The speaker’s love for poetry and the joy he receives from consuming it, is like no typical happiness. In “Eating Poetry” Strand is striving for readers to be able to relate to the speaker with something in which they have so much love
“Love is in the air, every sight and every sound” John Paul Young sings, “in the whisper of the trees, […], in the thunder of the sea”. I chose poems by Romantic poets, which have the word « love » in their titles. I thought it would be interesting to compare those poems, to see the kind of love they are dealing with, either with love for someone or just the feeling of love itself. I decided to use poems from the Romantic era, since love is discussed a lot in this period. In addition, I wanted to use only one specific period because when there is a change of movement in literature, it often implies a change in the way the poets write.
Another reoccurring theme in the poem is love. The reader can see from the very beginning that this poem is about someone the speaker loved very much. It’s clear that all the man wants is his dear Lenora back, although that is impossible. Knowing this, the reader can infer that Poe struggled with love in his own life, so much so that he took to writing about it. Although he never comes out directly and says that this is a poem about love, the reader can recognize the deeper meaning of his writings.
This poem is written in free verse, which means it does not contain regular stanzas and meter. This poem is for a general audience. The most distinct thing about the poem, is its nontraditional spelling and punctuation. The spaces scattered throughout the text reinforces the idea of loss and disappearance. After the third stanza, the subject changes from the woman to the poem itself.
The poem is written about a woman’s love relationship towards with a man. The poem consists of words that have symbolic meaning which depicts how the relationship is. The relationship is depicted as a very loving and caring relationship while the disadvantages of the relationship are discussed as well. In essence, the poem implies that the advantages in a true love experience overpower the challenges in a true love experience. The first stanza starts off gently to the likelihood of what seems to be great.
The poem is written about a woman’s love relationship with a man. The poem consists of words that have symbolic meaning which depicts how the relationship is. The relationship is depicted as a very loving and caring relationship while the disadvantages of the relationship are discussed as well. In essence, the poem implies that the advantages in a true love experience overpower the challenges in a true love experience. The first stanza starts off gently to the likelihood of what seems to be great.
Line 12 says, “I might be driven to sell your love for peace”; which is more important love or your peace of mind? Form “Love is Not All” is a rhymed and fixed form. As reading this poem you may think it has a stanza, because you can break it up into a stanza of four lines. When taking a closer look, the poem doesn’t have spaces between the lines or groups of lines. “Love is Not All” is a rhymed poem as well, because every other line rhymes.
The poem uses figurative language to help the reader understand the lover has already moved on from the love the speaker and lover shared together. The interesting thing about the poem is that figurative language is used mostly in the last two lines of the poem: “But in your day this moment is the sun, / Upon a hill, after the sun has set.”(11-12). In line 11, the speaker is mentioning the perspective of the lover when she was in relationship with the speaker in the past. The poet uses the phrase, “ This moment is the sun” to explain that the lovers experience of the relationship was like the sun; as if he is saying what that the sun represents the love between the speaker and the lover. In line 12, we see that the “sun has set”.
These words express his love and how he misses her, it makes someone miss their loved ones when they read it, which brings someone to their feelings. After reading this, I knew that this poem is telling their readers to cherish every moment with their loved ones, and not to let go of them that easily. To stick with them through everything, which makes their love grow stronger and better.
The second stanza both opens and closes with the rising of the moon. Nature is quite the firm underlying theme of imagery in the poem’s first two stanzas. Poems should be written in such a manner that they, like the “twigs” and like the “moss”, are another aspect of the natural world, in that poetry must not be forced onto a page, but rather it must appear on the page freely, naturally allowing it to then leave the page. McLeish is also explaining that poems should obtain nature’s intrinsic beauty that no words can describe, hence the phrase from the first stanza “…as wordless/As the flight of birds”. The theme of nature continues into the third and final stanza; however not as directly, yet nature’s elusiveness in the third stanza is how McLeish manages to teach the ultimate principle of life.