Cooling Water Poem Analysis

Improved Essays
The comparison between a typical poem about a woman missing her lover and a poem about a lady ghoul or demon of some sort getting herself ready for a feast with her lover illuminates the powerful way the same signifiers of a woman in love can be wielded by skilled poets to create two equally strong but totally conflicting moods.
Poem 212 describes young women playing in water and decorating themselves with nature to the delight of the poet. It starts with the image of a girl’s bodice that is soaking wet. The suggestion here is of that soaked bodice clinging to the as of yet unmentioned bodies of the young women. The description of it being wet with “cooling water” suggests that these girls are in the water because of the heat, and as mentioned
…show more content…
They both start with lists of adornments that bear a striking resemblance to the traditional adornments worn by women in love and then end with what the adorned ones do. In taking this form they link themselves to one another and likely a whole tradition of poems in this same format, the most traditional being a women wearing what the subjects of both poems pretend to wear and then going to meet their lovers. The contrast of the first poem is that they are young women only playing at dressing the part using the things that nature around them provides. This playfulness heightens the excitement and seduction with youth and innocence that still achieves the ultimate aim of seduction. The contrast of the second poem is even more stark, the women are not women but in fact ghouls playing at dressing the part using bits of decaying human bodies. The horror and disgust of the reader at the adornment of the fouls is heightened by its contrast to the loveliness and seductiveness of the woman in love hinted at by the references to typical adornment. When looked at together the two poems reveal how deftly these ancient poets could wield these poetic conventions to create such a spectrum of feeling within the same basic

Related Documents

  • Improved Essays

    Comparison of “Last Duchess,” and “Lover.” (An analysis of Robert Browning’s poems, “Last Duchess,” and “Porphyria's Lover.”) Robert Browning was a victorian poet, who had a complex way of explicating the different types of love. There are many similarities betwixt the two poems.…

    • 732 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Superior Essays

    Final Analytical and Research Essay Through the writings of poetry and storytelling, love and relationships have been a singular theme. Many poets and storytellers will use writing to tell love in different scenarios, from the depths of Hell where one’s lust of love causes eternal damnation to a love tale of two knights. Love has no boundaries and in most cases love is told from two perspectives. One from a male’s perspective and one from a female. This style of writing is used many times throughout many tales.…

    • 1956 Words
    • 8 Pages
    Superior Essays
  • Improved Essays

    In all aspects of society, various themes that affect everyone in life exist. These themes include love, heartbreak, beauty, death, joy, and others. Literature often embodies these examples in ways that the audience can relate to, no matter the time period it is published in. Poems can express the themes of love and death better than many other forms of literature, as they tend to be shorter. Two poems, “My Mistress’ Eyes Are Nothing Like the Sun” and “Death, Be Not Proud,” are sonnets, with fourteen lines and a form of rhyming scheme known as iambic pentameter.…

    • 800 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Superior Essays

    Love Sometimes love can be wretched. And other times it can be exciting and charming. In these works of literature, love can be interpreted in many ways. Depending on certain situations that the writer is trying to express, changes how the characters see love.…

    • 1292 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Superior Essays
  • Superior Essays

    The Romantic Period lasted from 1785-1832. During this time, the Democratic Revolution in France launched, which was the French Revolution. This revolution caused and shaped the Romantic period to be political, social, and economic with all three drastic changes. During the Romantic Period, many authors wrote poems, with a lot of emotion of love, passion and strong messages that we can now relate with in this livelihood. The two works I selected to work with caught my attention because both poems showed a lot of suspense and were similar in various ways.…

    • 1291 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Superior Essays
  • Great Essays

    To what extent and in what ways do The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories, Goblin Market and Rebecca unsettle cultural definitions of gender and/or sexuality? Christina Rossetti, Daphne du Maurier and Angela Carter question and unsettle contemporary ideas of gender and sexuality respectively in Goblin Market, Rebecca and The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories. Each author, writing at different periods in history and therefore different eras in terms of both the women’s rights movement and the evolution of the modern conceptualisation of gender and sexuality, chiefly concerns the focus of her work on examining the sexual journeys of women in patriarchal culture. Each has, because of this, been to differing extents hailed as feminist in their portrayal of women who, all of them in the liminal stage between childhood…

    • 1557 Words
    • 7 Pages
    Great Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Marie De France’s uncanny, whimsically lai “Lanval” satirically challenges and reverses the themes of love through stereotypical gender roles, which are unique and romanticized to traditions of the 12th century. Women for eternity have been rendered as beautiful, physical objects, who where inferior to men, and needed nothing more then a body. Marie De France depicted these same stereotypes in her writing but just in a reverse methodology. She criticizes the stereotypes of women with very opposing qualities while still displaying characters with feminism. This poem combines mercy and humility with a physical attraction which indicates the placement of power in the women characters.…

    • 1465 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    The World’s Wife is a collection of poetry that successfully challenges society’s preconceptions of what it means to be a woman. While the female voice is often silenced, Duffy focuses on the women who were in the midst of male-centric stories in Biblical, mythological and fairytale narratives. Some may argue that the expectations of women are completely subverted in poems such as The Devil’s Wife, in which the maternal and nurturing image of a woman is replaced by the disturbing portrayal of the infamous child serial killer Myra Hindley. Alternatively, some feminine qualities are also explored in this poem, such as a woman’s dependence on men, as demonstrated by Hindley’s twisted, passionate love for Ian Brady.…

    • 1060 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Superior Essays

    In the introduction of the poems she has feminised her form of writing by romanticising it. She is reminiscing about times with less sorrow, and nature is a big part of her memories. Time and nature are two characteristics of Romanticism within literature. She also feminises the subjects of her writing. She has personified “Mercy”, “Fiend of the Discord” and “Liberty”, and refers to these using the feminine pronoun.…

    • 1653 Words
    • 7 Pages
    Superior Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Analysis of “Head, Heart” Lydia Davis’s poem “Head, Heart” chronicles a short, yet meaningful interaction between the entities Head and Heart. Head and Heart have recently suffered an immense loss and feel great distress. In this time of great sorrow, it is Head’s duty to act as consoler to Heart, to comfort Heart in its moment of despair.…

    • 839 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    For example, they hold untold tales and conspire and if he could hold your hillside smile and the seashore laughter of her lips then he would. With Poem “Pamphilia to Amphilanthus” it says “But if he pay, his gain is our lost will.” Meaning if he wants to play that game it is fine with me his gain is my lost. One of the differences used in both of…

    • 289 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    The speakers of the poems, The Passionate Shepherd to His Love and The Nymph’s Reply to the Shepherd use imagery and figurative language showing the materialistic and realistic attitudes towards love and life and that gender-based hopes and expectations have not changed over time. When it comes to love and life we know that men and women have different attitudes. Men are usually idealistic and materialistic while the women are realistic and pragmatic. The Shepherd offers the Nymph many gifts like “A cap of flowers, and a kirtle Embroidered all with leaves of Myrtle” (Passionate Shepherd L.11-12) and more expensive things like “A belt straw and Ivy buds, With Coral clasps and Amber studs”(Passionate Shepherd L.17-18) proving that the Shepherd…

    • 350 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    In the eyes of a man of high royalty. This piece speaks to me because even since the bible days’ things have not changed. Women are pushing their bodies to the limit to please men. By doing crash diets, harmful surgeries, and many more unnecessary things. The colors correlates with the sadness in her eyes you can see the pain and hopelessness.…

    • 564 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Hero And Leander Analysis

    • 1346 Words
    • 6 Pages

    In literature, love has always been a concept of great debate, although, what exactly is love? Pamela C. Regan, from Los Angeles University, explains that “…A person who experiences sexual desire for another individual, along with other emotional or psychological events, may characterize his or her state as one of ‘being in love…’” (Regan 139). However, does this sexual desire always breed emotion? When one thinks of love, thoughts of tenderness, kindness, and romance often arise with it.…

    • 1346 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Great Essays

    Edward Rybak Professor Bessenbacher English M01B 15 April 2015 The Dichotomy of Death In “The Raven,” by Edger Allen Poe, the speaker is driven to madness as a result of essentially lamenting over the death of his beloved Lenore. This theme of meditating on death also runs through out John Keats “Ode to a Nightingale.” Although the central theme of these two poems is in essence based upon the same subject, the perspectives taken by the two authors are so immensely different that they demand an entirely different reaction from the reader.…

    • 1694 Words
    • 7 Pages
    Great Essays

Related Topics