A Man’s Love Lady Mary Wroth’s “Song” illustrates her personal experience with love. Wroth relates the poem to her unhappy marriage with her husband, Robert Wroth. The couple did not have similar interests and eventually grew separate from each other. Wroth’s separation from her husband lead to her affair with William Herbert. Wroth incorporates her experiences with marriage and love into the poem by establishing a theme of caution. Wroth illustrates the theme of being careful with love in the poem “Song” through her use of extended metaphor, imagery, rhyme scheme, and other literary devices. In the first stanza love is personified as a child. The opening sentence describes love as a child who is “ever crying” (Line 1). Wroth denotes the
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She teases men’s virtues by comparing them to those of a young child that seeks joy in others “wailing” because they are “failing” (13-14). Wroth also addresses men’s competitive nature through imagery. Stanza five contains similes that compare men to animals. The first simile compares the feathers on an animal, such as a bird, to men’s love. In Wroth’s opinion, love is delicate and weak like a feather. If the love between a man and a woman is weak, she believes the man is not “as firm in staying” with the woman (17). In addition, the use of the work feathers can also mean fathers. This situation can be applied to a child as well to a couple. If a mother does not nurture and care for her crying child, it will eventually die. The second simile in the stanza compares men’s love to a wolf hunting its prey. While the appealing love is “fierce” and dangerous to a woman, the man will always hurt her. The use of the similes in stanza five illustrates the gentle manner of a man’s love, but also reveals the danger of keeping it. The final two lines of the poem repeat what is stated in the first two lines of the poem. However, in the end, Wroth tells the reader to not deal with love at all and “leave him [the child] crying,” because a man’s love is not worth keeping (19). Once again, Wroth demonstrates the theme to be cautious of the love of a man through the use of an extended metaphor, imagery, and rhyme scheme. She warns
She teases men’s virtues by comparing them to those of a young child that seeks joy in others “wailing” because they are “failing” (13-14). Wroth also addresses men’s competitive nature through imagery. Stanza five contains similes that compare men to animals. The first simile compares the feathers on an animal, such as a bird, to men’s love. In Wroth’s opinion, love is delicate and weak like a feather. If the love between a man and a woman is weak, she believes the man is not “as firm in staying” with the woman (17). In addition, the use of the work feathers can also mean fathers. This situation can be applied to a child as well to a couple. If a mother does not nurture and care for her crying child, it will eventually die. The second simile in the stanza compares men’s love to a wolf hunting its prey. While the appealing love is “fierce” and dangerous to a woman, the man will always hurt her. The use of the similes in stanza five illustrates the gentle manner of a man’s love, but also reveals the danger of keeping it. The final two lines of the poem repeat what is stated in the first two lines of the poem. However, in the end, Wroth tells the reader to not deal with love at all and “leave him [the child] crying,” because a man’s love is not worth keeping (19). Once again, Wroth demonstrates the theme to be cautious of the love of a man through the use of an extended metaphor, imagery, and rhyme scheme. She warns