The Metaphysical And Victorian Concept Of Love Essay

One of Andrew Marvell’s techniques was metaphysical poetry, e.g. ‘vegetable love should grow’ and things contrasting between the physical and spiritual.

Shakespeare examines love in two different ways in Sonnets 116 and 130. In the first, love is treated in its most ideal form as an uncompromising force (indeed, as the greatest force in the universe); in the latter sonnet, Shakespeare treats love from a more practical aspect: it is viewed simply and realistically without ornament. Yet both sonnets are justifiable in and of themselves, for neither misrepresents love or speaks of it slightingly. Indeed, Shakespeare illustrates two qualities of love in the two sonnets: its potential and its objectivity. This paper will compare and contrast the two sonnets by Shakespeare and show how they represent two different attitudes to love.

William Shakespeare’s “Sonnet 116” and Edna St. Vincent Millay’s “Love Is Not All” both attempt to define love, by telling what love is and what it is not. Shakespeare’s sonnet praises love and speaks of love in its most ideal form, while Millay’s poem begins by giving the impression that the speaker feels that love is not all, but during the unfolding of the poem we find the ironic truth that love is all. Shakespeare, on the other hand, depicts love as perfect and necessary from the beginning to the end of his poem. Although these two authors have taken two completely different approaches, both have worked to show the importance of love and to define it. However, Shakespeare is most confident of his definition of love, while Millay seems

“Sonnet 116” written by William Shakespeare is focusing on the strength and true power of love. Love is a feeling that sustainable to alterations, that take place at certain points in life, and love is even stronger than a breakup because separation cannot eliminate feelings. The writer makes use of metaphors expressing love as a feeling of mind not just heart as young readers may see it. To Shakespeare love is an immortal felling that is similar to a mark on a person’s life.

Within sonnet 116, Shakespeare personifies the abstract noun of love when he states ‘Whose worth’s unknown’. Through personifying his ideology of true love, it makes it increasingly

Poets have written love poems for centuries with the first said to be around 1000BC. But what is love? It is defined by the Oxford English Dictionary as ‘ to have attachment to and affection for’. However, after studying various love poems, I have found that love is portrayed in many different ways. It can be possessive, hateful and pure and the fact that William Shakespeare said ‘The course of true love never did run smooth’ suggests that love is more complicated than a simple dictionary definition.

Teacher and classmates, A few weeks ago, I questioned Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet wondering why, why is this literature still prominent in today's society? The foreign tongue it is written in, the seemingly basic and boring plot and the lack of action all combined being regarded as one of man’s greatest achievements didn't quite equate. However through my studies of the question, How effectively does Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet shape our notion of love, I realised. Throughout the text lies defining moments of romantic, fickle and fraternal love and the complexity of the text allows for both interpretation while maintaining relatability. However our perception of love, the strong feeling of affection, has differed immensely since 1595. Romeo and Juliet, a story over four centuries old is the foundation of love and romance throughout history.

He wrote other masterpiece’s such as Hamlet and Julius Caesar. However he is most famously known for writing the love story of Romeo and Juliet. This story is about a young man that falls in love with a beautiful girl but, they can not be together because there families are enemies. They go throughout many trials to try to make their love prevail but in the end they both end up committing suicide. The text “Love’s Vocabulary” is an essay about the meaning of the word love.

Love means that one has to care for another person’s happiness more than their own, no matter how painful the choices one faces must be. It becomes a strong and emotional attachment that focuses on the heart and mind while simultaneously is a promise and the simplest way to be happy. In Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, William Shakespeare’s Othello, and Philip Sidney’s “Astrophil and Stella Sonnet 31”, certain characters have a distorted view on love as it is dominant and holds a heavy weight on the formation of relationships. A simple four letter word can be very influential when creating a basis of emotional availability.

The representation of love is greatly influenced by the values of the context given by the composer allowing the same concept to be viewed and treated in a completely differently. This is shown in Scott Fitzgerald's novel ‘The Great Gatsby’ and Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s poems ‘Sonnets from the Portuguese’. Both these texts are characterised by their time period, Gatsby is set during the ‘Roaring Twenties’ shaped by materialism, decadence and the american dream meanwhile EBB is set in the victorian era influenced by romanticism, enlightenment values, courtly love and petrarchan conventions. This contrast of values due to context gives a completely different representation of love in each text. PARAGRAPH 1: IDEALISED LOVE IN GATSBY; LOVE

Love, as we know, is a mystifying emotion. Even Sophocles, one of the three Greek tragedians whose plays have survived, stated: “One word frees us of all the weight and pain of life: That word is love”. As these four simple letters come together, everything else in the world is forgotten. This complicated emotion is held responsible for starting as many battles as it has ended and overall creating the world’s strongest bonds. Yet, what is love? The Oxford dictionary defines love as a strong feeling of affection but in the end, there are millions of ways that each individual defines love according to their experiences. One individual in particular is Shakespeare, who is widely known for expressing the significance of love in various plays of his, as he portrays several branches of love such as friendship, parental love, and romantic love. In Much Ado about Nothing, Shakespeare demonstrates the ways in which Claudio and Hero’s love shows the triumph of imagination over intelligence compared to Benedick and Beatrice’s love which also shows the triumph of imagination over intelligence throughout the beginning but slowly progresses into intelligence over imagination towards the end. Claudio and Hero’s love revolves around imagination over intelligence as a result of their sudden romance while Benedick and Beatrice’s love revolves around intelligence over imagination because of the true love that they express towards each other.

What is love? Love is the way you feel towards someone. In this case the poets William Shakespeare and Edna Millay talk about love in their own manner. In Shakespeare’s poem he compares the beauty of summer”s day to the beauty of a women. Edna Millay explains how love is not perfect and not to give up love for anything else. The two poets are illustrating a theme of love within the literary similarties and differences of the two poems.

Is true love an unattainable ideal? Do we all have a soul mate? Is love just an exchange of lies for the purpose of flattery? These questions, and countless others, regarding love have been pondered by philosophers and pop music stars alike for hundreds of years. William Shakespeare examines these questions from two vantage points in “Sonnet 116” and “Sonnet 138.” Firstly, in “Sonnet 116”, Shakespeare analyzes love in a rhetorical manner, meaning that he is not discussing a specific relationship of his, but theorizing on the concept of love as a whole, in abstract terms. Conversely, in “Sonnet 138”, Shakespeare analyzes love in a specific manner. He looks inward to inspect a relationship between him and a woman, also known as The Dark Lady, and paints a much different picture of love than in “Sonnet 116”, in specific terms. In William Shakespeare’s “Sonnet 116” and “Sonnet 138”, Shakespeare analyzes love in abstract and specific terms; concluding that abstract love relies on affection, does not change or age, and is built upon a solid foundation of truth, while specific love, on the other hand, relies on lust, actively ignores change and aging, and revolves around deception. These two sonnets paint entirely adverse portraits of love in order to emphasize the dichotomy between the poet’s expectations of love, and the reality which does not live up to the poet’s expectations.

A prominent playwright known for his romantic productions is William Shakespeare. It is evident that the topic of love is brought up many times in Romeo and Juliet. In Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, love is presented as an aggressive force that overpowers all other values and desires. This can be compared to the idea that love is very powerful in Diane Ackerman’s “Love’s Vocabulary”, and contrasted to the idea that love is gentle in I Corinthians 13:4-8. Shakespeare’s idea of love is similar to

Shakespeare, who wrote the sonnets in 1609, expresses his own feelings through his greatest work of literature. The theme of love in the poems reflect thoughts from the Renaissance period. Love is one of many components of Shakespeare’s life shown in the sonnets. Love can be defined in many ways other than a strong affection for a lover. In Shakespeare’s sonnets, the concept of love can be seen through many uncommon means such as the love of life before death in “Sonnet 73,” love in marriage in “Sonnet 116,” love through sexual desire in “Sonnet 129,” and love through nature in “Sonnet 130,” proving that love can be expressed through many different feelings and emotions.