Ode To A Grecian Urn, And The Lady Of Shallot

True love’s path is paved with every step. Through the assistance of fanciful elements as well as characters Puck and Oberon, the true message of love in William Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream is revealed. The four lovers know the direction in which their hearts are inclined to turn, but when the love potion is administered, the bounds of their rectangle are thrashed without knowledge or consent. The rapid shifts in affection between the play’s “four lovers” is representative of the idea that love isn’t a conscious choice, but a cruel game in which we are the figurines, being controlled by whomever the player may be, relating the characters’ karmic fates.

The similarities between the poems lie in their abilities to utilize imagery as a means to enhance the concept of the fleeting nature that life ultimately has and to also help further elaborate the speaker’s opinion towards their own situation. In Keats’ poem, dark and imaginative images are used to help match with the speaker’s belief that both love and death arise from fate itself. Here, Keats describes the beauty and mystery of love with images of “shadows” and “huge cloudy symbols of a high romance” to illustrate his belief that love comes from fate, and that he is sad to miss out on such an opportunity when it comes time for his own death.

Throughout this lay, there is a sense of hope in the author's tone, almost good-natured and kind hearted. She also sets a series of sorrowful tones that creates an atmosphere for the troubles the lovers have gone through to be in the presence of each other. However, the majority of the story is the happiness and joy from the lovers finally being with one another. Toward the

| |of forbidden love and the quest to keep it alive. The reader seems to |

“Love is heavy and light, bright and dark, hot and cold, sick and healthy, asleep and awake- it’s everything except what it is”(I.i.165). Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet is a tragedy about two star-crossed lovers going against their families. Along the way of their wondrous tale, we cross the paths of tears, true love, and death beyond compair. In Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet Benvolio and Friar Lawerence should be pardoned and Lord Capulet should be punished for Romeo and Juliet’s deaths.

Love always seems to find a place in someone’s heart not by choice but by admiration. One who admires another appears to feel something towards the person they are admiring and that feeling they have can lead into the feeling of love. Despite all of Love’s joy and excitement, Gottfried Von Strassburg’s Tristan and Thomas’ Tristan, reveals the way love overwhelms a person and the outcomes that happen when two lovers cannot be near or without each other. Love’s overwhelming feeling often associates with death, in that those in love are so consumed with emotion and the desire to be with their beloved that it can lead to their downfall. Even though the loves of Rivalin and Blancheflor and Tristan and Isolde/Ysolt are similar in ways, they also are different.

Love is such an abstract and intangible thing, yet it is something that everyone longs for. In Shakespeare’s play A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the difficulty of love is explored through the obstacles that characters have to face while pursuing their loved ones. Those characters that are in love in the play were conflicted with troubles; however, the obstacles of love do not seem to stop them from being infatuated with each other. The concept of true love is examined throughout this play. By creating obstacles using authority and a higher power, Shakespeare examines the power of love. Through Hermia and Lysander’s loving words, it is reasonable to conclude that love conquers all if you believe in it.

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:

Out of all the characters in the play Thomasina is perhaps the most beautiful. She is innocent, driven by academic zeal, and a genius of epic proportions. What is truly the most beautiful trait about her is that unlike Mrs. Chater and Lady Croom, it is “an insult in a gazebo,” (6) that she desires but true love. The final waltz that Septimus and Thomasina share could not be any more romantic as “Septimus holding Thomasina, kisses her on the mouth. The waltz lesson pauses. She looks at him. He kisses her again, in earnest. She puts her arms around him.” (95) The affection the two feel for each other is a huge part of any person’s definition of paradise: two people truly in love with each other uncorrupted by the society around them. Yet even in this seemingly paradisiacal situation, Thomasina still tragically dies.

Some would say that some of the greatest works of love literature of all time were written during the Renaissance era; passages and the truest forms of love. Two poets that stood out to me that claimed that they had captured the true essence of love in their poems were William Shakespeare and John Donne. While Donne and Shakespeare wrote many poems, and works on the subject of love the two that seem to capture the quintessential and transcendental love that was often described in this era are The Sun Rising by John Donne, and chapter three, act five from Romeo and Juliet by William Shakespeare, also known as Romeo and Juliet’s Dawn Song. While Romeo and Juliet’s dialogue is similar to The Sun

“The course of true love never did run smooth,” comments Lysander of love’s complications in an exchange with Hermia (Shakespeare I.i.136). Although the play A Midsummer Night’s Dream certainly deals with the difficulty of romance, it is not considered a true love story like Romeo and Juliet. Shakespeare, as he unfolds the story, intentionally distances the audience from the emotions of the characters so he can caricature the anguish and burdens endured by the lovers. Through his masterful use of figurative language, Shakespeare examines the theme of the capricious and irrational nature of love.

For this anthology about love I have chosen, and mainly centred around the topic of love that is forbidden. With this type of love, comes many struggles and questions that I’m sure must go through the minds of people in this situation. This is what happens with Romeo and Juliet in the Play written by William Shakespeare in 1591. It will be a romance that will strongly challenge them, but as we see it will not break the bond of love they have for each other. In this task I will try to describe the pain, happiness, frustration, forgiveness, anger, and joy through a collection of shorts texts that come with the topic of persecuted, and forbidden love.

The time periods that each text is set in varies and it is therefore interesting to note that this does not change the fundamentals, we are prepared to make sacrifices for love. All the characters were forced by restrictions of the time to make difficult decisions and in these cases they were willing to give their lives, either physically or emotionally, for their love. It shows the extremity of love, that it is worth more to these literary

becoming any worse in the future since “a thing of beauty is a joy for

The twenty-four old romantic poet John Keats, “Ode on a Grecian Urn” written in the spring of 1819 was one of his last of six odes. That he ever wrote for he died of tuberculosis a year later. Although, his time as a poet was short he was an essential part of The Romantic period (1789-1832). His groundbreaking poetry created a paradigm shift in the way poetry was composed and comprehended. Indeed, the Romantic period provided a shift from reason to belief in the senses and intuition. “Keats’s poem is able to address some of the most common assumptions and valorizations in the study of Romantic poetry, such as the opposition between “organic culture” and the alienation of modernity”. (O’Rourke, 53) The irony of Keats’s Urn is he likens