Both Elizabeth Barrett Browning and F. Scott Fitzgerald explore the transformative nature of love as a dominant theme throughout their texts to offer poignant social commentaries of their contextual eras. Their revelations of the empowering effects of love and aspirations, that emerge due to love are the tools for both composers to represent critical observations of their societal values. Both texts reveal the powerful nature of love and its ability to empower. The protagonists in each text undergo major transformations in their pursuit of love. Browning's Petrachan sonnets represent her journey of her love and passion for Robert Browning. Referencing her personal context, love has transformed and empowered her. As a female, her subversion of the sonnet form from a masculine voice to her own …show more content…
Additionally, the power of love is furthered as an intertextual connection between the texts through the explorations of browning and gatsby's aspirations. Both borwning and gatsby's hopes were transformed due to their love. Browning refelcts on her personal context in the early sonnets to demonstrate her former lack of hope. Her reference to the 'sweet sad years' in sonnet 1 highlights the distressed nature of her life and how death and sadness were prevalent in her life before love. Her declaration in her final sonnet expresses her belif of the verlasting unconitional love she is experienceing when she exclaims '...I shall but love thee better after my death" browning represents a hope that their love will continue after their death challenging the victorian notion that the limitation of love is in death. However while brownings hopes for their love are optimistic, gatsby's aspirations created from his love for daisy are destroyed. Fitsgerald's reference to the green light is a physical metaphor for gatsby's hopes of achieving
Edna St. Vincent Millay’s “Sonnet IV” is a sonnet spoken from the point of view of a woman who is permitting herself to remember an old lover over the duration of her cigarette. The poem is set up through the classical structure of a Petrarchan sonnet and shares the topic of a lost lover. The octave follows the course of the dream, which takes the form of smoke and shadows. The volta marks the end of the cigarette and the dream, but the speaker still continues her memories in the sestet to follow. Edna St. Vincent Millay’s “Sonnet IV” is similar to other Petrarchan sonnets in both structure and topic. Upon closer inspection, however, Millay’s poem challenges the classical topic of love seen in Italian sonnets by reversing the typical attempt at immortalization of the lover’s beauty and greatness through memory. This is creates a tension which aids to divide the poem into two parts, the octave and sestet. Through these lines of the poem, Millay employs enjambment throughout both the octave and sestet and end stop in only the volta. This aids in drawing attention to the change in diction from long, euphonious, and elevated words in the opening portion of the poem, to shorter, more cacophonous words in the final six lines. In the final two lines of her sonnet, Millay utilizes a metaphor of a setting sun to compare the speaker’s moment of memory to the sun setting behind a hill. St. Vincent Millay makes use of this contrast and these literary devices to emphasize her critique,
In the novel, The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald utilizes Gatsby’s love for Daisy to express the message of to the reader. Love is a very powerful thing not just the word itself but all of the power that it holds in the meaning it doesn’t take much for someone to express to someone else that they love them but it is really shown when one goes above and beyond to make sure that it is clearly identified as actions of love. The author utilized Gatsby’s love for Daisy in a chronological order set up by showing that this man was willing to do anything to prove that he loves her. The author even highlights aspects of the devotion coming from Gatsby’s end while they were separated and he had not one slightest clue of where she even was. Love can sometimes make people do some of the craziest things.
The reality of a perfect relationship can never be as good as the dream. Towards the end of chapter six, we begin to understand Gatsby’s true desire during the conversation between him and Nick, “you can’t repeat the past”, “why of course you can … I’m going to fix everything just the way it was”. Gatsby believes in the mutability of reality and having faith in the realness of his dreams even though his desire is truly unattainable. The past exerts a powerful force over Gatsby, and he consistently places hope in his materialistic possessions to which he believes will impress Daisy. This is illustrated through the combination of alliteration “sheer silk’ and fine flannel’ which serves to emphasise the abundance of fabrics as well as listing to describe shirts
Hence, she appraises the responder of how Robert Browning, her lover, has given her a new life and hope “in all her green” for the future. The pleasure and ecstasy she experiences due to his passion are further expressed through the repetition of “Say thou dost love me, love me, love me”. This conveys her excitement and deep infatuation with Robert. It also suggests the joy Robert has given her. Therefore, EBB communicates to the responder how influential true love is and how it can change one’s life forever.
“I would rather have eyes that cannot see; ears that cannot hear; lips that cannot speak, than a heart that cannot love” (Tizon). “The Great Gatsby” is a novel that takes place during this period, the “Roaring Twenties”, or otherwise known as the “Jazz Age”. This is a time of prohibition and experimentation. The novel portrays both the chaos and loss of morals that many during this time are experiencing. In the novel, love is expressed in three different ways; unconditional love, idealised love, and material love.
F. Scott Fitzgerald presents many themes in his novel, The Great Gatsby. One of the themes is love can be cruel. This theme is developed throughout the novel by his use of the motif of cheating inside of relationships as well as Gatsby’s blindness of Daisy’s flawed character. This motif represents the loneliness that still surrounds the characters even while they are within marriages.
However, Browning’s aspirations to push through social barriers and separate herself from the conforming way of Victorian society, is an ongoing progression throughout her Sonnets. The lust to subvert from strict 19th century female values is eminent in the progression of Browning’s female poetic voice in Sonnet XLIII. She metaphorises the expansion of her love through a spatial metaphor “Depth and Breadth and Height” combined with polysyndeton to emphasis the scope of her affection, which is a stark contrast from the delayed Volta in Sonnet I “who by turns had flung a shadow across me”. This progressive journey of love illustrates Bowring’s aspirations to overcome the highly regimented social order that Victorian England provided to the love of young couples, denying them freedom make their own decisions, “the melancholy years… those of my own life”. In both texts, the desire to push away from the present conveys a deeper understanding of the hope within their characterisation. Towards the end of chapter six, we begin to understand Gatsby’s true aspirations during the conversation between him and Nick, “you can’t repeat the past”, “why of course you can … I’m going to fix everything just the way it was”. Gatsby believes in the mutability of reality and having faith in the realness of his dreams even though his desire is truly unattainable. The past exerts a
Elizabeth Browning was one of the most widely read and known poets of the day. In the poem “Sonnet 28” notice it is not in iambic pentameter. When it came to love Elizabeth felt like there were no rules. In this poem Elizabeth says the letter are dead, that they are nothing
The concept of love in The Great Gatsby is very much akin to a tragedy such as Romeo and Juliet or Macbeth,Gatsby loses his life in his quest to obtain Daisy’s love .The Great Gatsby is a romantic drama novel set in the Jazz age by author F, Scott Fitzgerald. It tells the story of the fabulously wealthy Jay Gatsby and his love for the beautiful Daisy Buchanan. Fitzgerald highlights Gatsby and his relationship with Daisy to show that no matter how much wealth a person may accumulate, it cannot always provide happiness, and Gatsby is missing the one thing he longs for in life, Love
The physical metaphor of the ‘green light’ is symbolic of Gatsby’s hope and passion of ataining the Amercian Dream, in his pursuit of Daisy’s love. Nick returns to this imagery of the ‘green light’ as he concludes in a compassionate tone ‘Gatsby belived in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us’ to typify the established conventions of the Jazz Age, wherein values of wealth, beauty and success; that constitute the American Dream, were strongly emphasised. However, the metaphor ‘he paid a high price for living too long with a single dream’ recognises that Gatsby’s obsession with achieving the dream is what finally results in his death; therein, Fitzgerald epitomizes the values that underline the American Dream and comments on the decaying social morals of the 1920s, American society. This contrasts with EBB as she expresses that hope can be obtained from love as it has the power to reinvigorate the personnal outlook on
Her sonnets were a part of the Romantic era, a time where poets cultivated passion and individualism. Her romantic writing possesses hope portrayed in Sonnet I where she writes “Not Death, but Love”, an oxymoron showing how love has resorted her life, allowing for a “silver” lining to appear used of colour symbolism. The oxymoron sibilance “sweet sad years” clearly suggest her powerlessness in her past experiences of sickness and loneliness. Browning suffered under the control of her father's dominance which was a common occurrence for many Victorian women as they were seen as material objects of marriage and motherhood. She went against her father will and social norms by marrying for hope not materialistic means, unlike Gatsby. In sonnet XIV Browning expressed that a relationship should be “for love’s sake only”, the use of high modality pushes her statement against the morals of objectification of women. Therefore Borrowing values of hope and time have influenced her perspective on the context juxtaposing against Gatsby, who with the same values perceived a different viewpoint. She showcased straight against the social norms of the Victorian era and in the process found
Throughout Elizabeth Barrette Browning’s “Sonnets from the Portuguese,” the speaker expresses her thoughts on love. Despite the myriad of ways that the speaker chooses to express her understanding of love, it is comprised of qualities existing outside of the world’s inherently corrupt nature. The speaker in Elizabeth Barrette Browning’s “Sonnets from the Portuguese” views the world and her desires through the self-sacrificing and pure nature of love and values it above physical beauty and simple societal endearment.
Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s “Sonnets from the Portuguese” are a set of sonnets which highlight Browning’s perspective on idealised, spiritual love. F.S Fitzgerald’s 1926 novel, “The Great Gatsby” criticises
The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald is a tragic love story set in the immoral and unsure post WWI 1920s. The focus of the novel is on Jay Gatsby - a young, rich man who lives on West egg in New York - and his former lover from five years ago, Daisy. Throughout the five years during which the two were separated, Gatsby’s love for Daisy never waned, and he loved nobody but her. However, Daisy married another man - Tom Buchanan - in Gatsby’s absence. In any case, in an age of anxiety in the 1920s following WWI, the idea of love took on a new, modernistic, identity, that is demonstrated wonderfully in Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness. The novel “portrayed in graphic, orgasmic terms an extramarital love affair between the upper-class Lady Chatterley and her groundskeeper, Mellors” (Winkiel 54), which shows the forbidden and sinful nature of love in modernist literature. For this reason, the modernistic portrayal of love in The Great Gatsby is represented by a fruitless struggle between two people separated by class to be together.
Fitzgerald makes use of the green light to symbolize how the longing for love can be difficult. In the novel when Gatsby walked out of his mansion he had a desire for an object he kept reaching out for it, Then Nick examined where Gatsby was staring he saw "nothing except a single green light" (Fitzgerald 21). Showing the desire he had for this green light, but he was never able to successfully strive for it because he was so close yet so far. In time, it's discovered that the green light comes from Daisy's house. With Gatsby’s desire of the green light from Daisy's house, as a result the green light was a symbolic meaning of his love for Daisy. When Gatsby finally met Daisy after being apart for five years. Gatsby felt "that the colossal significance of that light had vanished forever." (Fitzgerald 93) The green light was the major source he had to demonstrate his desire