The poem "Clocks and Lovers" by W. H. Auden’s contrasts the idea of whether or not love will outlast time. Initially, the poem portrays a lover affirming the belief that love will triumph over time. The poem transitions and depicts the clocks' argument that due to time, love will eventually fade away. The narrator contrasts the two arguments with usage of imagery, personification, tone and diction. The argument that love will prevail over time is contrasted by the belief that as time goes by, time can never be stopped and love will not last. Overall, neither belief is represented as correct because the narrator contrasts the two opposing arguments by displaying that two arguments are incompatible. In regards to their following arguments, time is not as malicious or arduous to love but love is not impervious to time. Beginning early in the poem and used heavily throughout, imagery and personification are utilized to exemplify the lovers' argument. The belief that love is never ending is created through never ending connotations, "I'll love you, dear, I'll love you Till China and Africa meet, and the river jumps over the mountain and the salmon sing in the street." The lover uses images of the impossible such as fish singing, the laws of physics breaking, and distant continents meeting. This strengthens the original belief that love is eternal and superior to time itself. These tasks are nearly impossible and the idea of love one day ending is equated with them.
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.
W.H. Auden and Bruce Dawe, in their respective poems ‘Stop All The Clocks’ and ‘Suburban Lovers’, depict two different reactions to love. Auden’s use of an A, A, B, B, rhyme scheme creates rhythm through each of his 4 stanaz. Contrastingly, Dawe uses syllabic rhythm such as “on the fleet diesel that interprets them, like music on a roller-piano as they move, over the rhythmic rails”. Dawe also uses alliteration to create this similar pattern such as “breeze blowing”, “cliff of kissing” and “sandstone sustaining”. Both of these techniques create tone within each poem allowing the reader to reflect the mood of each poem. Auden’s rhyme scheme portrays a tone of sadness and grief in its simple structure and Dawe reflecting a tone of joy and longing
Throughout “Love Should Grow up Like a Wild Iris in the Fields” Susan Griffin provokes her readers to ponder why they consistently enslave themselves with the burden of daily monotony, instead of enjoying the simplicity of love. Griffin uses two metaphors in her poem when describing love, as a flower, as well as the iris of an eye. Her comparisons are as compelling as they are forthright. Using her comparisons, Griffin describes love as predictable, expected and routine. Realistically, love most resembles the iris of an eye, rather than a beautiful flower in the field. Throughout her poem, Griffin makes a concise correlation between love and both irises.
The overzealous beliefs brought about by love can be seen in the attitude of the lover, who acts as though his love will never die and can never be changed by time. When speaking to his lover, he says “I’ll love you, dear, I’ll love you / Till China and Africa meet / And the river jumps over the mountain / And the salmon sing in the street.” The last three lines of this stanza are hyperboles, giving the lover emphasis on how his love will die only when the absolutely impossible happens; therefore, he believes it is impossible for his love to die. In this stanza imagery is the upfront literary device, as is seen when Auden uses strong phrases such as “salmon sing” and “river jumps” to create an image of the impossible occurring to add to the unrealistic attitude of the lover. Impossible events continue to occur when the lover says “I’ll love you till the ocean /
It comes as no surprise that love poems are not a rare commodity. Whether they’re about a lovesick man pining for his soul mate or a general reflection about how one perceives love, these poems offer an analysis of one of the most innate desires of our human nature. Despite inevitable differences in writing style and point of view, there can be times where love poems employ similar strategies to tackle such an analysis. John Keats’ “La Belle Dame Sans Merci” and T. S. Eliot’s “The Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock” are no exception to this occurrence. Both poems use two different and
He we see that the poet is making an allusion to the human heart as a ship that is guided through life by love in the same way as stars guide the sailor through the sea. Next, the speaker tells us more of the awesome power of love when he says “Whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken” (8). We can see that he is telling us that the measure of man cannot quantify the potential power of the love within him, and though he may be small in stature, in his capacity to love he towers to the heavens. An important point is also made here that love is cosmic. It is a star and so, it is extraterrestrial. It is not bound within the earth, but the within the universe. To us, it seems a small thing, but we are all in its shadow. This immensity becomes ever more pronounced in line nine when the poet says “Love's not Time's fool” (9). Here he is saying that love rivals time in its power to continue into eternity. It feels like time may be jealous of love’s relentless march. Time has power over life and death, but as we see in line ten, with the phrase “Within his bending sickle's compass come” (10) love has the power to traverse the chasm of time’s passage. It endures even after the reaper has claimed the life of the one we love. The poet continues to elaborate on this timelessness of love when in line eleven he says “Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks” (11). This shows us that
From what I understood about this poem the speaker wishes that there was more time to love and appreciate his love interest. The theme I picked up was racing against time and seizing the day because throughout the poem he mentions time being this intangible object interfering with his infatuation with his lover. In the first stanza the author uses deep symbolism that upon further inspection describes his mentality, he compares coyness to a crime because there is not enough time to be shy, humans are limited to their short tie on earth. Other symbols include the speaker referencing the great flood and Noah ark, the end times and time’s winged chariot. I really liked this poem because of its complexity and use of symbols, it’s a tough read and
The young man holds the value of beauty over that of love. When he comes to face the fact that the love he felt has changed and become less intense and, in fact, less felt, he changes his mind about this person he’d loved before because what he had felt in his heart wasn’t true. That the object of his affection’s beauty fell to "Time’s Sickle" would not make his feelings change. This fact is supported by Helen Vendler as she wrote, "The second refutational passage, in the third quatrain, proposes indirectly a valuable alternative law, one approved by the poet-speaker, which we may label "the law of inverse constancy": the more inconstant are time’s alterations (one an hour, one a week), the more constant is love’s endurance, even to the edge
Relationships are complicated bonds that can instill many different emotions in the people involved. Our books explore a lot of these emotions, but one common theme that is present in two short stories and one poem, is the overwhelming emotion of love and how it causes blindness to flaws in relationships. In each of the stories, the loss of a spouse or significant other leads to an internal debate of whether the end of the relationship was for the better or worse. In “The Story of an Hour,” the internal conflict is on the topic of whether or not the main character should be happy about her husband’s death. In “The Jewelry,” the main character’s wife dies and he discovers that she was unfaithful.
The speaker believes the love would last forever, until he realized that love, like everything else, can come to an
No one and nothing will ever vanish their love. Another example of symbolism is when the narrator mentions, “the Ring,” (line 10). The narrator is trying to show the cycle of life, when mentioning, “the Ring,” during the whole poem. “Death takes the woman on a leisurely, late-afternoon ride to the grave and beyond, passing playing children, wheat fields, and the setting sun--all reminders of the cyclical nature of human life,” (Marie Rose Napierkowski and Mary Ruby 2). Marie and Mary also agree about the circle of life that was mentioned throughout the poem with the two love birds, the narrator and Death.
"To My Dear and Loving Husband" is one big love fest. It's not just about any old kind of love though. I'm talking about an unconditional, undying love. Basically, it's so romantic it's almost cheesy. The speaker spends the majority of the poem coming up with ways to describe the love she has for her husband, which is so incredibly strong that not even a river can "quench it". I feel like the quote above is central to this poem because it shows the love between the speaker and her husband. The husband loves his wife so much, she doesn't know how she will ever be able to repay him. At the end of the poem, the speaker suggests that the love her and her husband share is so strong and powerful it can somehow give them immortality. Now that's what
Finally, the speaker compares himself to the glowing remnants of a fire, which lies on the ashes of the logs that once enabled it to burn. In contrast, the love between the speaker and his beloved remains strong even though he may not live long. Here the speaker employs another kind of figurative language, the paradox, to emphasize that their love, unlike the fire, is unalterable and everlasting.
The next two lines, “Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks, / But bears it out even to the edge of doom” is an allusion to love standing its ground even in the wake of Doomsday. This quatrain effectively illustrates love as a thing that endures all hardship; reinforcing the extended metaphor of the previous quatrain.
Although the physical structure of the poem is similar to that of other poems (a series of couplets, with a single closing line), Alexander conveys meaning in an organizational pattern so that it mirrors that of a persuasive argument. Her poem is built around a thesis stated at the beginning, with explanation given in the body. However, the structure becomes most obvious during the shift, “Poetry… is not all love, love, love,” where she challenges the stereotypes surrounding poetry—effectively addressing the equivalent to the counter argument. The poem closes with a restatement of the original thesis, “Poetry… is the human voice,” and allows Alexander to convey a sense of completeness in her poem, giving her ideas a concomitant sense of credibility. Through the assiduous formation of her ideas, Alexander builds upon the explanation provided through metaphors, giving strength to her statements rather than adding more