Love Flashcards
2.6: Love makes you light
“A lover may bestride the gossamer”
2.6: Loving too violently / naively / quickly is dangerous
“These violent delights have violent ends And in their triumph die, like fire and powder, Which as they kiss consume: the sweetest honey is loathsome in his own deliciousness”
Violent delights have violent ends: Foreshadows the death of Romeo and Juliet
Recurring motif of gunpowder metaphor: Burns bright and fast, but not for long and then explodes
1.1: Effect of Romeo’s lust for Rosaline
“O heavy lightness! Serious vanity!”
“Feather of lead”
There is a semantic field of oxymorons connoting heaviness, reflecting the depression Romeo has fell in to.
1.1: Romeo’s love for Rosaline
“O brawling love! O loving hate!”
Semantic field of oxymorons reflects the irregularity of Romeo’s love (suggests it is love), and causes confusion.
The exclamation marks suggest desperation
1.1: Form analysis of love
Romeo’s soliloquy is a sonnet with an irregular rhyme scheme, reflecting how the love is not quite right.
1.1: Romeo does not feel complete
“Tut, I have lost myself; I am not here; This is not Romeo, he’s some other where”
Reflects Plato’s idea of 2 halves, and not feeling complete without Juliet
2.2: Light imagery to compare Rosaline and Juliet
“Juliet is the sun. Arise, fair sun, and kill the envious moon”
Sun: Recurring motif of likening Juliet to light
Envious moon: Represents Rosaline, Romeo’s love for Juliet has killed his lust for Rosaline
2.2: You can’t have love without lust
“Her vestal livery is but sick and green”
2.2: Irony of love makes you blind
“The brightness of her cheek would shame those stars”
Light is supposed to make you see more clearly, however, their love makes them blind.
This is reflected through them only meeting at night.
2.2: Angelic imagery
“Bright angel”
“Winged messenger of heaven”
“Unto the white-upturned wondering eyes”: White connoted holiness
How is Romeo’s love for Juliet similar to his love for Rosaline?
It could be interpreted that both relationships are lustful, however, Romeo’s lust for Juliet is reciprocated.
2.6: Amount of love
Romeo: “Be heap’d like mine”
Likens his love to a pile of Gold
Juliet: “But my true love is grown to such excess I cannot sum up sum of half my wealth”
The richest people cannot count their wealth
2.6: Biblical allusion + Plato reference about marriage
“Till holy church incorporate two in one”
Genesis 2:24: “and they shall become one flesh”
Plato: Idea of 2 halves
5.3: Love and death are inextricable
“With a kiss I die”
2.2: What meter is used in Juliet’s soliloquy, and what does this represent?
Iambic pentameter is used, apart from the line “Oh Romeo, Romeo, wherefore are thou Romeo?”, which symbolises how their love cannot be due to Romeo’s name.
