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Poetry Analysis Between Taylor Swift and William Blake

Decent Essays

‘What connections did you find between poems studied this year and what links can you make between the world of your poets and your world?’
Love and the breakdown of love or relationships is a theme explored in many poems. The songs Long Live by Taylor Swift and the poems The Sick Rose and The Garden of Love by William Blake all question and explore the theme of love.
The song, Long Live, by Taylor Swift, was written in 2010. At first listening to the song, we hear a fun, buoyant song about love, friendship and loss. However, careful analysis reveals a complex piece of poetry that relies on its strong imagery and upbeat tune to convey strong meaning to the audience. Essentially, the song is about love or friendship and the loss of it. …show more content…

The Garden of Love also follows a strict rhyme scheme of ‘ABCB’;
‘I went to the Garden of Love,
And saw what I never had seen:
A Chapel was built in the midst,
Where I used to play on the green’
The last stanza however, does not follow this rhyme scheme. Instead Blake uses internal rhyme in the last line with the words ‘briers’ and ‘desires’;
‘And binding with briers my joys and desires’
The three pieces of poetry are all connected through their meaning of the loss of something. Unlike Blake, Swift sings about the loss of love in as experiential. Instead of looking at the breakdown of the relationship in a depressed manner, she instead sings about it in a cheerful way about the positive things that happened throughout the relationship. Swift and Blake both use the technique of sight rhyme in their poems. Swift uses it with the words ‘mind’ and ‘wild’ and Blake with ‘storm’ and ‘worm’ in The Sick Rose and ‘love’ and ‘bore’ in The Garden of Love.
Even though Taylor Swift and William Blake lived centuries apart, they both talked about loss in similar ways. Both poets use strong rhythms and images to convey the message of the poems. Above all else, the three poems are connected through their meaning of loss which is a part of life everyone experiences.
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