Some Poets' Attitudes To Love

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Some Poets Attitudes To Love

A love poem is a piece of poetry that describes a positive emotion for one from another.  Love poems can come in many different forms.  There are ‘free verse’ love poems, where poets use no particular rhyming scheme or rules, but they let their poetry flow.  You can also find many ballads about love.  In Elizabethan times, often, sonnets were written to lovers or about them.  These are fourteen-lined, short verses that often portray emotion very well.  Love poems often use metaphors to describe emotion because ‘love’ is such a strong emotion that it can’t be described physically to another.

Christina Rossetti was a Victorian poet who often wrote about love.  In her poem ‘Amen’, it is hard to tell what she is writing about.  It could be love or even life.  At the start of each verse, she makes a definite statement and then questions it.  She starts with ‘It is over.  What is over?’  This implies that she is unsure of herself – or is not quite sure what is happening with her life or relationship.  The poem acts out her thought process.

  To start with, she seems sure that ‘It is over.’ Let’s assume that she is describing a relationship.  She has a chance to think and decides that she doesn’t know what is over.  This could imply that she doesn’t know which part of the relationship is over or why.  She could be questioning it because although it may be over to him, it is far from over with her – she is still very much in love with him.  Her questioning of her statement could mean that she doesn’t agree with it; deep down she feels differently.

Then, as if in confirmation of this, she denies that the statement is true.

 

Rossetti uses nature to describe how the relationship was built and why it still exists.  She says ‘Harvest days we toiled to sow for: now the sheaves are gathered newly.’  By this, I think she means that hard work has been put into the relationship to make it work and so it is not failing, but a small ‘crop’ still exists and is still growing.  A harvest is used to describe the relationship (or the life) of Rossetti.  A harvest usually symbolizes life, comfort, food and mirth.  A good harvest is a positive thing.

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In the next verse, again, she still seems very unsure of the way things are going in her life.  Another one of her thought processes is used to begin the second verse.  She states, ‘It is finished.’ But then goes on to ask, ‘What is finished?’ – very unsure.  However, in this verse, she decides to agree with her statement that yes, much has finished.  She says, ‘Lives are finished; time diminished; was the fallow field left unsown?’   By this, I think she is trying to say that, although the actual relationship or her life hasn’t ended, much ...

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