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What Is The Theme Of Love

Decent Essays

The theme of Love is complexed and varied: How is the theme of love portrayed respectively in ‘My last duchess’ by Robert Browning, ‘Mother in a Refugee Camp’ by Chinua Achebe, ‘Sonnet 116’ by Shakespeare, ‘Catrin’ by Gillian Clarke, ‘Sonnet 130’ by Shakespeare and ‘Le Belle Dame Sans Merci’ by John Keats?

Love is a mixed emotion of happiness and sadness that no one can avoid. These poems explore love in three different ways, obsessive love, motherly love and unconditional romantic love. The three poets uses a wide range of literary devices and language techniques to convey the theme of and to challenge the readers mind in what love it.

‘My Last Duchess’ by Robert Browning is set in the Late Italian Renaissance. Browning’s inspiration for ‘My Last Duchess was from a Renaissance duke, Alfonso II of Ferrara, whose wife, Lucrezia died in 1561 at age 17. Although Lucrezia came from a powerful and wealthy family, she never had a chance to enjoy her status as a duchess since she married Alfonso II at age 14, 3 years before her death. After her tragic death, Alfonso …show more content…

Although they both consist the same theme, the love is expressed in two different ways. ‘Catrin’ is an intensely personal poem, illustrating an argument about whether her daughter can stay outside in the dark skating for ‘one more hour’. As Clarke mentions in the poem that there is always a ‘tight red rope of love’ that ties them together, despite their differences, which brings them even closer. In contrast, Achebe describes a mother in a refugee camp, that under no circumstances will she stop unconditionally love and care for her dying child, even when everyone around her has given up. Both these poems express that even how hard and challenging it is to be a mother, and how many differences there are, love will always exist between a mother and a child

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