Love in HJohn Donne´s A Valediction Forbidding Mourning and Andrew Marvell´s To His Coy Mistress

To experience feelings of delight and bliss individuals must also face difficult times to help them better recognize and appreciate their future happiness. Without experiencing sadness and heartbreak people would be significantly less appreciative of their future lovers and self. To fully feel what love is, you must have experienced loss because without feeling how painful the flip side of situation is there would be no way of feeling anything at all, which would drive everyone to be completely numb. Throughout the following poems “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?”, “My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun”, “The Flea”, and Thomas Hardy’s “Neutral Tones” the authors all share their experiences about love, with a major emphasis on

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.

       In the traditional Romance narrative, there is some desirable object whose consummation is the driving preoccupation of the text's protagonist. The aspiration of the Romantic hero is to capture that elusive object that will, nevertheless, consistently out-strip him. These heroes are intimately acquainted with the pain of the loss and suffer deeply for feeling so acutely. However, loss itself, is essential to the equation and is, in fact, a large portion of what establishes the thing as desirable.

In A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful Edmund Burke writes, “It is the nature of grief to keep its object perpetually in its eye, to present it in its most pleasurable views, to repeat all the circumstances that attend to it”. Burke’s writing attempts to clarify the “pictorial, literary, cultural, economic and psychological” phenomenon of sublimity, explicating the ways in which power, vastness, obscurity and beauty intersect to form emotional response. A Philosophical Enquiry elucidates why so many Romantic poets and writers would make grief, mourning and death the subjects of their works; the limitless, obscure, infinite theme death corresponds to the existential, contemplative and introspective ideas Romantic writers were attempting to interrogate. But the subject of death in Romantic literature transcends the topic of corporeal death and explores the death of memory, of youth, of innocence and of the past. Furthermore, the Romantic writers were grappling with a shifting, changing society that caused a sense of pervasive loss in their works; as artists, authors and the population attempted to navigate a society characterized by political revolution and technological innovation, poems about mourning act as almost consolatory works.

In analyzing the woman’s experience, the tone of the poem principally informs its paradoxical nature. For, while the notion of passion is conventionally associated with powerful and overwhelming emotion, the speaker’s tone is consistently calm and subdued when alluding to it. As evidence of this, one must recall the manner in which she establishes her sexual desire for her anonymous lover:

The profession and art of love is a timeless study yet differs according to time and textual features employed. Composers select particular form to best express their ideas on issues such as love and emotion, inherently influenced by their own context. ‘Sonnets of the Portuguese’ by Elizabeth Barret Browning (EBB) were initially private, personal reflections, a poetic documentation of her courtship with Robert Browning during the Victorian period. ‘The Great Gatsby’ by F. Scott Fitzgerald is a longer text where characters are strongly developed, falsely striving to live and accomplish the American Dream. Love is deliberately portrayed by each composer to reflect their varying contexts, opinions and forms.

The narrative poem, “The Highwayman” authored by Alfred Noyes, symbolizes the forbidden, but pure love among the highwayman and the landlord’s daughter, Bess. The power of their love for one another was so strong for they sacrificed themselves for each other. “Annabel Lee”, a poem written by Edgar Allan Poe, signifies the obsessive, but eternal love between the narrator and his wife, succeeding her passing. The two authors develop the theme of love, nevertheless, Noyes develops the theme of sacrificial love whereas Poe establishes the theme of obsessive devotion.

In lines Marvell introduces the relation between time and the lady at fault, the speaker wants to love her but it is difficult,

“A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning,” by John Donne explores love through the ideas of assurance and separation. Donne uses vivid imagery to impart his moral themes on his audience. A truer, more refined love, Donne explains comes from a connection at the mind, the joining of two souls as one. Physical presence is irrelevant if a true marriage of the minds has occurred, joining a pair of lovers’ souls eternally.

Not often are men portrayed as a victim within a love affair. William Yeats and John Keats both allow a special woman to consume their emotional state within a short period of time. Heartbreak and anguish are commonly accommodated with love, though William and Keats view upon their loss leads to insight on the nature of love. Both “The Song of Wandering Aengus” and “La Belle Dame Sans Merci” describe a female figure which has made an impact on the main character, however the poems' use of refined euphemisms and symbolism, although both have similar love experience, they contrast sharply in the aftermath of their love experiences.

The discovery of one’s romantic self can take many forms which can encompass the notions of reason, nature and freedom. However, experience plays a crucial role in making this discovery. The individual must delve into nature which is the strongest force encouraging one to invoke their inner emotions without any logical explanation or fear. This allows one to remain free. The following essay will discuss the works of The Sorrows of Young Werther by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and The Prelude by William Wordsworth.

The definition of love is truly unknown. The many emotions and forms associated with love make it a complicated thing to define. Many describe it as fleeting and all consuming, but the darker face of love lies just below the surface of simplicity. This seemingly innocent word brings out feelings of obsession, questioning of one’s self-worth, and jealousy. Can the light exist without the dark? In Pablo Neruda’s “Sonnet XVI”, his expressive language highlights the vital reliance of these two opposing forces in saying that it keeps the physical and emotional space between two people just wide enough to prevent the two forces from ever touching. On the same token, Ernest Hemingway’s, The Sun Also Rises, highlights the destructive consequences of trying to close this gap. The opposing contrasts coupled with the inability to close the widening gap between two individuals call attention to the dilemma spread out over time of the cyclical nature of why two people can never fully know and understand each other.

This essay will discuss a selection of poems taken from Christine de Pizan’s Cent Balades, published at the end of the fourteenth century, and a number of sonnets by Louise Labé, whose Œuvres were printed in 1555. Love and desire are the prevalent themes in the work of both of these poets. Since definitions of love vary so greatly, the terms ‘love’ and ‘desire’ will be used interchangeably in this essay to refer to love expressed as desire. The poems discussed here all depict the individual experience of desire, the discourse of which is shaped in various ways; it might focus on the subject’s grief at the loss or lack of the object of desire, express the suffering which comes as the result of love or desire, or depict the fantasy of a successful union in which the object of desire is attained, the aim of which could be deemed to be the alleviation of pain.

Andrew Marvell writes an elaborate poem that not only speaks to his coy mistress but also to the reader. He suggests to his coy mistress that time is inevitably ticking and that he (the speaker) wishes for her to act upon his wish and have a sexual relationship. Marvell simultaneously suggest to the reader that he/she must act upon their desires, to hesitate no longer and ³seize the moment?before time expires. Marvell uses a dramatic sense of imagery and exaggeration in order to relay his message to the reader and to his coy mistress. The very first two lines of the poem suggest that it would be fine for him and his mistress to have a slow and absorbing relationship but there simply isn¹t enough

Love makes people become selfish, but it is also makes the world greater. In this poem, the world that the speaker lives and loves is not limited in “my North, my South, my East and West / my working week and my Sunday rest” (9-10), it spreads to “My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song (11). The poem’s imagery dominates most of the third stanza giving readers an image of a peaceful world in which everything is in order. However, the last sentence of the stanza is the decisive element. This element not only destroys the inner world of the speaker, but it also sends out the message that love or life is mortal.