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English Lit 6 Poem Essay

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‘Compare the treatment of love in some of the poems you have studied ’

Poem at Thirty-nine,
My last Duchess,
Remember,
Anne Hathaway,
Havisham
On my first Sonne.

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.

‘Remember’ is in the form of an Italian sonnet in which Christina …show more content…

The poem is extremely moving and sad, but I think the speaker feels proud of her father and this is suggested at the end of the poem where she develops similar characteristics to him: ‘cooking, writing..’ and how she is ‘happy to feed whoever strays my way’ like her father. Walker does this to express that a part of her father belongs to her and she is proud of these similarities, which keep him alive in her memory long after his death. I think it is interesting that Walker uses phrases such as ‘I look and cook just like him’ because this creates a positive mood in the poem and contrasts the sorrow showing how her despite her father's death, he lives on through her. Furthermore, Walker’s strict upbringing is suggested by the ‘beating’ she sometimes received; however, she did not judge her father,as she was thankful for the morals she was taught and the importance of telling the truth. The idea that she has done some

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