I Should Have Loved You All Have Lived Analysis

James Fenton and Carol Ann Duffy are both contemporary poets. Their poems ‘In Paris with You’ and ‘Quickdraw’ both include the themes of the pain of love. This essay compares how the two poets present the pain of love in their poems, exploring things such as imagery, vocabulary and form and structure.

In her poem “One Perfect Rose,” Dorothy Parker misleads the reader throughout the first and second stanzas into believing this poem is a romantic tribute to a tender moment from her past through her word choice and style of writing. However, the tone of the entire poem dramatically changes upon reading the third and final stanza when Parker allows the reader to understand her true intention of the poem, which is a cynical and perhaps bewildered view of the memory. And, with this shift in the tone in the third stanza, there is a shift in the meaning of the entire poem, leading the reader to believe that the first two stanzas were not, in fact, sweet but instead a sarcastic and bitter account of this past moment. In the first stanza, Dorothy

In “The Story of an Hour” the main character Louise Mallard has just found out that her husband, Brently Mallard, died in a train accident. She did not hear the story as many women have heard the same, (527) which means that she didn’t immediately think that her life was over and she could not go on without her husband, she thought of the rest of her life with open arms and excitement. She could see in the open square before her house the tops of trees that were all aquiver with the new spring life. (527) she was looking forward to a whole new life, a life of her own. Of course she was sad and knew that she would mourn her husband, be sad when she saw him lying in the casket at his funeral. And yet she had loved him—sometimes. Often she had not. (528) She is saying she did love him but not most of the time. While she was alone in her room staring out the window a feeling came over her that she was unsure of at first, but when she let herself go she realized it was freedom, triumph, and victory. She kept whispering to herself “free, body and soul free!”(528) She and her sister walked down the stairs together to find her husband, Brently, walking through the front door, she died of a heart attack as soon as she saw him.

In "A Sorrowful Woman" the wife is depressed with her life, so much so, "The sight of them made her so sad and sick she did not want to see them ever again"(p.1). This wife and mother has come to detest her life, the sight of her family,

The last line in the poem “and since they were not the ones dead, turned to their own affairs” lacks the emotions the reader would expect a person to feel after a death of a close family member. But instead, it carries a neutral tone which implies that death doesn’t even matter anymore because it happened too often that the value of life became really low, these people are too poor so in order to survive, they must move on so that their lives can continue. A horrible sensory image was presented in the poem when the “saw leaped out at the boy’s hand” and is continued throughout the poem when “the boy’s first outcry was a rueful laugh…the hand was gone already…and that ended it”, this shows emphasis to the numbness the child felt. The poem continues with the same cold tone without any expression of emotion or feelings included except for pain, which emphasizes the lack of sympathy given. Not only did the death of this child placed no effect on anyone in the society but he was also immediately forgotten as he has left nothing special enough behind for people to remember him, so “since they were not the one dead, turned to their affairs”. This proves that life still carries on the same way whether he is present or not, as he is insignificant and that his death

Similarly, as “Stop all of the Clocks” develops the narrator metaphorically and onomatopoeically highlights that everything in life must acknowledge the death and experience it with him. Outward signs of cotton gloves and bows with doves is a metaphor for the person’s acknowledgement of death. The importance of the deceased love extends to every facet of the narrator’s life because they belonged in every moment that the narrator lived. In this moment of grief, the narrator feels betrayed because they invested in a love which was not eternal.

The loss of a loved one is perhaps the most difficult experience that humans ever come up against. The poem Porphyria’s Lover, written by Robert Browning, adds a sense of irony to this. At the most superficial layer, the speaker’s in both Porphyria’s Lover and Neutral Tones, written by Thomas hardy, both deal with loss. The tones in Neutral Tones seem to be indifferent, or Neutral. Porphyria’s Lover speaker ends up murdering his beloved at the end the poem. While this isn’t the case with the speaker in Neutral Tones, the two speakers are much more similar than we might think. The speaker in Neutral Tones doesn’t outright murder his lover, but there is a considerable amount of disdain and contempt towards his supposed lover. The speaker in Porphyria’s Lover is quite obviously a disturbed man, the sinister nature of the speaker in Neutral Tones, however, is not as clear. Delving further into this idea, I will also discuss other obscure parallels throughout the two poems.

The poem’s structure as a sonnet allows the speaker’s feelings of distrust and heartache to gradually manifest themselves as the poem’s plot progresses. Each quatrain develops and intensifies the speaker’s misery, giving the reader a deeper insight into his convoluted emotions. In the first quatrain, the speaker advises his former partner to not be surprised when she “see[s] him holding [his] louring head so low” (2). His refusal to look at her not only highlights his unhappiness but also establishes the gloomy tone of the poem. The speaker then uses the second and third quatrains to justify his remoteness; he explains how he feels betrayed by her and reveals how his distrust has led him

One particular paragraph is especially eloquent, and warrants closer analysis: “People grieve and bemoan themselves, but it is not half so bad with them as they say. There are moods in which we court suffering, in the hope that here, at least, we shall find reality, sharp peaks and

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.

Each time I felt all the agonies of her death — and at each accession of the disorder I loved her more dearly & clung to her life with more desperate pertinacity.”. What the author is trying to say is that every time the man tried to get over his wife he couldn’t get over it due to how much he felt for her. Therefore this supports the claim that an inference that can be made is that the author has a negative perspective on life since his wife died because this is demonstrating that since he has had one very bad experience he hasn’t had someone who kept his head up during the dark time. The third example is when “The Raven” by Edgar Allan Poe states, “Deep into that darkness peering, long I stood there wondering, fearing, Doubting, dreaming dreams no mortal ever dared to dream before; But the silence was unbroken, and the stillness gave no token, And the only word there spoken was the whispered word, ‘Lenore?’”. What the author is trying to say is that after his wife death he begins to think that his wife is there and he begins to call out to

“Wish for a Young Wife”, by Theodore Roethke, may seem to be more than just a simple epithalamium, for the way the poet presents his writing compels the reader to question his true intentions. Nevertheless, although it is easy for the reader to trip down this path, a closer reading, in which one pays particular attention to aspects such the poem's imagery, rhyme scheme, meter, and parallelism, allows them to acknowledge that as the poet appreciates his wife and elaborates on what he wants for her, it is in fact the ambiguity of the poem that doubles the effect of his sincerity and love for his young wife.

Edna St. Vincent Millay’s “Sonnet IV” follows many of the conventions of the traditional Petrarchan sonnet. It follows the traditional rhyming scheme and octet, sestet structure. However it challenges the conventions of the typical subject of the Italian sonnet, unrequited love. In the octet at the beginning of the poem Millay uses images that give a sense of transience and in the ending sestet of the sonnet she contrasts the sense of impermanence given earlier with the idea that the speaker cannot forget the smiles and words of their ex-lover. This contrast between permanence and transience illustrates Millay’s interest in a fugacious relationship with everlasting memories. After further analysis of Millay’s highly structured rhyming scheme which puts emphasis on the last words of each line. She uses these words to further express her interest in exploring impermanent relationships by using words that are associated with an end or death.

After coming across his lover’s resting place, the narrator finally realizes that it is the anniversary of her death and that he mindlessly travelled to the place of her burial. His actions imply that he still yearns for her, trying to keep her memory alive and relive it as a new experience (Scraba 47). His denial and attempt to relive his past shows his insanity as he repeats the endless cycle of remembering and

I remember the day just like it was yesterday, the pale color and coldness of her skin. The sky was clear blue, soft, with a touch of red, and the trees seemed stiff in their bright green shade. The wind was blowing with its humid dry air. And All I could do was stand silently in disbelief, caught up in my own thoughts and calm as I ever been. Wondering what I could have done differently to change the course of time, life had taken us upon. Since that very day a chunk of my heart was ripped away, and broken into pieces… “Oh how I miss her so much.”