Link poems Flashcards
After the Lunch
Carol Ann Duffy – Valentine
• Offers an unconventional approach to traditional, romantic idea of valentine’s day
• Infuses an everyday object with symbolism relating to romantic love
• Reminiscent of metaphysical poets – approached ordinary objects in surprising ways
• ATL – both explore love in unconventional ways but CAD poem views love in a negative way
The Orange – centred on the narrator’s delight in trivial things bringing them joy. The last line of the poem reveals that the voice is freshly in love and that is why they suddenly find joy in ordinary things.
Wild Oats
- An Arundel tombs
• It describes the poet’s emotional response to seeing a pair of recumbent medieval tomb effigies, with their hands joined, in Chichester Cathedral.
• Larkin draws inspiration from the figures to muse on time, mortality, fidelity and the nature of earthly love. Andrew Motion describes him “using the detail of the hands as the focus for one of his most moving evocations of the struggle between time and human tenderness”.
• The final line is among the most quoted of all of Larkin’s work. When read out of context, it may be understood as a “sentimental” endorsement of “love enduring beyond the grave”.
• I think what survives of us is love, whether in the simple biological sense or just in terms of responding to life, making it happier, even if it’s only making a joke.
• Philip Larkin is well known for his pessimistic, sometimes crabby approach to everyday life in his work and seemed to have a somewhat jaundiced view of traditional rites such as marriage.
For My Lover
- Mr Mine
• Appreciation of the beloved’s body
• Could be seen as objectification
• Sense of moving apart – changing relationships
• Unequal relationships - Admonitions to a special person
• Comparing the experience of falling and being in love to somewhat inevitable phenomena
• Does this give power to love as a great thing.
• Compares the act of falling in love as more powerful than personal free will.
• Presents it as something divine - Daddy – Sylvia Plath
• she feels like she has been a foot living in a black shoe for thirty years, too timid to either breathe or sneeze. She insists that she needed to kill him (she refers to him as “Daddy”), but that he died before she had time.
• She remembers how she at one time prayed for his return from death, and gives a German utterance of grief (which translates literally to “Oh, you”).
Meeting Point
Funeral blues
• Idea of stopping time – grief has sapped his will to live
• Love, whether for good or bad, can stop time
• Brings in grief, the loss of love, to include the whole world – shows extent of devotion
• Relates one’s beloved to divinity – power of love?
• Encapsulates the extent to which love affects life - He was my North, my South, my East and West, My working week and my Sunday rest,’
• Link to meeting point – love freezes time, encompassing power of love
A more loving one
• This is a poem about unrequited love.
• The More Loving One is a poem in which an extended metaphor is used to depict the feelings of the speaker, who is the victim of unrequited love. Auden uses the extended metaphor of stars to represent the lovers who do not feel the same for their pursuers.
• Continues to love, despite unrequited – sense of darkness without a love
• link to meeting point – Auden presents love as being a ‘star’ in our lives. Different to meeting point in that unrequited vs. togetherness. Both are happy and loving.
One Flesh
Love poem
• Love has many facets and different presentations
• Writes about the less glamourous parts of love relationships
• Explores the role of pain in love (love without pain doesn’t exist)
• Pain cannot overpower love
• love, on the other hand, is so kind that it relieves you of from every pain. It forgives you for all your committed crimes. It is benevolent, it is true, and it is kind like god.
• love is kind; it is generous as it forgives all your sins.
• Link to OF – about different ways love presents itself, but love remains powerful through it all.
I, Being Born a Woman
Love is not all
• traditional Shakespearean sonnet with fourteen lines of iambic pentameter. It consists of three quatrains and a couplet at the end.
• This poem is a contemplation by the speaker on all the ways in which humans suffer for love.
• Millay begins by stating all the things that love is not, all the physical ways it cannot help someone in need of food, shelter, water or sleep.
• Despite these things, she writes, men still physically and mentally kill themselves for love. The poem takes a turn at this point to first person in which the speaker contemplates selling her own love to save herself from a variety of fates.
• Its focus is a personal message addressing the question of the depth, importance, and transitory nature of love.
La Belle Dame sans Merci
My heart leaps up – William Wordsworth
• expresses a number of the several features of Romanticism: a love of nature, the relationship between the natural world and the individual self, and the importance of childhood in making the poet the man he becomes, memorably expressed by Wordsworth’s statement that ‘The child is father of the man’.
• Wordsworth observes a rainbow in the sky and is filled with joy at the sight of a rainbow: a joy that was there when Wordsworth was very young, is still there now he has attained adulthood, and – he trusts – will be with him until the end of his days.
• The paradox of the line ‘The Child is father of the Man’ is that our childhoods shape our adulthoods: the inversion of the usual idea of things (that an adult man is a father to his child) neatly embodies Romanticism’s desire to shake up the way we view ourselves
The Garden of Love
London
• The speaker takes a walk through the designated streets of London. This walk brings the speaker near the River Thames, which seems to have its course dictated for it as it flows throughout the city. The speaker sees signs of resignation and sadness in the faces of every person the speaker passes by.
• The speaker hears this pain too, in the cries men as well as those of fearful newborn babies. In fact, in every voice in the city, in every law or restriction London places on its population, the speaker can sense people’s feelings of being oppressed by city life.
Love and Harmony
• speaker is examining the interrelationships between love, freedom, and marriage.
• The tree is a symbol taken from the tree of knowledge out of the Garden of Eden (notice the “golden fruit” reference in line 9). It is also intended to represent the synthesis of energy between love and marriage, harmony and freedom, a place where oppositions are unified.
• Blake is aiming to emulate transcendence through the fall (the loss of innocence experience) and uses the symbol of the turtledove to do so. In the end, the union in this poem is well chosen because it is a union bound by desire (both physical and spiritual) and is not forced upon the speaker by religion or law
Whoso List to Hount
- Astrophil and Stella
• Reason vs. love - even as his reason urges him to give up Stella for his own good, Astrophel cannot stop loving her. The sonnets are full of dialogues between Reason and Love in which Astrophel admits that Reason is correct, but he remains unable to give up his love.
• Same preoccupation with woman causes overwhelming joy as well as tormenting pain – similar exquisite pain.
• Separated but continue in their love of each other - Wilt thou leave me thus
• Speaker questioning long – term lover
• Reminder that he has loved her through thick and thin
• Repeats ‘say nay’ – shows his desperation to be with the woman
• One – sided love (love remains unrequited)
She walks in Beauty
Love’s philosophy
• The main theme is that of the “connection” that exists between all things in the world in general and between the poet and his object of affection in particular. There is unity in nature. This unity is also found in human relationships and interactions.
• The speaker feels in need of a kiss from his lover and to prove the logic behind these feelings gives numerous examples of how things come together in nature. He wants to mingle in another person’s being and produces an elegant, if rather weak, plea for this to happen.
• ‘Love’s Philosophy’ is stating that nothing in this life is alone and that every object, even rivers and winds, have something to partner them. Why, therefore, doesn’t the narrator have his love?
Sonnet 116
Sonnets
• 29 – less concerned with material and human concerns. Presents love as a light in darkness. Uses divine imagery to show the power of love.
• 129 – desire presented darkly. Lust and desire make us animalistic and ruins what could be good in relationships. The momentary enjoyment of desire is presented as full of regret and madness as compared to the everlasting nature of idealised love. Fight between lust and love is part of human condition.
Remember
A birthday
• It is an unusual poem in Rossetti’s production as it expresses pure, undarkened joy.
• The poem, A Birthday, can in fact be viewed as a poetic vision of transcendent love, wherein Rossetti combines intense sensuousness with Christina devotion
• she makes use of the images of a songbird, a fruit-laden apple-tree, and a rainbow for the expression of the depth of her love.
• That is; the joy of the narrator is inexpressible, and cannot be defined in words.
• By virtue of these similes, the narrator tries to vent out her jubilation or happiness about the arrival of her love.
• Could be earthly or divine (reunion with Christ)
• She continues to search for an appropriate simile for her feelings, using symbols that invoke images of celebration and happiness. The laden apple-tree promises the nourishment of fruit. The rainbow signifies God’s promise to Noah and mankind that he will not flood the earth again.
The Flea
The good morrow
• In the first stanza, he addresses his beloved and asks her to cast her mind back to before they were lovers. What was their existence like before they met and loved each other? Were they little more than babies, like infants who are not yet weaned off their mother’s breast?
• Donne answers his own (rhetorical) questions by saying yes: before they met each other, any pleasures they enjoyed, or thought they enjoyed, were mere a mere shadow of the joy they now feel in each other’s company.
• In the second stanza, Donne bids good morning, or good day (hence ‘The Good-Morrow’) to his and his lover’s souls, now waking from their ‘dream’ and experiencing real love.
• the real world beyond their bedroom is of little interest to them. Men may voyage across the sea to other lands, and men may even chart the locations of other worlds beyond our own – that is of no concern to us, Donne tells his lover. We don’t need those other worlds, because our bodies are a world in themselves, ready for the other to explore.
To His Coy Mistress
The definition of love
• Indeed, only Despair, rather than Hope, could have shown him what it was like to experience ‘divine’ love – in other words, the truly special love is that which is hopeless, because we know we cannot have the person we desire.
• Hopeless love often strikes us so much more powerfully than hopeful love where we think something may come of our desire. (This leads Marvell to use the wonderful oxymoron ‘Magnanimous Despair’
• Marvell likens the course of love to geometric lines, arguing that ‘oblique’ lines (i.e. lines which slant, or are not parallel) often meet, just as imperfect lovers will often find their match; but lines which are truly ‘parallel’ will never meet (since they will never converge
• Marvell argues that if Heaven fell and the Earth was torn apart, then he and his lover, those two ‘poles’, might meet – but it’s not very likely that the heavens are going to fall and the Earth be torn in two.
