Love is a strong and lasting affection between spouses or lovers who are in a happy, passionate and fulfilling relationship. It can also be an unbreakable bond sustained through all the ups and downs faced in life, an everlasting feeling. An unconditional form of the feeling is rare and is usually found between parent and child relationships. It is, without a doubt, the most discussed feeling in the world. The feeling has been the source of thoughts for many different poets since the beginning of time and has been portrayed in a variety of ways. Such distinctive portrayals of love consist of; the varying definitions of love; exploration of obsessive love; the depiction of unconditional love.
One distinction in the way poets portray love is …show more content…
Valentine’s day is meant to be a celebration of love, instead she implies that love should be a constant feeling and that it should be celebrated permanently instead of being assigned to a single day of the year. This serves as the only correlation between the ideology of the two poets. She begins with a short and abrupt sentence, “Not a red rose or a satin heart.” This line displays her refusal towards the typical gifts of valentine. Her strong refusal is evident as the mentioning of the two gifts are prefaced by a capitalised “Not”. The title ‘Valentine’ carries a plethora of gushy connotations but by beginning the poem with the negation, “Not,” the speaker asks the reader to abandon them. In the next line, unlike Shakespeare’s tender tone towards the topic of love, she introduces her bizarre and unusual choice of a romantic symbol through the use of the metaphor, “I give you an onion.” This is an extended metaphor as Duffy elaborates on it throughout the poem. It expresses her view that love is not a just a simple cherishable feeling, but that it has layers like that of an onion. Layers that are hurtful as peeling onions make people tear up which is linked with crying. The fact that tears are inevitably shed whilst peeling onions signifies that the hurtfulness of love is also inevitable. The next line mentions that, “It is a moon …show more content…
Poets Robert Browning and John Clare do this in ways that are both fairly similar and yet completely different through their poems ‘My Last Duchess’ and ‘First Love’ respectively. In the poem ‘My Last Duchess’ Browning paints a devastating portrait of Duke Ferrara’s vicious personality through a dramatic monologue being delivered to a messenger of his next wife about his obsession with his dead wife and how it led to him supposedly killing her. His compelling obsession is established early in the poem when the Duke says, “That’s my last Duchess painted on the wall, looking as if she were alive.” The two pronouns “my” and “she” imply his ‘ownership’ of the woman who is stripped off her identity and spoken of as an object under his possession. He is portrayed as a collector of both : paintings and women. The fact that she is painted directly on his wall means that the painting can never be sold or belong to anyone other than him, further implying his obsessiveness. Being the one painted on his wall whilst the Duke is known to have had past Duchess’s shows that she may be of high significance to him and creates a sense of anticipation for the reader to wonder(enquire about) why that is. The verb “looking” paired with the description of a life-like painting suggests that the painted duchess is literally looking at the messenger - conveying a cry for help; trapped
One distinction in the way poets portray love is …show more content…
Valentine’s day is meant to be a celebration of love, instead she implies that love should be a constant feeling and that it should be celebrated permanently instead of being assigned to a single day of the year. This serves as the only correlation between the ideology of the two poets. She begins with a short and abrupt sentence, “Not a red rose or a satin heart.” This line displays her refusal towards the typical gifts of valentine. Her strong refusal is evident as the mentioning of the two gifts are prefaced by a capitalised “Not”. The title ‘Valentine’ carries a plethora of gushy connotations but by beginning the poem with the negation, “Not,” the speaker asks the reader to abandon them. In the next line, unlike Shakespeare’s tender tone towards the topic of love, she introduces her bizarre and unusual choice of a romantic symbol through the use of the metaphor, “I give you an onion.” This is an extended metaphor as Duffy elaborates on it throughout the poem. It expresses her view that love is not a just a simple cherishable feeling, but that it has layers like that of an onion. Layers that are hurtful as peeling onions make people tear up which is linked with crying. The fact that tears are inevitably shed whilst peeling onions signifies that the hurtfulness of love is also inevitable. The next line mentions that, “It is a moon …show more content…
Poets Robert Browning and John Clare do this in ways that are both fairly similar and yet completely different through their poems ‘My Last Duchess’ and ‘First Love’ respectively. In the poem ‘My Last Duchess’ Browning paints a devastating portrait of Duke Ferrara’s vicious personality through a dramatic monologue being delivered to a messenger of his next wife about his obsession with his dead wife and how it led to him supposedly killing her. His compelling obsession is established early in the poem when the Duke says, “That’s my last Duchess painted on the wall, looking as if she were alive.” The two pronouns “my” and “she” imply his ‘ownership’ of the woman who is stripped off her identity and spoken of as an object under his possession. He is portrayed as a collector of both : paintings and women. The fact that she is painted directly on his wall means that the painting can never be sold or belong to anyone other than him, further implying his obsessiveness. Being the one painted on his wall whilst the Duke is known to have had past Duchess’s shows that she may be of high significance to him and creates a sense of anticipation for the reader to wonder(enquire about) why that is. The verb “looking” paired with the description of a life-like painting suggests that the painted duchess is literally looking at the messenger - conveying a cry for help; trapped