Egyptian Love Poems Essay

Many of these poems describe romantic relationships and the relationship’s effect on the speakers’ behaviors. Whether the speaker feels lovesick, obsessive, or excited, the behavior of the speaker is different than it was when he/she was not in love. These love poems from Deir el-Medina depict the effects of a romantic relationship on the behavior of the people involved.

[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.

romantic love celebrated in songs and romances of the Medieval Period. Moreover, being a code

Romance has been around for as long as human beings have been alive. The concept or romance changes through time and culture. In the Egyptian and Chinese ancient love poems, civilizations that seem distant from each other end up sharing similar concepts of romance. To them, a romance develops in steps which incorporate seeing their beloved from afar, trying to get to them, and alas having them. A closer look at both poems "My god, my Lotus…" and "Fishhawk", can show how two cultures characterize the steps it takes in order to acquire romance.

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.

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.

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.

The ancient greeks language had many different words for love categorizing the different types. With the theme love makes people do crazy things, they specifically point out the love between man and women. In ancient greece, it was frowned upon to let you relationships with others to dictate your decisions and actions for the greater good. Family was very important, but not as important as the rules, laws, and the gods. In Ode 4, the chorus says “Love!-you wrench the minds of the righteous in outrage,

Throughout history, incest, or consanguineal mating, has largely been considered taboo in cultures around the world. This belief may not simply be culturally motivated, but evolutionarily advantageous and biologically enforced. Despite this, in multiple cultures, the prestige of royalty and nobility seem to outweigh this fundamental virtue. Nowhere is this more true than in ancient Egypt, where members of the royal family were encouraged to marry and mate with close relatives, even siblings or parents. How did the ancient Egyptian pharaohs fair the negative repercussions of an incestual bloodline? While grandiose archeological findings may indicate that the nobility of ancient Egypt lived a spectacularly lavish lifestyle and were revered as gods, this romantic viewpoint often overlooks the underlying biological truth - noble bloodlines were often ravaged by congenital disease, a consequence of their consanguineal pairings.

In George Frideric Handel’s masterful 18th century opera, Giulio Cesare, one may find many examples of the classic operatic archetype of power, particularly in relation to love and fear in how they are both tools that are oftentimes used to gain power. In this specific opera, Handel heralds the greater power-seizing potency of love when compared to its counterpart-- terror. In this essay, I plan to examine how the Egyptian character Cleopatra utilizes the power of love in order to achieve her own political and personal gains. I shall use text examples from the libretto to show how she triumphs over the darker forces of her enemies, Ptolemy and his great general named Achillas.

The third speaker, Eryximachus, bases his speech on Pausanias’ theory of common and celestial love. He explains that common and celestial loves are natural within our bodies. Eryximachus tends to stray away from the larger point of view and goes down a narrower path as his definition of love solely pertains to medicinal purposes, as something to bring together polar opposites, like hot and cold, black and white, sweet and sour, and get them to love one another. He wants to consider a general perspective of love, characterizing it not only for human beings but for lifeless objects as well.

Both the Song of Songs and Sappho’s love poems stem from the core concept of the overall intimacy and indescribable nature of love. Both reach to describe love by comparing to the beauty of nature and the underlying feelings presented by nature; however, the two differ in their specific context of love. The Song of Songs covers what would be today called the “honeymoon phase” where the love is sweet, perfect and what the world envisions, whereas Sappho takes the melancholic side of love, focused on entrapment, and overall heartbreak. These differences create completely different stories of love, one of life long happiness, and one of chasing love.

with some very different views of love as brought to us by Agathon, Phaedrus and

We only call a certain category of those in love, lovers (Symposium 7) and in contrast with what Aristophanes had said about lovers being in search of their other half, Diotima argues that lovers love what is good. After all, the aim of loving beautiful and good things, of course, is to possess them, because the possession of beautiful and good things is wisdom and with wisdom comes happiness and happiness is deep-down what everyone is ultimately in pursuit of.

To women love is a personal and subjective experience. If you go around and ask the question “What is love?” you will get so many different answers. The reason for this is because to each women different things are important. It may mean loyalty, passion, excitement, warmth and friendship. Women also think that love can mean that someone will do anything for the other person and be there for that person no matter what the situation. Love, in ancient Greece, was known to be the admiration between a man and beautiful young boy. In the thirteenth century, the definition of love was the love between a woman married to another man and knight. Love between a wife and husband was the norm in Puritan New England. Also in Victorian times, the asexual commitment from a mother for her child was the definition of love. As you can see there were many different types of definitions of love. In today’s society norm definition of love is a longstanding heterosexual relationship between two committed lovers.