Christina Rossetti's Poetry: Controlled and Passionate
Rossetti's poetry has been described as both controlled and passionate. Making clear what you understand by the terms discuss which of these two views you have more sympathy with and why. Refer closely to at least three of the set poems.
Christina Rossetti poetry uses concise structures but through these she expresses immense emotion; in this respect her poetry can accurately described as "both controlled and passionate" yet the two words are almost a paradox as passion is frequently seen to be at odds with controlled tight structures. Other poets have also followed in
Rossetti's footsteps by combining tight structured poetic forms with emotion e.g. Dylan Thomas.
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The poem sits easily on a page and is visually satisfying, although this is in part due to the visual rhymes previously mentioned. This appearance though is false as the poems content is analysed but reinforces the theme of appearance and reality in the 4th stanza.
Again, the "controlled" use of structure can be seen as adding to the poems "passion" showing a masterful combination of the two. The repetition of and permutations on the line: "my heart is breaking for a little love" is another structure that reinforces the poems meaning and show the despair that the poem communicates. The move away from the 1st person in the last two stanzas serves to provide a different perspective on the emotions discussed allowing a broader view than if the whole poem was in the first person, again this use of structure emphasises the underlying emotions.
Although the structure of the poem contributes to its emotiveness the language is also essential to exhibit Rossetti's "passion". The natural imagery in the last three lines of each stanza contrast
Rossetti to the natural world, they demonstrate how she feels left out of natural cycles by having no mate. There appears to be a longing to bear children in the last stanza, possibly Rossetti wishes not for the love of a partner but for the love of a child. Nature is usually associated with the idea of mating for
In 1786, Helen Maria Williams published a two-volume poetry collection. The collection was titled Poems and A Song is featured there in that area. A Song has six sections. Each section consists of one stanza that has four lines and an ABAB rhyme scheme and the metre is similar to that of an iambic trimeter. Moreover, there is a great use of punctuation. The poem’s central theme is love and how a particular emotional relationship affects the lyrical voice.
The way the poet used powerful word choices and emotion to show how he felt throughout the poem In the beginning of the poem it starts off sad but by the end of the poem it shows a side of anger. I thought the poem was very strong and powerful because of the personification he used. I think his poem was powerful because it felt personal and something relatable in his life. Throughout the poem the poet seemed like he was talking about someone in his life such as his partner. I think if the poet did not seem like he was talking to a partner then it would not be as straightforward as it was. Since he used personification throughout the poem it made me as a reader to be able to connect with what the poet and it made it feel more personal. I really liked the word choice the poet used throughout the poem. Some of the words stood out to me more than others. One word that really stood out to me when reading this poem was the word “shit.” While most poets do not use profanity, it helped show how he was feeling and the emotions he was using at that time. I think this poet was speaking from his life experience and wanted to show the emotions he was feeling when this was happening. I think people write poetry for an act of self-expression. I believe when a poet writes a poem that they are trying to write about a personal experience in their life. Also, a poem can be emotional and creative with only a
The book “The Captain’s Verses” by Pablo Neruda, there are many love poems. Poems that express different ways of loving someone. I decided to pick Neruda's body of work because of how smooth and elegant his poems sound. They express so much passion towards a person and also send a message. When reading his poems I would be able to understand the emotion the poem carried. This is the first thing that caught my attention from his poems. The emotions each and every one of them carried.
Love can be quite a difficult topic to write about, expressing one’s intimate and innermost emotions requires a great level of dedication and honesty. If done correctly, the outcome is truly stunning. John Donne’s “A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning” and Katherine Philips’s “To Mrs. M.A. at Parting” are two masterpieces of this genre. These poems depict the concept of true love so meticulously that the reader cannot help but envy the relationships presented. Perhaps the reason that these works are so effective is due to the fact that they are incredibly similar to each other. Although some differences are present when it comes to structure and gender concerns, the poems share the same theme of love on a spiritual level and show many parallels in meaning.
In this allegorical poem, Rossetti uses
The poem Perhaps by Vera Brittain captivates, as well, it portrays being genuine sincere. The writer reveals so much emotion and feeling with her words, which is clearly able to predict based upon the poem. When read, this poem shows compassion as well as hidden sorrow in every stanza. The words written in this poem perfectly align beautifully to make an extraordinary and insightful piece of literature. Brittain is an exceptional writer and this shows all throughout the poem with her use of punctuation, imagery, allegory, and many other literary aspects.
A poem is a piece of writing that partakes of the nature of both speech and song that is nearly always rhythmical, usually metaphorical, and that often exhibits such formal elements as meter, rhyme, and stanza structure. In her poem, “Variations of the Word ‘“love”’,” Margaret Atwood introduces to her audience the word “love” from many different perspectives. Google defines “love” as “an intense feeling of deep affection”, or “having a deep feeling or sexual attachment to (someone).” But “love” is not something that can easily be described. Atwood goes on to present and portray the word through different illustrations, beginning with cliché examples and ending with her own personal scenarios. The author’s tone and metaphorical language effectively conveys her perspective of “love”.
However, this can be seen as the speaker acknowledging the overwhelmingly true fact of her being dead while her husband lives. The speaker asks her husband not to waste his time honoring her memory or trying to make gestures of love for her when they cannot be received. She also allows herself the freedom to focus on herself and her afterlife. The speaker is revolutionary in her autonomy and her acceptance of the ever-constant change that pervades human existence. Through this poem, Rossetti highlights the emerging feminist movement of the time and provides a stark contrast to the usual male-driven
In “The Arts of Beauty: Women’s Cosmetics and Pope’s Ekphrasis,” Tita Chico contends that ekphrastic representations of women in The Rape of the Lock and Epistle to a Lady indicate Pope’s privileging poetic artistry over the art of cosmetics. In both poems, Pope exploits the humiliation of a “cosmetically constructed woman” in an effort to assert the supremacy of his own artistic authority (Chico 4). Chico uses other scholars―Laura Brown, Christa Knellwolf, and Felicity Naussbaum chief among them―to anchor the origins of her argument, but she immediately addresses their respective limitations. She gently criticizes other scholars for
The theme of this poem is, each heart is different, In lines 26-28, It states, " Or tell you from the bottom of it how i feel." This quote means that the speaker is talking deep, the speaker is in their feelings, he/she is being for real. Also people have different feelings, like today its all in the way you are treated. This passage was important to me because the speaker is showing his/her true feeling and that every one is different and has different
Christina Rossetti was a Victorian poet that is seen as, “one of the most important of English women poets both in range and quality” (Britannica.org). Her religion was especially important to her, a High Church Anglican. She devoted her life to her religion, and she even broke off an engagement because the man she had planned to marry became a Roman Catholic. However, in 1871 Rossetti [contracted] Graves’ disease. The illness was life threatening, but she still continued to write poetry through her faith. After she had lived with the disease for a while, her works started to shift towards devotional prose writings. The two ideas that she wrote the most about were, “the transience of material things” and, “the resigned but passionate sadness
Likewise, the Victorian Era poet, Christina Rossetti credited with poems like ‘I wish I could remember,’ a feminist poem that was written from a woman’s point of view, a poem which used the Italian Sonnet form. Christina Rossetti has used both the English Sonnet and the Italian Sonnet, and this may be reflective of her background; she was born in England, but her father was Italian, so Italy, its language and customs had a strong influence on her life and her creativeness.
Rossetti spent most of her life by strict religious principles. She gave up two engagement commitments due to religious factors. Rossetti's religious compassion in her work was no secret. A well known Rossetti critic, Jerome McGann, says, "nearly all her poems contain important allusions to and quotations from The Book of Common Prayers and the Bible." (McGann 211).
The potent emotion of jealous love permeates throughout both Robert Browning’s ‘My Last Duchess’ and Carol Ann Duffy’s ‘Medusa.’ Jealous love forms a central concern of the poets, with each one focusing on different aspects, which the reader may come to identify the poems as exploring the intensity of human emotion.
When reading the title, we often associate a love song as something jaunty,pleasureable, and celebrating, or its other extreme, regretting, nostalgic, and full of pity for the singer’s troubles in love. With Williams the singer, the main idea revolves around the concept of an incomplete union in first person point of view, which makes the reading more personal as the reader is using “I” instead you or he. From this concept stem the ideas that this poem is about hopelessness or happiness, communal sex or masturbation. Delving into history, literary techniques, association with the author, and own opinion of it, there is easily more to it than meets the eye.