Реферат: Love Poems Essay Research Paper Lovepoems
Название: Love Poems Essay Research Paper Lovepoems Раздел: Топики по английскому языку Тип: реферат |
Love Poems Essay, Research Paper Love poems are a way of expressing sexual or loving feelings through words. Love poems are almost always romantic but as we will see, this is not the case for all of them. I will be analysing and comparing three different love poems: ?The Seduction? by Eileen Mc Auley, ?To his Coy Mistress? by Andrew Marvell and ?The Flea by John Dunne. Many regard these poems as amongst the best ever written so I think that this should be an interesting topic and look forward to researching it. The man in ?To His Coy Mistress? strikes me as being a very sleazy, desperate, lonely, old man. The poem is about a man who is trying to persuade his mistress to sleep with him.? The first stanza starts off with the man hinting of his desires with his mistress.? He creates beautiful scenes to make himself seem more romantic and desirable to his mistress: ?To walk and pass our long love?s day.? Thou by the Indian Ganges side shouldest rubies find?.? Whenever the man says, ?I would love you ten years before the flood?, I think that he is trying to emphasise that he has loved her ever since the time of Noah? Ark and always will.? This is a deep and very useful example of hyperbole being used by the poet to help the man get the point across about the amount he loves his mistress.Marvell again uses hyperbole as we approach the end of the first stanza whenever he begins talking about his mistress? body.? He uses gross exaggeration when he says: ?A hundred years should come to praise thine eyes, and on thy forehead gaze.? Two hundred years adore each breast, but thirty thousand to the rest.?Throughout the entire first stanza enjambment is evident and I feel that he uses this to enhance the mood and atmosphere of the poem.? I feel that this stanza is basically euphemistic as the man is using fancy words and phrases instead of just asking the woman to sleep with him.The second stanza is short and starts off seriously with the man telling his mistress that they will both die quite soon and life is short and thus this may be the only chance she has to lose her virginity.The mood of the poem changes totally whenever the man over-steps the line and makes a sick, morbid remark: ?The worms shall try that long preserved virginity, and your quaint honour turns to dust.?This perverse attempt by the man to persuade the young innocent girl to sleep with him before it is too late and she takes her virginity to the grave where she loses it to the worms.? He is trying to let the woman know she will keep her dignity and maidenhead as long as she has sex with him.? Although this is a sickening thought it seems to be a powerful, persuasive argument.The description of the grave as a ?fine place? shows the desperation of the man in question.When he goes on to say: ?…But none, I think, do there embrace.? I think that the poet expects us to start feeling sorry for the man now.? We are then met with the smart simile; ?Now let us sport us while we may, and now, like amorous birds of prey??Almost immediately after this simile we come across the first and only example of assonance in the entire poem, when the man says: ?Let us roll all our strength, and all our sweetness, up into one ball.? This was implying that the two of them become one in the ceremony of sexual intercourse instead of being singular and apart from each other.These final lines are one last gasp attempt to her to let him fulfil his wish and persuade his ?target? to sleep with him.? I am not sure why, but I get the impression that by the end of the poem the mistress is ready to ?give in? to the man.? This theory is due to the brighter atmosphere, which develops after the second verse. The structure of the poem varies, in that the second and third verses are relatively short compared to the first verse. The mood of the poem is inconsistent as it contradicts itself between the start and end of the poem but overall it is quite an intricate and nice atmosphere as the protagonist spends most of his time comparing the woman to beautiful, picturesque locations. Despite my disliking of ?Old English? and love poems in general, I must say that I did, in fact, enjoy analysing this poem as it helped me understand the language used several hundred years ago and gave us an insight into this man?s mind. In contrast to ?To His Coy Mistress? this poem was written quite recently (1980) by Eileen Mc Auley. The poem is basically about a young woman who is taken advantage of whenever she is drunk.? She goes on to have a baby and is forced to raise it herself whenever everyone else abandons her and she loses her childhood. The introductory stanza sets the scene in a ?run down? part of Merseyside.? A metaphor is used as early as the first stanza; ?far from the blind windows of the tower blocks.? Straight away we can sense that the atmosphere of the poem is dark and uneasy and we can get the impression that something is going to go wrong. In the second verse we get can sense cheapness and superficiality: ?Leather jacket creaking madly.?? We get the gist of the poem whenever we find out that he male who she is with hands her a bottle of vodka and calls her a ?little slag.? We learn of the girl?s naivety and innocence and we feel sorry for her as the alcohol consumes her and she is rendered helpless. ?She had nodded, quite enchanted? supports this theory. The opening line of verse four is, I feel, the most powerful and meaningful line in the entire poem: ?As he bought her more drinks, so she fell in love.? Also in this stanza there is the first evidence of sexual contact when he ?stroked her neck and thighs? We find out about the boy and his background in the fifth stanza: ?I?ll take you to the river where I spend the afternoons, when I should be at school, or eating me dinner.? Where I go, by myself, with me dad?s magazines and fill a bag with shimmering sweet paint thinner.? Ad the language in this is very broad and modern the remainder of the scene basically tells of his hard upbringing and plans for the future. The overall language used in the poem is a lot more up to date and modern than ?To His Coy Mistress,? which makes it easier to understand and relate to?and to analyse. Mc Auley drops some subtle hints to describe the atmosphere at the time, ?she followed him there,? which suggests curiosity and also: ? the frightening scum on the water? which contradicts the happy, innocence of the previous statement. The mood of the poem progresses to become even darker and we sense that our earlier prediction that something bad was going to happen nears when the line, ? the Mersey, green, like a sceptic wound? is delivered. We learn that the girl has been seduced when it turns out that the boy?s breath smells of mouthwash, suggesting that he was not even drunk.? This raises the emotions and angers the readers and thus the poet has been successful in creating a tense atmosphere. There is a massive change in scenery by the beginning of the second half of the poem starting from stanza number nine and we indirectly learn that she is pregnant when it says: ?When she discovered she was three months gone.? We witness the leaving of childhood and the introduction to adulthood when she rips her ?My Guy? and ?Jackie photo-comics? from her wall. The girl realises the enormity of her mistake and begins to ask herself questions angrily and rhetorically, ?Where now, is the summer of my sixteenth year?? and, ?Where are all the day trips to Blackpool, jumping all the rides?? A powerful line which could put all teenage girls off having un-protected sex came in the third last stanza, ?So she cried that she had missed all the innocence around her.? Again the mood changes as we enter the final two verses and we leave the sorrowful stage and enter the aggressive stage. Mc Auley uses sarcasm to emphasise the anger expressed by the mother-to-be: ?But then again to be smoking scented drugs or festering, invisibly unemployed.? Better to destroy your life in modern, man-made ways, than fall into this feminine void.? Better to starve yourself, like a sick precious child, than to walk through town with a belly, huge and ripe.? And better now to turn away, move away, fade away, than to have the neighbours whisper, ?You always looked the type.?? ? Through these last two stanzas we can see cast amounts of anger and regret expressed and we finally hear the girl?s real feelings. Overall I think that this is a brilliant poem and is very well written but I must say that, I feel, that this is a very biased, one sided, sexist view.? After all, ?it takes two to tango? and all the blame cannot be placed on the male.? In fact it was as much the girl?s fault seeing as she got drunk in the first place. Although I did enjoy this poem I do feel that it is rather sad and morbid to be labelled a ?love poem? and to be honest I must admit that I preferred ?To His Coy Mistress? as the writer/poet uses a lot more hyperbole and oxymoron etc. to express thoughts and views and this is why I would support Andrew Marvel over Eileen Mc Auley. (Analysis by???..) |