In the poems ‘The Garden of Love’ by William Blake and ‘To His Coy Mistress’ by Andrew Marvell, both poets present barriers to love differently through the use of various poetic techniques denoting language and structure. Blake criticises institutionalised religion, not only emphasising its unnaturalness but also utilising the concept to frame it as a barrier to pure, unadulterated love. Marvell however, presents a barrier to love as the more structured construct of time through the juxtapositioning of the speaker’s longing desires and the imminent reality of the burdens of time. In ‘The Garden of Love’, the speaker displays his disdain to institutionalised religion as he believes in it hinders the exploration and advancement of love. In referring …show more content…
However, in amongst stark differences, there are also notable structural similarities between both poems. In ‘The Garden of Love’, Blake has used a somewhat regular rhyme scheme of ABAB for the first two stanzas and ABCD for the final stanza. This regularity is also displayed in Mavell’s poem which is written entirely in couplets. The breakdown of the rhyme scheme in Blake’s poem mirrors the disruption to the harmonious element of love displayed by the Garden in the first stanza and creates an unnatural sense of incompleteness and fear. This implies that the chapel, representing institutionalised religion, destroys all elements of nature and innate human desire. This suppressing of natural human desire is also shown in Marvell’s poem as the mistress’s “coyness” is preventing the speaker from being intimate with her. Her flirtatious reservations, paired with the advances of time, lead the speaker to form an extremely coherent, philosophical argument; this results in a logical rhyme scheme which could also be said to resemble the constant ticking of a clock. The reasoned argument is extremely fitting for the Neoclassical period it was written it as other authors of the time also delved into the importance of individual satisfaction through coherent debates. However, Blake’s poem resonates with the Romantic period which differs immensely due to the inherent desire for personal freedom which was common amongst his
The poem “For That He Looked Not upon Her” is written by a man that has been ravaged by love. The author fears love’s fierce power and ability to destroy as he attempts to escape his own uncontrollable desire. In his poem “For That He Looked Not upon Her”, George Gascoigne develops his complex attitude towards love and desire through the use of diction, imagery, alliteration, and poetic form.
Analyse the presentation of relationships in the Farmer's bride and one other poem Relationships dictates ones behaviour. Similarly, Charlotte Mew's poem deals with the institution of marriage that gave authority and legal rights to the man. However, James Fenton's poem is about surfacing from a long relationship. The rural society depicted in the Farmer's bride is a traditional one.
But most of the poems we analyzed earlier are about more than fifty years old, which would explain a lot about the male dominance in relationships at that time frame, because Heterosexual romantic relationships have historically been all about men courting and “keeping” women. And it’s a powerful tradition. Whether it’s asking someone out, picking up the bill, open the door, carry the bags or being the main breadwinner in the family, many of the ideas we have about romance are still based on men being initiators and directors and women being receivers and caretakers. Yet society is changing. Women are increasingly entering the “male domains” of high-powered jobs and sexual
This correlates with Hamlet, ‘frailty, thy name is woman!'. Blake also manages to demonstrate that love leads to devastation by the use of rhyme, ‘joy' and ‘destroy'. Furthermore, the use of enjambment throughout creates a fast tempo to the poem mirroring the duration of a relationship based on a ‘dark secret'. The lexical choice of ‘dark secret' suggests deception which we are lead to believe is present in Claudius and Gertrude relationship as she is unaware he poisoned Hamlet.
The tone of Obsession, however, is filled with anger, culminating in a sense of melancholic disappointment. Relating this to the broader themes of Songs of Experience and The Flowers of Evil as a whole, To Tirzah exemplifies Blake’s experience and Obsession epitomises Baudelaire’s spleen. Experience in To Tirzah and the Songs as a whole means a loss of innocence, while spleen in both Obsession and other works of Baudelaire is a sense of enmity. The technical differences and underlying values therefore add to both poems’ overarching attitudes toward mortality and sin, and contribute to the ultimate belief, or lack thereof, in religion and
In this song, the singer describes a man’s love for his girlfriend as well as the difficulties and pain inherent to loving another. The song describes the pressures that humans face, and how their struggles against difficulties end in failure. Despite this, it is the efforts made against these failures that eventually add up to an individual’s worth (Mahan, 2005). The significance of this song to the album is that it attempts to deify love, and it does this by examining how man tries his best at love, just the same way in which he tries his best at being good and religious. Even though man will always lose in his efforts at devotion and pure love, he will eventually be redeemed through his constant
More so the love extends from the individual life to the coexistence of all the people in the society (or globe). Girmay successfully convinces the audience that a universal love exists between the empty, silent spaces in her poem. Love is the “you better than me, you kinder and so blistering with anger, you are who I love.” If the rain is the tears of angels, I suppose the reason is joy. Love is virtuous, abundant, and passionate.
The poem, in brief, is about the struggle the speaker faces as he prepares for war and attempts to explain to his lover how important honor is to him, surpassing even his feelings for her. It is written creatively, with a unique style. The poem is also personal and temporal, a trait of poems of this era. The poem is written in a conversational tone and is read as if by a male writer to a female lover. Lovelace weaves poetic techniques such as assonance, and metaphor together to create a good rhythm, and a theme based upon honor.
There are numerous intriguing works of literature from the Renaissance period. Among these works are the pastoral poems “The Passionate Shepherd to His Love” by Christopher Marlowe and “The Nymph’s Reply to the Shepherd” by Walter Raleigh. The two poems are telling the same story or talking about the same ideas from two different people’s perspectives. A shepherd is talking to his beloved in “The Passionate Shepherd to His Love,” and his lover responds to him in “The Nymph’s Reply to the Shepherd.” The two speakers have two drastically different outlooks and views of their lives.
In comparison to Marvell’s “To His Coy Mistress”, these response poems convey two different viewpoints from the mistress and in my reasoned opinion, provide a deeper scope to the objectification and mistreatment of women in poetry. This can be seen through evidence and supported by exposing the overall attitude of the speakers, issues of gender in each work, each poem’s language, the overall tone of each work, the form of each poem, and through each speaker’s responses to “Big Famous Lines” presented in “To His Coy Mistress”.
Love and relationship between man and woman has been the focal point of countless literary works, music pieces and other art objects since times immemorial. Depending on the personal experience and worldview of the author, the feeling of love has been interpreted in many individual ways. Consequently, to find two masterpieces which depict love similarly seems inconceivable. The texts under analysis – J.L. Borges’ “What can I hold you with?” and the song “Anything for Your Love” by E. Clapton – although written by two contemporary artists and elaborating the image of love, produce an absolutely different effect on the reader.
The poem 's content points not to just a single memory, but an entire sexual affair from the speaker’s youth—chronicling the erotic encounters that would eventually lead to his lover’s “footfall light” and both of them “silent as a stone”. Thus the memory is also clouded by the nature of erotic
The numerous titles, forms and definitions of God depict how powerful he is, making it an important motive to search for God since he is the caretaker of the human soul. The metaphorical usages of nature seen in the writings “The Dark nIght of the Soul”, “Ode 314” and “Sou’s Beloved” are distinct and similar in many different ways which help portray how love is natural, necessary and beneficial. In the poem “Ode” by Rumi, a Muslim poet, love is seen as powerful, natural, unexplainable and necessary through its usage of natural metaphors. The first couple lines describe how those who don’t experience love haven’t experienced love “pulling them like a river,” (Ode, Rumi).
Alfred Prufrock and Preludes, both of which are characterised by a keen awareness of minute details as well as incredible sensitivity towards situations and people, definitively reflects Jeanette Winterson’s psychological profile of T.S Eliot. Her notion that Eliot’s proficiency with language meant that his poems were not in any sense a screen for passive observation, but a porous membrane in which his suffering could be alleviated and diffused through the form of poetry, whilst simultaneously allowing responders to enter and empathise with Eliot’s experiences and emotions. This coincides with Thomas J. Morrissey’s critical essay on the personas in Eliot’s poetry, as he wrote that “to experience the poems, therefore, is to discern the speakers’ struggles, struggles which can be heard in the voices of the narrators”. Furthermore, the personas are connected through their fascination with time, as seen in Preludes and the repeated phrase “there will be time” in The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, which is an allusion to Andrew Marvell's poem To His Coy Mistress (1621 - 1678). The allusion is ironic in nature as the poem conveys the importance of taking opportunities and ‘seizing the day’, yet Prufrock’s inner despair and suffering is the result of continual indecision.
Society’s superficial viewing of women is also reflected in the poem’s wring, as it may seem that this poem is strictly concerned with a prostitute, but in fact it describes all females. The male representative in the poem, Georges, then asserts his superiority, despite their similar conditions of being poor. Although he is sexually attracted to her as he “stiffens for [her] warmth”, suggesting an erection, he is unwilling to accept her as a human being as he deems her question “Why do you do this?”