1. Introduction
What is love? Pop culture in the 21st century provides for a generalised perception on the matter of love; one reads about illustrious love stories that can even surpass time, but what about the Egyptians? What did they perceive love to be? By relying on academic sources, this essay will analyse the characteristics of Egyptian love songs and what these love songs expressed about the Egyptian’s view point towards love.
2. Characteristics of Egyptian love songs
Sung at banquets and festivals (Creaseman & Wilkinson 2017:202), ancient Egyptian love poems, also referred to as songs, are full of desire, longing, and heartache. The characters in the love songs were women and men, or boys and girls in love, who affectionately refer
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The speakers narrate their personal experiences of longing and that something that was once to them a source of pleasure, is now being nullified by sadness, “Pomegranate wine, once sweet in my mouth is now like the gall of birds” (Fox 1985:279).
The poems also depict love-sickness experienced by the lovers, which causes one to be irrational, jealous, and results in the inability to complete mundane activities (Fox 1985:279-280). The love songs also describe how the love of one’s lover is the only effective medicine for ailments, given that love to them brings well-being and vitality, “She is more powerful for me than the Compendium” (Fox 1985:280).
In the love songs, the lovers also express that their love for one another gives each other strength, “It is her love that makes me strong. She’ll cast a water spell for me!” (Fox 1985:32). The aforementioned line is from ‘The Crossing’ and refers to a boy who expresses his love for a girl; her love gives him strength and courage to cross a river inhabited by a crocodile in order to reach his beloved (Fox 1985:32).
3. The authors of Egyptian love
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
[Seven whole days] Seventh Stanza “Seven whole days” is an Egyptian love poem that was written in Ca.1300-1100 B.C.A. This poem is written in first person style, which refers to the narrator telling his point of view of what he feels and wants the reader to know and conclude. This Egyptian love poem is also referred as a lyric, which is a short 45 line or fewer poems that gives a unified impression using verbal music, emotion, imagery, and first person subjective views. As I read and analyze this 20 line love poem, I draw conclusions that, our narrator clearly has interest and expresses feeling about a beloved one that he hasn’t seen in seven whole days; our narrator is either distraught or depressed; and he merely could have a mental illness.
When analyzing ancient Egyptian love songs, what I firstly noted was that the concept of love was not stereotyped in being predominantly a masculine or a feminine concept. Both men and woman expressed their emotions of both pain and joy throughout (Fowler 1994:30). However, some contrast does exist in a few songs in that girls are portrayed as being more assertive, more dominant and taken more initiative than boys (Fowler 1994:40). This is clear as boys are never portrayed in addressing their loved one in the second person, rather in the third person and also, does not initiate action but rather sits and waits for action to come his way (Fowler 1994:62). Thus, these love songs provide us with an insight into the manner which couples behaved, and were viewed by others when in love. This view and understanding of love I believe is a direct reflection of the ancient Egyptian society where woman were seen as being sexually untrustworthy and men the slave to this sexual nature of woman.
romantic love celebrated in songs and romances of the Medieval Period. Moreover, being a code
“Love Poem” by John Frederick Nims is an excellent of example of an author using many types of literary terms to emphasize his theme of a love that is imperfect yet filled with acceptance. In, this poem Nims uses assonance, metaphor, and imagery to support his theme of “Imperfect, yet realistic love”.
“First Poem for You,” by Kim Addonizio, illustrates a night between two lovers lying next to each other. From this sonnet, it is discovered that through symbolism, imagery, and structure, the speaker’s views on relationships are embellished.
William Shakespeare’s “Sonnet 116” and Edna St. Vincent Millay’s “Love Is Not All” both attempt to define love, by telling what love is and what it is not. Shakespeare’s sonnet praises love and speaks of love in its most ideal form, while Millay’s poem begins by giving the impression that the speaker feels that love is not all, but during the unfolding of the poem we find the ironic truth that love is all. Shakespeare, on the other hand, depicts love as perfect and necessary from the beginning to the end of his poem. Although these two authors have taken two completely different approaches, both have worked to show the importance of love and to define it. However, Shakespeare is most confident of his definition of love, while Millay seems
The third stanza goes on to define the pain, only now in more emotional terms, such as "It hurts to thwart the reflexes / of grab, of clutch" (14-15), as well as the pain of continuously having to say good bye, each perhaps as if for the last time: "to love and let / go again and again" (15-16). These lines reinforce the impression that the first stanza's definition of "to love differently" is in fact an anti-freedom or state of emotional anarchy, now using words like "pester" to describe any separation; the poet is compelled "to remember / the lover who is not in the bed" (16), hinting at obsessive tendencies as being possible components of the relationship. We also learn that she believes love requires work, which she cannot do without her partner's assistance, and that this lack of cooperation frustrates her. She believes this neglected effort is the other party's fault by his failure to do his fair share, thereby leaving her own efforts ineffective, the whole of it characterized as an effort "that gutters like a candle in a cave / without air" (19-20). Her demands of this work are quite broad, encompassing being "conscious, conscientious and concrete" in her efforts and optimistically calling this work "constructive" (20-21) before ending the stanza.
One of the overarching themes that spanned over the many books we read over the semester, was the nature of love and the search for meaning. Love is an inherent aspect of humanity, and while it is an often inexplicable and complex sentiment, it is intrinsically connected with mankind's search for meaning in life. Love often leads a person in directions that they do not expect, and this is obvious in the very different applications of love in different books. However, one common idea about the relationship between love, suffering, and wisdom, can be argued for based off the ancient texts that we read. In The Epic of Gilgamesh, Antigone, and The Tale of Genji, love is used as a vehicle for wisdom through suffering and loss.
Love is not always an easy adventure to take part in. As a result, thousands of poems and sonnets have been written about love bonds that are either praised and happily blessed or love bonds that undergo struggle and pain to cling on to their forbidden love. Gwendolyn Brooks sonnet "A Lovely Love," explores the emotions and thoughts between two lovers who are striving for their natural human right to love while delicately revealing society 's crime in vilifying a couples right to love. Gwendolyn Brooks uses several examples of imagery and metaphors to convey a dark and hopeless mood that emphasizes the hardships that the two lovers must endure to prevail their love that society has condemned.
Love is a confusing thing. Many people confuse its connotation and generally never truly understand what it means. From reading “A&P” and “Araby” and understanding how the characters develop throughout the stories, there is a significant difference of what we portray love to be compared to what it actually is. Throughout both stories, both protagonists thought they understood love, but little did they know that they were in for a rude awakening. Both “A&P” and “Araby” go about depicting love in an almost similar way. However, although both stories entail jubilant love amongst the youth, they both incorporate an epiphany of reality in which both protagonists did not foresee.
This book report is an analysis of the Egyptian Love Poem [ My god, my Lotus…], from the book, The Norton Anthology of World Literature, Volume A. Egyptian Love Poems date back to 1300-1100 B.C.E., they were written on papyri, potsherd, and flakes of limestone. Papyri are a sheet-like material that was made out of pithy stems from a water plant. Which was used to write or paint on in the ancient Mediterranean world, potsherd is pieces of broken ceramic material. The lovers in Egyptian Love Poems are young and tend to be under parental supervision, half the poem is spoken by the girl and the other half by the boy. [ My god, my Lotus…] uses imagery to describe the desires of love and how different types of love function within modern societies. This poem displays different perspectives of love and the reality of how love is viewed in most civilizations. Readers will learn that love is not exclusive to men and women, and how different forms of love can lead them to overcoming life obstacles.
Through the use of poetic devices such as repetition or alliteration, the author originally describes what love is not capable of providing and defines love as unnecessary but by the end of the poem, the author reveals that love has some value.
Poets have written love poems for centuries with the first said to be around 1000BC. But what is love? It is defined by the Oxford English Dictionary as ‘ to have attachment to and affection for’. However, after studying various love poems, I have found that love is portrayed in many different ways. It can be possessive, hateful and pure and the fact that William Shakespeare said ‘The course of true love never did run smooth’ suggests that love is more complicated than a simple dictionary definition.
Love is perhaps one of the most contested issues in the world. No one has a precise definition of what love really should look or feel like. Most people have resorted to use their own experiences in love to effectively derive its true meaning. Through these experiences, philosophers have argued that the definition of love varies greatly depending on whether it was given by a man or a woman. This is however not the case. As proven by the narratives of Beauvoir and Sartre, the definitions of love derived from the experiences of both men and women are quite similar. Consequentially, Beauvoir’s account of the woman in love sheds important light on Sartre’s conflicting thought about love. By first highlighting the concepts of love as stated by Beauvoir, this text seeks to establish how Beauvoir’s account of love lays a vital foundation for Sartre’s.