Motif Of Love In Poetry

Defined by Merriam-Webster, the simplest definition of love is “a feeling of strong or constant affection for a person” (Merriam-Webster), but love actually has many meanings in society. For some people it is a love for someone whose important to them, for others it is how they feel towards an object or thing, or sometimes love is such a strong feeling, people become cautious towards it. Love can stay the same or it can constantly change throughout people’s lives, but it plays an important role in everyday life. The theme of love is found everywhere, especially in poems. Over time different love poems explore societies and people’s attitudes towards love.

In Shakespeare’s “Sonnet 148”, the speaker is clearly a man that is in love, but seems to think of love in a negative way. He feels that love itself is tricking him and clouding his judgment. He sees his love as far better than everyone else sees her to be. He states, “O ‍me, what eyes hath love put in my head/ Which have no corresponde‍nce with true sight!”

A poetic irony - Shakespeare gives one of the most thoughtful lines in the play, to the least thoughtful of characters. Bottom says it all; sometimes there is no reason to justify true love. Often, when one’s mind becomes obstructed by love, most reason, logic and rationale goes away in order to fulfill that love. Therefore love really keeps little company to reason, and can become very foolish and filled with

To many people the word “Love” does not seems to be something physical that a person can touch or see, but more like an abstract noun. Love is not something that they can touch or to other it's how they are affected mentally. The author of  Love 2.0: How Our Supreme Emotion Affects Everything We Feel, Think, Do, and Become, Barbara Fredrickson gives us another way to view the word love and how it affects us as human beings. Instead of looking at love as a noun but start to look at it as a verb, due to love constantly changing. Fredrickson understanding of love takes a different approach than other by looking at the biochemical aspect of our body band and how it is “designed to love”.

Many literary works have love as a theme. By reading different novels, one receives a glimpse of all the different kinds of love and their purposes. In Their Eyes Were Watching God, love is represented as the sea. By reading this novel, the reader comes to the conclusion that our capability to love deviates with every person we come across. Love is in some ways an art, and it transforms as people transform.

William Shakespeare, one of the most famous and influential playwrights of all time, once asserted that “powerful love … in some respects, makes a beast a man, [and] in some other, a man a beast.” In making this statement, Shakespeare suggests that love is a powerful force that has the ability to both strengthen and ruin people. O. Henry’s heartwarming short story “The Gift of the Magi,” which describes how a poor couple’s attempts to afford meaningful gifts reinforces their relationship, and Edgar Allan Poe’s grim poem “The Raven,” which illustrates a mourning lover’s descent to madness, demonstrate the contrasting effects love can have on people. While “The Gift of the Magi” conveys a positive theme about the importance of love and how it

From the times of Ancient Greek, love was called Eros which meant sexual passion or Philla which meant deep friendship. Different cultures and civilizations have defined love and its many aspects in different ways. Fredrickson on the other hand has addressed to us that to understand love more we must get rid of all ideas we have heard since birth. Fredrickson proposes a new perspective on this feeling called love that we have so many phrase and stories to describe it. In the essay, “Selections from Love 2.0” Fredrickson states, “Just as your body was designed to extract oxygen from the earth’s atmosphere and nutrients from the foods you ingest, your body was designed to love.

In A Ritual to Read to Each Other, William Stafford speaks about a different kind of love than in Shakespeare’s sonnet. The love Stafford describes isn’t romantic, rather it is built on the fragile communication we have with the people around us. Stafford emphasizes the love of humanity, and begins his poem by pointing out how desperately bereft we are of this kind of empathy today. In the second stanza Stafford talks about the emptiness that exists between us. According to the poem we’ve become

Shakespeare believes that the time is a very destructive force. It is so powerful that it can decay and destroy every mortal things of the world. Nothing is out from the clutch of time and its shadow.

William Shakespeare’s “My Mistress’ Eyes Are Nothing Like the Sun” shows that ulterior motives for love can also refer to personality and non physical features of a person. Flannery O’Connor’s “Good Country People” and William Shakespeare’s “My Mistress’ Eyes Are Nothing Like the Sun”, show that love can be influenced by an ulterior motive, through the use of specific word choice and storyline

The two poems I will be comparing and contrasting in this essay are two of William Shakespeare 's most popular sonnets. Sonnets in chapter 19, 'Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day? ', and in chapter 23, 'Let me not to the marriage of true minds, ' of our Literature book. Both of these poems deal with the subject of love but each poem deals with its subject matter in a slightly different way. Each also has a different purpose and audience. In the case of 'Shall I compare thee ' the audience is meant to be the person Shakespeare is writing the sonnet about.

The individuals possessed by ideal love are not the only ones who are affected by it. In Romeo and Juliet, Friar Lawrence’s first reaction to Romeo’s drastic change of “love” was shocking : “Holy Saint Francis, what a

Shakespeare’s Sonnet 116 says, “Let me not to the marriage of true minds. Love is not love. Which alters when it alteration finds, Or bends with the remover to remove. O no! it is an ever-fixed mark.

Love can exist as affection, infatuation, obsession, pleasure and in many other ways, as love is abstract. Hence, there is no one single interpretation of love. Love is a theme that has been embedded into language and literature over the centuries, yet due to the ever changing perception of love people continue to search for a universal definition of love. Poems are able to showcase the inner feelings and desires of a poet as well as their own unique views on love. Nevertheless, through poems “La Belle Dame sans Merci” by John Keats, “My Last Duchess” by Robert Browning, “Mother in a Refugee Camp” by Chinua Achebe, “The day is gone, and all its sweets are gone!”

Throughout William Shakespeare’s “Sonnet 130,” the reader is constantly tricked into thinking he will compare his mistress to something beautiful and romantic, but instead the speaker lists beautiful things and declares that she is not like them. His language is unpredictable and humor is used for a majority of the poem. This captivating sonnet uses elements such as tone, parody, images, senses, form, and rhyme scheme to illustrate the contradicting comparisons of his mistress and the overarching theme of true love. Shakespeare uses parody language to mock the idea of a romantic poem by joking about romance, but ultimately writes a poem about it.