Deceived
In John Keats “La Belle Dame sans Merci,” the speaker express his love for this fairy woman where he explains, “I met a lady in the meads, Full beautiful—a faery’s child,” (13,14). But he was “Lured” (33), to sleep with the woman who he thought once loved him and as she said, “I love the true” (28). Why then if she “love thee” does he feel the darkness of “horrid warning gapèd”? Was it all just a dream? Or reality?
Firstly, the speaker as I assume is a man because he is talking about a lady he met which he called her a“faery’s child,” (14). As he said in the poem he was, “ Alone and palely loitering” (Keats, 2), That certain stanza made me pictured a man alone with no sense of direction no sense of love. Lonesome. But they never went into much detail on what he was doing or where he came from. Moving on, just from a few lines into the poem the speaker’s tone was coming off as melancholy. I got the melancholy tone because the speaker seemed very sad and gloomy with phrases as, “O what can ail thee” (1) almost sound like a cry for help or just a cry out of last hope. He then goes on to say “I met a lady in the meads,” ( 13 ), as stated previously but, this is when the poem turns from melancholy and alone to happy and almost hopeful.
Continuing on, in this poem the speaker became infatuated with this lady. As he said, “ I made a garland for her head, And bracelets too, and fragrant zone;” (17,18 ) he begins to fall for her and starts to be very taken with her
The tone of this poem is a mixture of emotions. She seems to enjoy being in his company, although the stories he shares break her heart. She expresses her conflicting feeling when she states the following:
Firstly, the speaker’s attitude or the tone demonstrates how a person can be the cause of their own misery. From the very start of the poem the speaker has a depressing tone. Any little event that occurs the speaker reads it as a negative occurrence that adds to his ever growing misery. For Example, when the speaker says “Deep into that darkness peering, long I stood there wondering, fearing, Doubting, dreaming dreams no mortal ever dared to dream before.” The speaker hears a knock on the door and opens it to see that there is no one there. Instead of going back to sleep he demonstrates his negative attitude by
Within “A Certain Lady” the main theme presented to the reader is that love can often be a one way road, ending in heartbreak and loss of emotion. Throughout the poem the speaker experiences many events within he life, between her and her husband, that help to exemplify the theme. The first example present to the reader is on line three. Her the speaker states, “And paint my mouth for you a fragrant red,” showing the reader how she would dress up for her husband, despite never needing to. However, further ahead in the poem the speaker is met by the apparent lack of effort exerted from the husband, going so far as to rehearse and recite the list of things he has already stated he loves about her rather than being genuine. In line ten the speaker states, “That I am gay as morning, light as snow,” in regards to how she behaves for her husband. This quote shows that she maintains a perfect body image, as well as, a pleasant attitude in order to please her husband. Regardless of her efforts, the speaker is forced to listen to her husband talk about other women that he has come across in his travels rather than talk about her. This can be seen on lines fourteen and fifteen, “And you bring tales or fresh adventurings -- Of
The poem then transitions to the post-marriage life of the couple in stanza two. In lines eight through ten, the speaker states that she is too shy around her husband. Not only does she not smile, but also she does not answer her husband when he calls her. This shows that the speaker's life took a great emotional transition, as she is overly shy and feels uncomfortable around him. However, around the middle of the second stanza, the speaker transitions into another stage of
Love is not always an easy adventure to take part in. As a result, thousands of poems and sonnets have been written about love bonds that are either praised and happily blessed or love bonds that undergo struggle and pain to cling on to their forbidden love. Gwendolyn Brooks sonnet "A Lovely Love," explores the emotions and thoughts between two lovers who are striving for their natural human right to love while delicately revealing society 's crime in vilifying a couples right to love. Gwendolyn Brooks uses several examples of imagery and metaphors to convey a dark and hopeless mood that emphasizes the hardships that the two lovers must endure to prevail their love that society has condemned.
“looked like the love thoughts of women. He could be a bee to a blossom - a pear tree blossom in the spring. He seemed to be crushing scent out of the world with his footsteps. Crushing aromatic herbs with every step he took. Spices hung about him.
“The courtly lady…possesses a curiously hybrid gender. While maintaining stereotypically female sexuality, she also holds, in principle at least, the status of a feudal lord.” Burns’ statement insinuates a reversal of power dynamics between man and woman in the courtly love lyric, implying that the woman’s stereotypical beauty and sexuality in courtship, is a gateway to subverting and overpowering the lovesick male, making her a superior lord. The Amour Courtois lyric is deemed inconsistent with the representation of woman as an empowered “feudal lord” due to the sheer objectification of femininity and beauty. Poets such as Geoffrey Chaucer and William Dunbar commend a woman’s aesthetic appeal or satirise the lack of it, thus elevating medieval misogynistic expectations of physical beauty as a feminine necessity that objectifies women under the control of man’s advances. Throughout courtly love lyrics female beauty is a purely frivolous and superficial trait lacking predominant depth, to render woman as a “lord” would be poetically conflicting as the only power exemplified by female subjects in courtship is through the idolisation and sexual lust of the male devotee.
Beauty and the Beast is a “Tale as old as time” or at least as old as 1740 which is when the first publication appeared (De Villeneuve). The original author, Gabrielle-Suzanne Barbot de Villeneuve, wrote 362 pages which Jeanne- Marie Leprince de Beaumont later abridged (De Villeneuve). Countless people know the general story of Beauty and the Beast: A beautiful girl saves her father by becoming a prisoner in an enchanted castle. She and the master, a hideous beast, become acquainted. The beast wants the girl to be content, even when her request is to leave, so he lets her go. When the girl returns, the beast is in grave danger. Tearfully the girl confesses her love for the beast, and he transforms into a handsome prince.
The attitude of heartbreak and betrayal of the speaker caused by the woman is used to contrast the connotations of the words chosen to build on the irony. He describes the situation as "trustless"(6) and "grievous"(11) due to the anguish this woman causes. The speaker employs such words to make clear the influence that she has over his emotional state. The undertone of the poem, created by rhetoric, is pessimistic as well as resentful which contributes to the speaker's attitude towards the woman. The negative emotions of the how he feels contrasts to the emotions that this woman causes by describing "the gleams which on your face do grow" (4) and her "blazing eyes"(14). Through the use of positively connotated rhetoric when describing the physical beauty of the woman, the attitude of the speaker is established to indicate his conflicting mental state. The speaker creates images through the use of emotionally charged words to compare himself and how he feels about the woman to visual images of his
The reader begins to wonder if it is actually just the man she is afraid to be in love with rather than the idea of love itself. According to her, the man sees her simply as a problem that he can solve with his wits and charm, suggesting that he would not be interested in her once she has dissolved in the heat of his charm. Perhaps she is aware that this man might not be a good choice for her, yet she cannot control her feelings for him. However, in the following lines, she expresses her own incapacity to survive and be happy, bringing the reader back to the theme she started the poem with. Despite being blown away by his acts of kindness time after time, she finds herself beyond recovery and asks the man to reconsider his intentions since she is a problem he might never be able to solve. Therefore, the second stanza shows the grave nature of the poet's
In the first quatrain of the poem, the author communicates to the reader that he has two loves, one of which is “comfort” and “despair” (1). The word “comfort” shows that the person is loving while the word “despair” shows that the other person is not loving. The speaker’s first love is a man who is described as “better angel” and “right fair” (3). I think the speaker used the words “better angel” because it shows purity and he used the words “right fair” to describe how beautiful the man is. His second love is the opposite, she is described as “worser spirit” and “colored-ill” (4). I think the speaker used the words “worser spirit” because it shows the readers that the lady is evil and unpleasant, he also used “colored-ill” to describe the
The elegiac tone expressed in “The Wanderer” is that of loneliness and longing, and is recurring throughout the course of the poem. The main character’s apparent loneliness and longing is most evident when he wakes from his hope filled dreams which results in his “grief renewed” (line 44), because he always finds himself alone. However despite being alone, since the loss of his kin and lord to war, the wanderer cannot stop himself from hoping that he can one day find a place of belonging. This idea is referred in “the gift in the meadhall” (line 25) which in Anglo-Saxon times was a
not hear her recite this poem I can imagine in my own mind that her
In the second stanza, the speaker beholds a piper joyfully playing under the tress for his lover to find him with song. “Are sweeter; therefore, ye soft pipes, play on; not to the sensual ear, but, more endeared. The use of imagery of the senses is effective here. For I consider poetry to be more musical in nature than literary text. The speaker claims to be hearing melodies emanating from the urn, which for me the sound transmission from the urn correlates to the finite aspects of fleeting love. While the nature of art of the urn seems to me to represent the exquisiteness and infinity of the universe. Indeed, the sounds of silence from art is akin to vastness of space and time. “She cannot fade, though, thou hast not thy bliss,” (line19). Keats is asking the readers to not grieve for him. Because, her beauty will not diminish over time it is everlasting.
John Keats’s poem “La Belle Dame Sans Merci” dramatizes the conflict between dreams and reality as experienced by the knight. On a late autumn day, the speaker stumbles upon an ailing knight and asks what is wrong. The knight reveals that he had fallen in love with a beautiful lady, “a faery’s child” (14), who then abandoned him after professing her love and spending one night together. The speaker is recounting his experience with the knight to his audience.