Andrew Marvell’s “The Definition of Love” reflects on what love is to the speaker. He never reveals who the subject of his love may be but that fate should lead him there. There is no physical setting for this poem. From the beginning the reader gets the feeling that the speaker isn’t too positive about love. Then he discusses how fate is one of the main driving force that’s keeping him from getting to his lover. In stanza four he speaks about how perfect lovers can never met because of fate. Then if they should meet it would be in the heavens and stars. The last two stanzas go back to how they should never meet even if everything was prefect. The anonymous speaker speaks of how love is up to fate and hope. Sometimes fate doesn’t lead someone
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These stanzas are divided into four lines that have an iambic tetrameter. The pattern goes like ABAB CDCD. Each line has eight syllables. He uses this structure to illustrate how he feels towards love or how it works with fate. Marvell uses a rhyme pattern of the last word of each line rhymes with the last word of every other line. In his first stanza he uses the word rare to rhyme with the word despair in line three. It is like this throughout the whole poem. Each stanza introduces something different. Stanza one discusses how rare love is. Stanza two talks about if can impossible it is for him to see it. Stanza three speaks of Fate. While stanzas four and five discuss how Fate keeps love from happening. Then in his last three stanzas he for them to be together they would have to basically go through hell and high waters to get there. It seems like the stanzas are broken down like this to represent his thought process about what’s happening. He allows this structure to be used to discuss how fate plays a big part in love and how they seem to go hand and …show more content…
It shows that he was influence by some of the writers of his time. His use of literary elements help him make the poem flow and pull the reader into the poem. One other critic debates on wither he speaks of a platonic love or a declaration of love (Berthoff 16). He use several ways to say that the lover and he should never meet. He effectively explains how fate can keep two lovers away from each other. Even though his writing is a complex he wrote about an issue that people still go through in modern times. While other critics may see it differently than others. One wrote that “The Definition of Love” my read as a description of the difficulties of a homosexual love (Hall 433). This doesn’t take away from the greatness of the poem. It makes the reader wonder wither or not he wrote it for a male lover or female. The poem holds a deeper meaning then what meets the eye. The reader may think its talking about one thing in the first few stanzas. Then by the end the poem will have a whole different meaning. The poem leaves the reader wondering why Andrew Marvell titled the poem “The Definition of Love” when the poem doesn’t give a concrete definition to
These stanzas are divided into four lines that have an iambic tetrameter. The pattern goes like ABAB CDCD. Each line has eight syllables. He uses this structure to illustrate how he feels towards love or how it works with fate. Marvell uses a rhyme pattern of the last word of each line rhymes with the last word of every other line. In his first stanza he uses the word rare to rhyme with the word despair in line three. It is like this throughout the whole poem. Each stanza introduces something different. Stanza one discusses how rare love is. Stanza two talks about if can impossible it is for him to see it. Stanza three speaks of Fate. While stanzas four and five discuss how Fate keeps love from happening. Then in his last three stanzas he for them to be together they would have to basically go through hell and high waters to get there. It seems like the stanzas are broken down like this to represent his thought process about what’s happening. He allows this structure to be used to discuss how fate plays a big part in love and how they seem to go hand and …show more content…
It shows that he was influence by some of the writers of his time. His use of literary elements help him make the poem flow and pull the reader into the poem. One other critic debates on wither he speaks of a platonic love or a declaration of love (Berthoff 16). He use several ways to say that the lover and he should never meet. He effectively explains how fate can keep two lovers away from each other. Even though his writing is a complex he wrote about an issue that people still go through in modern times. While other critics may see it differently than others. One wrote that “The Definition of Love” my read as a description of the difficulties of a homosexual love (Hall 433). This doesn’t take away from the greatness of the poem. It makes the reader wonder wither or not he wrote it for a male lover or female. The poem holds a deeper meaning then what meets the eye. The reader may think its talking about one thing in the first few stanzas. Then by the end the poem will have a whole different meaning. The poem leaves the reader wondering why Andrew Marvell titled the poem “The Definition of Love” when the poem doesn’t give a concrete definition to