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Wendy Cope

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Looking for Someone to Love

Love is a basic human need that everyone encounters at least once, if not more, in his or her lifetime. There are different means to look for a future lover, whether it is through the Internet, or meeting someone coincidentally at a restaurant. Then there is also the idea of writing a personal ad in newspapers describing exactly what you seek for in a relationship. In Wendy Cope’s villanelle “Lonely Hearts,” there are individuals who have written ads describing themselves, as well as what they want in the other person. In Cope’s poem there is the use of tone, repetition, and rhyme that work together in order to illustrate the lonesome and desperate people who rely on newspaper ads to find love. The …show more content…

The speaker feels sadness and wants to find friendship in someone who is below the age of twenty-one and does not smoke, but in adding the rhyme, the speaker’s gloominess is accentuated. “Please write (with photo) to Box 152/Who knows where it may lead once we’ve begun?/Can someone make my simple wish come true?” (16-18) displays the speaker’s longing for a human bond. This desire to find a relationship is so immense that the speaker has even asked for a picture of the reader of the ad to be sent to them. The number “152” rhymes with the word “true.” In doing this, the reader’s attention is drawn to the words being said because rhymes attract readers to continue reading. These last few lines of the poem give hope to being able to find someone to love through a personal ad. In conclusion, Wendy Cope’s villanelle has an obvious intent in demonstrating how the speakers in the poem are distressed in finding a companion, that they have gone as low as having to write a personal ad in a newspaper. Without love, there is loneliness and sadness, and in the poem, the different speakers show how gloomy they are without a significant other. Through the use of tone, repetition, and rhyme scheme, Wendy Cope reveals her argument that the speakers find themselves lost and isolated because they do not have any relationship with another human being,

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