In the famous poem “Bright Star”, dedicated to his lover Fanny Brawne, John Keats presents the essence of love in passion and in depth. As its form, a combination of Shakespearean and Italian sonnets suggests, the poem portrays love as a subject full of seemingly contradictive qualities. As a subjective matter, love is active and passive, physical and spiritual, mutable and eternal at the same time. Holding immortal love as the ultimate value of life, the speaker imagines a brave possibility of love transcending life for his romantic belief. In the beginning of the poem, the speaker presents love as a subjective matter by contrasting it with the significant image of the star, a symbol of divine objectivity. Since long ago, man has learned to observe stars for its “steadfastness” for directions and guidance (1). Thus in western culture, star is seen as a prophetic divine existence, a form of absolute truth or universal rule, above all arbitrary and relative beings on earth. The speaker then implies love to be the opposite by emphasizing the star’s incapability of worldly emotions and personal perspectives by applying the metaphor of “Eremite” (4). The stoic hermit or recluse under religious vow sacrifices personal feelings and preferences in order to obtain absolute truth. Hence, the speaker perceives love as a subjective matter, unrelated to the absolute. In line 6, the metaphor of “mask” also proves such assumption: Only by covering the objects, the snow, amorphous
Since the beginning of human existence love has earned a meaning of pure bliss and wild passion between two people that cannot be broken. Through out time the meaning of love has had its slight shifts but for the most part, maintains a positive value. In the poem “Love Should Grow Up Like a Wild Iris in the Fields,” the author, Susan Griffin expresses that this long lost concept of love is often concealed by the madness of everyday life and reality. In the poem, Griffin uses many literary elements to help convey the importance of true love. The usage of imagery, symbolism, and other literary techniques really help communicate Griffins’ meaning
James Fenton and Carol Ann Duffy are both contemporary poets. Their poems ‘In Paris with You’ and ‘Quickdraw’ both include the themes of the pain of love. This essay compares how the two poets present the pain of love in their poems, exploring things such as imagery, vocabulary and form and structure.
The third and fourth stanzas offer the poems greatest paradoxes. The author speaks of the lovers being "At this unique distance from isolation" which is to say they are in the one place where they can truly be themselves, in their natural habitat, doing that which is only natural to human instinct. Despite these circumstances, however, the two are at a loss: "It becomes still more difficult to find / Words at once true and kind, / Or not untrue and not unkind." It is through this final stanza that the author conveys the ultimate paradox of human relationships: Relationships are not built upon true love for one another; rather they are built upon the absence of hatred.
No matter what happens in one’s life, the sun still comes up every day and the stars still shine brightly each night. In “Bright Star” by John Keats and “Choose Something Like a Star” by Robert Frost, both authors compare elements of nature, such as stars, to the things in one’s life. Through soft diction, peaceful imagery, and figurative language such as similes, Keats seeks to convey that people should cherish even the little things in life. In “Chose Something Like a Star,” Frost includes dark imagery, brutal diction, and personification to prove that like the stars, some things remain constant in one’s life.
The author persuades people to use their head before just using the words heart or love to give the word its true meaning. Carruth also displays what happens to words when they tend to be misused which is that they usually lose their value over time if they are not of great importance. Through his writing style in the poem, Carruth shows how people freely use the word “heart” and how it affects the meaning of the word. He opens and closes the poem with a question, refers to the heart as 'it' in the first stanza, and shows uncertainty of the importance of the heart in the first stanza as well.
The acceptance of love has the power of transforming an individual to demand of that same love. The social context of the 1850’s was seen to be emphasised on individual’s emotions and rebellion against established social rules and convections which was evident in her open declarations of love and demanding’s of love which was a concept of idealised love. The notion of idealised love transforming an individual is presented in the ‘Sonnets from the Portuguese’. Sonnet 14 as Elizabeth Browning urges her lover to not love her for any particular reason other than “love’s sake only”. In the Octave, the first line is EBB talking directly to whom she loves and she uses high modality in the word ‘must’, making it seem like she
The poem that has made best use of diction so far is “Bright Star” by John Keats. In the poem, John Keats uses formal diction to express the desire to experience a life that never changes. He states, “Bright Star, would I were steadfast as thou art”. Keats use formal words like “thou” other than the informal you. Keats use of word choice emphasize the seriousness and melancholic feeling. Through word choice Keats emphasize his wants to live an eternal life but also not wanting to live this life alone. He uses words like, “splendor”, “sweet unrest”, and “steadfast” to convey his ideas.
Initially, Barrett Browning’s misunderstanding of love implies her innocence, apparent in the utilisation of direct speech in Sonnet I, “Not Death, but Love,”, emphasising her surprise. However, as the sonnets progress her views are altered and Sonnet XIV accentuates Barrett Browning’s yearning to be loved and urges Browning to reemphasise his love, “But love me for love’s sake, that evermore thou mayst love on, through love’s eternity,”. Imperative voice and diction indicates Barrett Browning’s preoccupation for an everlasting love that is not influenced by superficial circumstances. This notion is reiterated in Sonnet XXI, “Say thou dost love me, love me, love me,”. Imperative tone is utilised, urging Browning to repeatedly express his love for her. The idealised love that EBB envisions can surpass even Death, reflected in her Victorian
As seen throughout the Romantic Period, proper description and visualization of setting served as crucial to the overall feel and overtone for a poem. Keats’ masterful composition of “Bright Star” exemplifies his vivid imagery as a star is described to hang lonely in the night and personified as forever awake with “eternal lids apart”. He dreams of lying on his “fair love’s ripening breast... to hear her tender-taken breath.” Keats’ imagery serves to stir emotion within the reader and relate intangible concepts to those that can be related. His depictions of severe circumstances are filled with
The first stanza uses concrete imagery to depict a working man “with cracked hands that ached” (3), the speaker’s father, starting a fire. The second stanza starts with warm connotations of the fire rescuing his home from the cold; however, the stanza ends with the speaker expressing his fear, a figurative coldness, of “the chronic angers of that house” (9). The third stanza completes the epiphany that the final line of the first stanza, “No one ever thanked him” (5) hints at. It is at this point that the speaker understands that his father expresses his love differently. While the speaker was looking for an overt expression of his father’s love, his father, a working man, can only show his love with the means by which he is familiar. To the father, love is an expression of actions, actions that the speaker is oblivious to during his childhood. By the setting being early Sunday morning, it shows that the father’s actions, as a symbol of his love, are omnipresent and supersede his own desire for rest. The final lines of every stanza reflect the speaker’s growing realization that he was indeed loved by his father, that he initially didn’t recognize his father’s actions as an expression of this love, and that his obliviousness to this unfamiliar expression of love helped contribute to what
While the beginning half of the poem feels joyous and lighthearted, it is masked by a thin facade. This is portrayed by the nighttime setting and the shakiness of the seemingly cheerful terms, such as the verses “while the stars, that oversprinkle / all the heavens, seem to twinkle” (6-7). In the latter half of the poem, the tone becomes openly dark. The speaker probably sees this poem and its four sections as stages in life, which quickly dive from a bright atmosphere to a downright distressing one. Together, they represent the idea that happiness is
The great comparison, somewhat of a conceit, only serves to show the complete infatuation of young love. The girl warms the boy, brightens his day, and thus she is his sun. But the contrast between the bleary winter day and the light the girl represents serves as commentary of how love lights up our bleak world. Young love is what transforms this poem from a mere retelling of a winter day to a retelling of a fond memory of a girl. Love is what brightens the world, what transforms it from a cold and lonely winter day into a beautiful story, and the innocence of young love opens ones eyes to the innocence of love in the face of the cruelty of the world. Love is an infatuation, a prize, an experience, and it keeps us warm even on the coldest of days. Love warms us in the way a winter jacket could not, and it makes us feel as if we have a fire, not in our hands like the speaker, but in our
The comaparitive study of texts over time offers insight into how changing social, cultual and historical contexts influence the values and perspectives of humanity. Elizabeth Barret Browing’s (EBB) Sonnets from the Portuguese (1850) and F. Scott. Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (1925) explore the differing attitudes towards passionate love, and the aspirations of indiviuals. Depsite the variations in textual forms, it is in examining both texts as social commentaries witihin their respective contexts – the Victorian Era and the post-war Jazz Age – that we come to a deeper understanding of the human passion for love and aspiration. EBB’s Sonnets from the Portuguese narrates the poets journey to the expression of passionate love, despite the
I interpreted this poem as a very sad one. A love unrequited by the pursued. In the first two lines the poem tells you to forget about the love you share and hear a tale of this. Not to literally forget, but possibly put aside. The man is a winter breeze, cold and rough and sort of roams the land. The woman is a window flower, shut off from the outside. This sets up the separation.
“We all reject out of hand the idea that the love of our life may be something light or weightless; we presume our love is what must be, that without it our life would no longer be the same; we feel that Beethoven himself, gloomy and awe-inspiring, is playing the ‘Es muss sein!’ to our own great love” (35).