‘A birthday’ is not regarding the sort of birthday that first comes to mind, the day an individual is born, but it is about the birth of love. She compares everyday objects to her love. One line can be a joyful image of love and then the next line would be a gloomy image of love, so it is up and down all the way through. Until at the end, where the poet reveals that what she was writing about was in fact the birthday of love, when her love came to her.
I am now going to compare these two poems in the way they are written and their meanings. To begin with they are both on the theme of love. Neither poem has anything to do with the loss theme they are focused on describing their feelings on love. A similarity between the two is that both poets are comparing their love to objects. Elizabeth Browning compares her love to happy thoughts and feelings, whereas Christina Rossetti is comparing her heart to objects. So the two poets are comparing slightly different aspects of love, to somewhat different things, one compares to objects the other to feelings. These two poets are also both written by women.
They are also written quite differently in their styles. ‘How do I love thee’ is a sonnet with 10 stresses per line. ‘A Birthday’ is 16 lines long with 8 stresses per line.
Consequently these poems are similar in the way they are written but not the style.
The next two poems I am going to compare are ‘First Love’ by John Clare, and ‘When we two parted’ by Lord Byron.
John Clare was born in 1793 to a poor labouring family in Northamptonshire. He was not very well educated in his youth and spent a lot of it helping out with the labouring on the farm. It did not look very much like he would turn out to be a writer with the lack of education he had but in his teens he discovered ‘The Seasons’ by James Thompson and this inspired him to write poems himself. His first love, Mary Joyce, was the daughter of a wealthy farmer. It caused him great loss when she left him and this showed evidently in his poetry. In 1837 he was admitted to a mental asylum. He escaped and walked back to Northamptonshire in the hope he would be reunited with Mary Joyce. He spent the rest of his life then in Northamptonshire general asylum, still writing poems but his later poems all described haunting rural landscapes, but were some of the most famous of his works. He died in 1864.
‘First Love’ is a poem about love and loss. It has 3 stanzas each consisting of 8 lines, rhyming every other line. The poem begins by saying he was ‘struck’ with love. He deals with the sensations of being struck dumb, deaf and blind by the beauty of this unknown person. She knows nothing of him and has not seen him; this makes it unrequited love because it is all one sided. This is the sense of loss he has in his heart, the fact of the love being unrequited. At the end he tells us that he feels a completely changed person, he can never be the same again. He only has love for this woman now; he cannot love anyone else ever again.
Lord Byron was born in 1788 so lived around the same time as John Clare. He was born with club-foot and was very sensitive about this. When he was 10 he inherited his Uncles title and land. After this he built up a lot of debts and was found to be having bi-sexual love affairs. He lived in many different places throughout his life and had many different women going in and out of his life so never properly settled with anyone. He died of a fever in 1824 at the young age of 36.
‘When we two parted’ is written in 4 stanzas with 8 stanzas per line. The lines are very short and it rhymes every other line. The poem appears to be about a loss. The opening two lines speak of two people having to separate or part. From the way the two lines are written we can see they did not really want to part because of the tears involved. The whole poem describes his loss and has him asking why she left. In the last stanza he wonders about what he would say if they met again after many years. He says he would greet her with silence and tears, which according to the second line in the poem is how they parted – ‘in silence and tears.’
The period in which these two poems are written is similar, they are both early 19th century. Both of these poems describe a loss in different ways although ‘First Love’ is also about love. In ‘First Love’, the loss is the fact that the love he has found is unrequited. The object of his affection does not even see him. But in ‘When we two parted’ the loss is harder for the poet because it was someone he obviously loved dearly and felt considerable pain when she left. These poems are also both written by men unlike the first two which were written by women.
The poems by the women were focused more on the theme of love but the poems by the men were more focused on the loss theme. This is just a selection of the poems from the ‘love and loss’ poems we studied. They are all different in their own way but have quite a few similarities which I have pointed out.
