Romantic love, physical love, unrequited love, obsessive love......Compare the ways poets have written about love, bringing out different aspects of the theme.

Another poem with a negative tone is ‘Villegiature’ by Edith Nesbit who was writing after Blake. This poem is not about the restrictions of marriage but about a possible romance that has fallen apart.  Blake’s poem seems darker though because he mentions ‘graves’ and ‘tombstones’ which relate to death.  Nesbit seems to make fun of her love life by using lines like ‘remember how you always bore me’.  Nesbit’s poem does not make use of he symbols that Blake uses which makes her poem easier to understand.

Andrew Marvell’s poem ‘To his Coy Mistress’ takes a more positive attitude towards love.  Hid poem, like Blake’s, was written at a time of upheaval during the English Civil War and he was influenced by this. His poem is a ‘carpe diem’ poem which was fashionable because it told people to ‘seize the moment’ because they did not know what would happen next.  The lines

‘But at my back I always hear

Times winged chariot hurrying near’

Show this because the poet is trying to get the woman to go to bed with him.  At first he tells her that if they lived for eternity then he would wait, but they don’t so he tells her that if they wait too long his love might not last.  He says

‘And your quaint Honour turn to dust;

And into ashes all my Lust.’

At the start of the poem the pace is slow, symbolizing how long he would wait for her love if they had all the time.  But when he tells her they do not have time, the poem picks up pace. Andrew Marvell uses a lot of hyperbole, for example when he mentions that he would love her ten years before the Flood.  It is obvious they were not alive at this time.  Some of the language in the poem compares the woman to the river Ganges in India and himself to the English river Humber.  This shows her as being exotic and shows that he was interested in the Voyages of Discovery which had begun to open up the world at the time.

John Donne, a contemporary of Marvell, also uses the Voyages of Discovery as images in his poem ‘The Good-Morrow’.  He refers to ‘sea-discovers’, ‘new worlds’ and ‘maps’ and then he compares himself and his woman to being two ‘hemispheres’ of the globe joining together.  He seems to be deeply in love.  You can tell this as he uses phrases like ‘our two loves be one’.  Done also uses some hyperbole in he final lines of the poem where he says that if they stay together their love will never die.

In Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s ‘How Do I Love Thee?’ there is also use of hyperbole.  For example in the last line she says

‘I shall but love thee better after death’

Barrett Browning uses the hyperbole to show romantic love.  The love is so strong in this poem it can almost become unrequited love as she almost idolizes this person.  Barrett Browning tries to measure her love for this man.  The use of repetition of ‘I love thee’ may give a tedious tone to this poem but it really emphasizes her point.  As her love in this poem is so large to explain she compares it to situations showing strength or other emotions such as joy, but even sadness is involved from the reference of tears.  I think this shows that all her life and after goes into this kind of love not just the good times and it is hard work.