The Greek God Of Love, Eros, And Anne Stevenson

Often in literature, as seen in life, things tend to be deeper than their superficial meaning; such is seen in the poems written about the Greek god of love, Eros, by Robert Bridges and Anne Stevenson. Love is a contradictory feeling in which some people value its existence while others get bemused by it. The poems use specific diction, structure/syntax, tone, and other literary devices to convey their feelings of love and what love means to them.
Starting with Robert Bridges, one can see that the syntax of the sentence portrays that it is a question in which he is asking Eros “why hast thou nothing in thy face?” The reader can see that love is blind (because the god of love has no apparent face) in which certain individuals do ridiculous things and live in this fantasy because they do not want to be in a state of emotional …show more content…
Throughout the poem, Bridges then calls Eros an “idol of the human race” yet the line after he calls the god of love a “tyrant of the human heart.” These terms obviously seem quite different from one another in which an idol is something you look up to, but a tyrant is something that you are bound to follow no matter what—so Eros is a god that everyone wants, but if you get him you are bound to him. Bridges continues to say that Eros is the “flower of lovely youth” and who’s “exuberant flesh [is] so fair” giving the reader an image that this god is a beautiful one who will be with you in your youth but as “time” passes, it “[decays] the colours warm” showing that love fades away. However, after the negativity, the tone changes in which Eros is the “image of eternal Truth.” This means that Bridges feels that love is a powerful thing and is in fact not sham but the truth. Furthermore, the poet holds on to his tone of mystery as he describes Eros as one whose “face is nought to find” and who has a “soft unchristen’d smile” who lies in the “shadows neither love nor guile.” Comparing the gods