The Importance Of Physical Beauty In The Renaissance Era

Shakespeare’s sonnet 130, “My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun” and Pablo Neruda’s “My ugly love” are popularly known to describe beauty in a way hardly anyone would write: through the truth. It’s a common fact that modern lovers and poets speak or write of their beloved with what they and the audience would like to hear, with kind and breathtaking words and verses. Yet, Shakespeare and Neruda, honest men as they both were, chose to write about what love truly is, it matters most what’s on the inside rather than the outside. The theme of true beauty and love are found through Shakespeare and Neruda’s uses of imagery, structure, and tone.

Ever since the beginning of time, love has played an enormous role among humans. Everyone feels a need to love and to be loved. Some attempt to fill this yearning with activities and possessions that will not satisfy – with activities in which they should not participate and possessions they should not own. In Andrew Marvell’s poem, “To His Coy Mistress,” the speaker encounters an emotion some would call love but fits better under the designation of lust for a woman. In contrast, the speaker of Robert Herrick’s poem, “To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time,” urges virgins to marry, to make a lasting commitment in which love plays a

The Human Condition is a big part of our understanding of literature, it can mean death, acceptance, judgment, and several other diverse things. It is about the positive or negative aspects of humans that everyone all universally deals with at least one time in one’s life. In the novel “The Great Gatsby”, written by F. Scott Fitzgerald, the short stories Raymond Carver’s “Everything Stuck to Him”, and Katherine Anne Porter’s “The Jilting of Granny Weatherall”, all have the most prominent human condition: love. Love is portrayed as society’s primary concern in literature, and is represented as a main concern in today’s society .

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.

Rossetti capitalizes on the appearance of a beautiful woman to address the vain pursuit of beauty in place of love. In the poem, Rossetti writes, “And one there sang who soft and smooth as snow / Bloomed like a tinted hyacinth at a show” (4-5). A graceful singer has always been considered an emblem of beauty to the world. In addition, fairer complexions, similar to the color of snow, characterize delicate and attractive women. Rossetti also uses the brilliant colors of hyacinth flowers to further describe the woman’s alluring nature. Because the woman has such an appealing appearance, she most likely attracts a lot of male attention, so it should not be surprising to readers that out of the three women, the beautiful one seeks love through marriage. Rossetti states, “one temperately / Grew gross in soulless love, a sluggish wife” (9-10). Since the man only married the woman for her beauty, he neglects her when she grows old and unattractive. The woman dwells in soulless love because the man’s love for her was only skin deep and did not involve her heart.

The acceptance of love has the power of transforming an individual to demand of that same love. The social context of the 1850’s was seen to be emphasised on individual’s emotions and rebellion against established social rules and convections which was evident in her open declarations of love and demanding’s of love which was a concept of idealised love. The notion of idealised love transforming an individual is presented in the ‘Sonnets from the Portuguese’. Sonnet 14 as Elizabeth Browning urges her lover to not love her for any particular reason other than “love’s sake only”. In the Octave, the first line is EBB talking directly to whom she loves and she uses high modality in the word ‘must’, making it seem like she

In the poem, “For That He Looked Not upon Her,” by George Gascoigne, the speaker longs for a woman who is dangerously tempting, yet trustless. This situation of forbidden desire develops an attitude of sorrow, regret, and longing of the man. The English sonnet’s quatrains, harsh and grievous diction, and strong visual and tactile imagery assist in developing his conflicting emotions which cause his complex attitude.

Throughout the sonnet, For That He Looked Not upon Her, George Gascoigne uses different literary devices to demonstrate the speaker’s caution of women as a past victim of a misleading love. This poem deals with the spirit of desire and that desire resulting in suffering. These literary devices help underline certain plots and the speaker’s response to them.

Wilde’s novel is an obvious evidence of the pervasiveness of main values of Victorian society. According to Wilde, “Aesthetic tendencies have to be taken with prudence and have reasonable limits that imply moral responsibility.” According to the critic Alex Ross, “ Wilde’s aestheticism, his fanatical cult of beauty, was the deepest and most lasting of his passions, and it is now the most radical about him” (Ross 2011).

Edna St. Vincent Millay’s “Sonnet IV” follows many of the conventions of the traditional Petrarchan sonnet. It follows the traditional rhyming scheme and octet, sestet structure. However it challenges the conventions of the typical subject of the Italian sonnet, unrequited love. In the octet at the beginning of the poem Millay uses images that give a sense of transience and in the ending sestet of the sonnet she contrasts the sense of impermanence given earlier with the idea that the speaker cannot forget the smiles and words of their ex-lover. This contrast between permanence and transience illustrates Millay’s interest in a fugacious relationship with everlasting memories. After further analysis of Millay’s highly structured rhyming scheme which puts emphasis on the last words of each line. She uses these words to further express her interest in exploring impermanent relationships by using words that are associated with an end or death.

I have decided to do my collage based on appearance during the renaissance and modern time to show how the two time periods connect and how they differ. The image of Kim Kardashian in a waist trainer and the renaissance corset, both were/are used to shape a female's body so that it looks like an hourglass. An hourglass body was considered more appealing to men. The next images that I will like to point out are the eyebrow images. One shows an image with thin eyebrows and the other one has thicker eyebrows. During the Renaissance, thin eyebrows seem to be considered more attractive, but now thick eyebrows are considered more attractive. The next comparison that I will be making is the image of a woman's face during the Renaissance and a bottle

     In the last verse of When you are Old, William Butler Yeats uses personification of love to enhance the image of the late lover waiting for the elderly woman. Lines 10-12 ?Murmur, a little sadly, how Love fled, and paced upon the mountains overhead and hid his face amid a crowd of stars? give personal qualities to love. By capitalizing love, it becomes its own being, which waits impatiently, hence pacing the mountain. Yeats gives love a face hidden in the stars. The ?face? is love?s distinguishing characteristics, such as tenderness and sensitivity.

This sonnet serves to invoke a strong sense of realism in love, arguing that as strong an intensity of emotion as may be held, may be held, without the need for delusions of grandeur, taking the view that trying to reconcile two essentially different and diverse things as equal is to do true justice to neither. The beloved in this case thus represents more the need for a character developed to challenge stereotype than an actual real-life woman,

The poem discusses this concept by going into some detail about the dense fragrance from the earth that lives darkly in his body. I believe the sonnet is expressing that this love is not visible to the world. In actuality, it is a feeling that lives in the depths of his soul. The poem states it is “hidden within itself the light of those flowers.” At this point in the text, the writer lingers and there is potential for an outward expression of love. However, it remains hidden. I believe these few lines are voicing his love leaves him isolated from the world, and no one can possibly comprehend its power.

During the Renaissance period, most poets were writing love poems about their lovers/mistresses. The poets of this time often compared love to high, unrealistic, and unattainable beauty. Shakespeare, in his sonnet 18, continues the tradition of his time by comparing the speakers' love/mistress to the summer time of the year. It is during this time of the year that the flowers and the nature that surround them are at there peak for beauty. The theme of the poem is to show the speakers true interpretation of beauty. Beauties worst enemy is time and although beauty might fade it can still live on through a person's memory or words of a poem. The speaker realizes that beauty, like the subject of the poem, will remain perfect not in the