Unrequited Love Figurative Language

The poems convey the frustration of different types of one-way or unrequited love relationships through the skillful use of vocabulary and figurative language. The methods used by Gwendolyn Brooks and Alan Dugan both use various methods in order to convey objective meaning and emotional nuance. First we can look at Gwendolyn Brooks’ “To Be in Love” where she opens the poem with a couplet as she wrote, “To be in love / is to touch things with a lighter hand,” which simply describes the euphoric state of being in love. Brookes would go onto write “He is not there but / you know you are tasting together,” in which Brookes describes the pain of being in a long distance relationship or a story of unrequited love where the female narrator’s desire for has become so painful it is borderline delusional. In the first half of “To Be in Love,” Brooks leads the reader on a …show more content…
Dugan opens up his poem by stating, “Nothing is plumb, level or square” and by that he means to say that nothing is perfect. Dugan goes on to say, “I am no carpenter” as he swore to Christ as he admits that he is not perfect but he tried. In his efforts to convey objective meaning and emotional nuisance, Dugan uses imagery and allusions as he creates an image of an unstable house and of a man whom is unstable himself and carries a lot of mistakes or sins as he compares himself to Christ whom died for our sins and was seen and believe to be perfection. Through the use of allusion and referring to Christ, Dugan allows the reader to contrast the two and see how far apart humans truly are from what they want to be and states that nobody is perfect and love will never be