Essay Writing about Love

Writing about Love

Love poems have always been very popular because love is one of the deepest emotions that people can feel and poetry is a good way to express such an emotion. When people think of love, they think of a typical romantic love but an exploration of pre-1914 love poetry shows other types of love such as unrequited love and obsessive love. The poems I will explore in depth are ‘To his Coy Mistress’ by Andrew
Marvin, ‘The Garden of Love’ by William Blake, and ‘How do I love thee’ by Elizabeth Barrett-Browning.

Blake’s poem ‘The Garden of Love’ is his view of being deceived by the perception of marriage. He has shown this by using the Chapel to symbolize marriage. When he gets there he finds ‘Thou shalt not’ …show more content…

Nesbit’s poem does not make use of he symbols that Blake uses which makes her poem easier to understand.

Andrew Marvell’s poem ‘To his Coy Mistress’ takes a more positive attitude towards love. Hid poem, like Blake’s, was written at a time of upheaval during the English Civil War and he was influenced by this. His poem is a ‘carpe diem’ poem which was fashionable because it told people to ‘seize the moment’ because they did not know what would happen next. The lines

‘But at my back I always hear

Times winged chariot hurrying near’

Show this because the poet is trying to get the woman to go to bed with him. At first he tells her that if they lived for eternity then he would wait, but they don’t so he tells her that if they wait too long his love might not last. He says

‘And your quaint Honour turn to dust;

And into ashes all my Lust.’

At the start of the poem the pace is slow, symbolizing how long he would wait for her love if they had all the time. But when he tells her they do not have time, the poem picks up pace. Andrew Marvell uses a lot of hyperbole, for example when he mentions that he would love her ten years before the Flood. It is obvious they were not alive at this time. Some of the language in the poem compares the woman to the river Ganges in India and himself to the English river Humber. This shows her as being exotic and shows that he was