Love Poetry

Love Poetry


By closely examining at least three poems, explain in detail the type of love which is being portrayed in each.

Many poems that are written are to do with love. If one read or wrote a poem to his or her lover it would be seen to be romantic. Poems are often told as stories like in “The Flea” by John Donne which tells us of a man desperately trying to persuade the girl to sleep with him or in “Porphyria’s Lover” we learn that the lover kills Porphyria to make sure the love they have is preserved forever. In “Let me not” William Shakespeare tells us the story from his point of view and what he thinks love is. All these poems are just three of the many love poems around, but each one has a different meaning and a different type of love is portrayed.

John Donne was born in 1572 in London. He studied law in 1591 and then was ordained in 1615 and six years later became Dean of St. Pauls, a position he held until his death in 1631. John Donne wrote letters, elegies, satires, epigrams, devotions, sermons and poems. His songs and sonnets are loved by audiences and “The Flea” written for fun would have to one of them. In the poem it demonstrates the sophisticated wit which Donne approaches seduction in his love poetry. The poem is arguably a performance designed to show the reader how cleverly thought an argument could be twisted rather than a genuine attempt at courtship. The poem is made up of three stanzas each one having a different argument to put across. It is an extended metaphor with the flea and its actions compared to the narrator and the mistress. A flea goes around his daily business by landing on unsuspecting culprits and then sucks the blood from it. When had enough he goes and does his act on other mammals. Two types of blood are then mixed inside the flea. This is how the flea is related to the narrator and the mistress. Basically the first stanza is where the flea is spotted; the second is where the narrator argues that she mustn’t kill the flea, and the third is where she kills the flea. He tries to make all the arguments logical so he can win her over. The first stanza has three arguments to it. The 1st argument puts forward the point that the flea is so small and he is only asking a little thing of her. The second is that they have already accomplished the act within the flea so why don’t we just have sex because we have already done it. “And in this flea, our two bloods mingled be”. And in the third argument the narrator says the flea has had more pleasure that he has because she won’t sleep with him and the flea has had the blood of his and hers mixed together and therefore are one. In the 2nd stanza the women attempts to squash his argument by killing the flea. The lover then turns to the religious side of things by saying, “…yea more than married are.” We are already married within the flea so if you kill the flea you will be murdering part of me because we are now one. “This flea is you and I.” In the 3rd stanza she kills the flea because she has heard enough about the whole subject. She is made to fell guilty and that she has committed a sin so because she has done so and bee so cruel why doesn’t she sleep with him still to make it up to him. The lover then realises that he has lost and that his argument has fallen to pieces. In the last three lines he attempts just one more time to get he to sleep with him.
This poem even though it is classed as a love poem it is a different type. It is not a romantic poem nor seductive. It is more of a lets sleep together and that will be that. There is not any real love in this poem just the narrators love for sex and he will argue to have his own way. He doesn’t like the mistress; he just wants to fulfil his own pleasure.

Porhyria’s Lover is a monologue, which gives the reader a dramatic insight into the mind of an abnormally possessive lover. Love poems often express the wish that time would stand still so that a particularly intense moment of love will last forever. This is the same with the lover in the poem. He feels the same way and feels he has to immortalise the moment in a different way to anyone else. In the poem we can see that right from the beginning he loves Porpyria. His moods differ throughout the poem. Whereas at the start of the poem, Browning uses negative images of the weather to reflect his mood and then when Porhyria enters she improves his mood and the weather. The opening lines reflect his mood and there is personification of the wind. Using weather to show moods is called pathetic fallocy. ” The rain set in early to-night, The sullen wind was soon awake.” The next quotation shows when she improves and brightens up his mood. ” She shut the cold out and the storm,” and ” Blaze up, and all the cottage warm. ” From the poem we can see that the lover is very impassive and Porhyria makes all the sexual advances. ” She put my arm about her waist, And made her smooth white shoulder bare.” The passion goes on but the lover suspects that someone else is love with her. He wants total possession. No one can share her. He realises then that Porhyria loved him and that she is all his. “…at least I knew Porhyria worshiped me.” The repetitive use of the word “mine” in line 36 shows how possessive he is. “That moment she was mine, mine fair.” Because he knows that at the moment in time she loves him he wants to preserve that love. “In one long yellow string I wound, Three times her little throat around. I strangled her.” He had killed her with her own hair. There is a total lack of emotion when he kills her and he fells no guilt or remorse. There is even warmth-links to passion. “No pain felt she; I am quite sure she felt no pain.” He doesn’t think he has committed a criminal act and he now thinks that their love will go on forever. The last descriptions are more positive after death and it sounds as though she is still alive. The last three lines suggest the three most shocking lines in the poem. “And all night long we have not stirred, And yet God has not said a word!” He thinks that he is not going to be punished by God. This is the same as Johanne Agricola an Antromian who believed that a child of God could not sin and therefore could not be punished by God. Porhyria’s Lover is a dramatic monologue that follows an ABABBA scheme. If we take the first lines to demonstrate this we can see that the ending words are the rhyming parts. ” night; awake; spite; lake; break.” This pattern follows throughout the whole poem.

William Shakespeare wrote more than one hundred and fifty sonnets in which he reflects upon the nature of love and the effects of passing time. In Let me not he gives us his idea of the characteristics of a really, lasting love between two people. Normally a sonnet fits into 2 lines of argument. An octet is the main argument while the sextet develops the argument and concludes it. Let me not is an Iambic Pentametre which means five main beats that are alternately stressed/unstressed. This poem is all about true love and how it never ends. It is not talking about one person but Shakespeare discusses love in general-what it is and what it isn’t. In the 1st quatrain Shakespeare puts across the idea that love is permanent and unchanging and true love is forever. In the 2nd it says “It is the star to every wandering barke”, meaning love is like stars-fixed and there forever, and in the 3rd quatrain it concludes that physically people will change over time and their beauty will fade, Lov’s not Times foole, through rosie lips and cheeks”, but true love not only lasts while we are mortals ” Love alters not with his breefe houres and weekes “, but it will last until the end of time, “But beares it at even to the edge of doome “. At the end of all sonnets a rhyming couplet finishes it. Because this poem is a description of how Shakespeare sees love he ends it by saying “If this be error and upon me proved, I never writ, nor no man ever loved”. This means “If I am wrong then I never wrote and no man ever loved anyone!” Basically he is saying that how he described love, that should be how it is and anyone who thinks differently is very wrong because he is always right.

The three poems studied in this essay all show a different type of love and how that love is expressed. It doesn’t mean to say that there are only these types of love and that these are the only ways to love someone.