Comparing Song Of Songs And Sappho's Love Poems

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

Pain can be expressed in both sorrow and anger. Sappho creates great imagery in this fragmented poem by taking pain into natural moving actions. She expresses how her feelings change from hurt to anger and how heavy pain can really be. Sappho uses physical movement to express her emotions in different directions. She also emphasizes how she sees revenge is the ultimate goal in order to recover from that pain.

“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”.

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.

Sappho’s poem, entitled Fragment 16, is of the lyrical style instead of the epic style we are used to in Homer’s Iliad. The lyrical style of poetry got its name because it was usually accompanied by a lyre while it was recited. It also was used to express more emotion rather than telling a story. This form of poetry seems to be more artistic rather than the story telling of epic poetry of the time. In this poem we are able to use the comparison of different imagery to understand a common theme within the poem itself. The reason for the interesting title of the poem is because most of Sappho’s poetry is now only found in fragmented forms. Most of Sappho’s writing is from 600 B.C.E.

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.

Unlike other forms of literature, poetry can be so complex that everyone who reads it may see something different. Two poets who are world renowned for their ability to transform reader’s perceptions with the mere use of words, are TS Eliot and Walt Whitman. “The love song of J Alfred Prufrock” by TS Eliot, tells the story of a man who is in love and contemplating confessing his emotions, but his debilitating fear of rejection stops him from going through with it. This poem skews the reader’s expectations of a love song and takes a critical perspective of love while showing all the damaging emotions that come with it. “Song of myself”, by Walt Whitman provokes a different emotion, one of joy and self-discovery. This poem focuses more on the soul and how it relates to the body. “Song of myself” and “The love song of J Alfred Prufrock” both explore the common theme of how the different perceptions of the soul and body can affect the way the speaker views themselves, others, and the world around them.

This implies that love and desire are essentially interchangeable, however, Sappho does not treat them as such. This distinction becomes solidified by analyzing Sappho’s use of the gods in her poetry in which she correlates love with the goodness Aphrodite and lust with the god Eros. By observing Sappho’s stylistic formations within fragments 1, 16 and 31, the

Love, in Rumi’s poetry was aimed at his love for God and in Sappho’s poetry it was aimed at others around her though she did address Gods and Goddesses in her work. In Rumi’s poem “The Music of Love” from the Masnavi-i manawi, he said “Hail to thee, then, O Love, sweet madness! / Thou who healest all our infirmities! / Who art the Physician of our pride and self-conceit! / Who art our Plato and our Galen! / Love exalts our earthly bodies to heaven, / And makes the very hills to dance with joy! / O lover, 'twas Love that gave life to Mount Sinai, / When "it quaked, and Moses fell down in a swoon." / Did my Beloved only touch me with His lips, / I too, like a flute, would burst out into melody.” with this poem he spoke of the love that he feels for his God. He stated similar feelings in his poem “Religion of Love”, in this he spoke of how much God’s love matters to a man and how much love the man has for his God. In Sappho’s poetry she addresses the love that she feels for certain women, in her poem “You Can Free Me” she spoke of a woman was so beautiful that she could not be compared to any mortal woman, she said “I hoped for love / when I look at you face to face / not even Hermioni / seems to be your equal. / I compare you to blond Helen / among mortal women. / Know that you can free me / from every care, / and stay awake all night long / on dewy riverbanks”, and with this

There are different forms of love, ranging from the lust of one another to a familial fondness. Two poets, Sappho and Catullus, each represent a different type of love in their respective poems. Sappho, a female poet born in the early sixth century B.C. on the Greek island of Lesbos, was said to be the tenth Muse and a supreme lyric poet of her time. Her life remains mostly a mystery, but through her poems it has been found out that she had a husband, and a daughter named Cleis. Catullus, a Roman poet that lived from roughly 84 to 54 B.C., found inspiration in and was influenced by Sappho, opting to write about love rather than politics like the rest of the poets of his time. He also popularized the style of “love elegy” in poems. Sappho and Catullus, as seen in “Sleep, Darling” and “If Ever Anyone Anywhere” respectively, use diction, the speaker, figurative language, and imagery in similar and different ways to express varying versions of love.

By not having neither too much nor too little. The right amount will vary with the individual the golden mean is achieved when one attains a certain balance.

However, in the woods the tone is calm and images seem to be linked closely to nature. ‘Therefore the winds piping to us in vain, as in revenge have sucked up the sea’. The natural images are used to describe true love. Unlike the fearful Athens, the wood’s is free, but vulnerable to chaos.

The poem “How Do I Love Thee”, by Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and “What Lips My Lips Have Kissed”, by Edna Vincent Millay are both well-known poems that both have themes of love. (LIT, Kirszner & Mandell, Pg. 490). In both poems the poet helps the reader experience a lot of emotion with the use of certain words. There are speakers in both poems. In Mrs. Browning’s poem, the speaker is undefined, leaving open that the speaker could be a he or she. Millay’s poem which is written in first person, the speaker is more defined leading the reader to believe it is a she who is talking about love in the past tense. Both poems are sonnets written with fourteen lines, and written in Italian style. When comparing these poems we will be looking at the use of rhyme scheme and metaphors and how they were used to express emotions in these two sonnet poems.

In the same way, Sappho finishes by indicating love is forever. Through this poem, she wins over how deep her love is by turning this scary crazy love, into something that is going to last for a very long time. Additionally, the Sapphic poetry displayed in this poem creates a powerful emotion which simply intensifies as you read the poem. The poem starts out beautifully slowly, and then erupts to deep love affection.