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Modern Love In David Lehman's When A Woman Loves A Man

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While a cliche of love poetry is for it to be enchanting and fantasy-like, modern romance could be anything but romantic in a world of post 9-11 stresses. In David Lehman’s “When a Woman Loves a Man,” he expresses his own experiences with modern love. These experiences shared display not only the ups and downs of love, but the falling into of complete and unconditional love. Through the vividly depicted tellings provided by Lehman, it displays the progression and development of one modern couples maturing relationship through multiple episodes that take course throughout their time together. In addition, by investigating these episodes, it is arguable that this poem is about a man learning to love a moody woman. Looking at the poem as a whole, it lacks rhyme scheme and a regular stanza structure. However, by Lehman omitting a rhyme scheme, it is considerably more appropriate regarding the raw, thick and thin series of events that take place for the man and the woman of the poem. If the poet had decided to include rhyme, it may have risked adding a “cutesy”, sing-songey-ness, to the poem, which could have taken away from the exposed honesty of modern love. In addition, Lehman presented this work using mainly modern and casual diction, making it seem more realistic and conversational for the audience to read. This works for the poem because by the end of the poem the reader feels familiar with the poem’s characters, being that they went through these scenarios with them. As

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