Love and Relationship poems

I chose to contrast the poems Love is not all by Edna St.Vincent Millay and To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time by Robert Herrick. 

Love is not all starts by telling us how unimportant love is. It is not necessary for our survival and without it we will still be human. However, it then shows that she herself is in love and that even when she would be in extreme conditions she would not trade that love for anything. This poem basically contradicts The Beatles “All You Need is Love” by saying that yes it is important but it’s not all that you need.

To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time is a poem telling young women that they need to marry while they are young or they will never find anyone that wants them. This poem has the complete opposite viewpoint of the former poem. Robert Herrick is saying that these women are only wanted when they are young. They are only wanted when they  have their youth. Also that if these women do not find men while they are young then they will not have any purpose in life.

I personally agree with the viewpoint of Edna St.Vincent Millay. I think that when an if you find love it can be amazing and that person can be your “everything” but they aren’t really everything you need. Love can only give you so much but you still have to live life and be yourself and find other purpose to life. 

A Life of Simplicity, Nature, and Love

• Read the classic pastoral “The Passionate Shepherd to His Love”, followed by “Urban Pastoral” Babette Deutsch and “Let Evening Come” by Jane Kenyon.  Compare and contrast how the latter two contemporary, pastoral poems use literary devices to explore the role of nature in human life.

First off, I did not like the "Urban Pastoral". The imagery used to describe the scene in what to me appeared to be New York seemed very dirty and congested when read next to a classical pastoral poem such as "The Passionate Shepherd to His Love". And one cannot say that it is the contemporary nature of the poem that makes is seems so crass because "Let Evening Come" is contemporary but manages to conjure up twilight in an idyllic setting. Kenyon's poem is a more standardized format. Most every stanza begins with the word "let" and every other stanza ends in the single sentence "let evening come". Deutsch's is much less rigid in it's structure, employing  enjambment to further this idea of a broken landscape that is somehow woven together as a whole. The imagery is also starkly contrasting in a fairly obvious way.  Deutsch speaks of a city with pigeons and tramps and ladies who turn up their noses - a pastoral urban wonderland per say. Kenyon on the other hand, speaks of a barn with a hoe in the long grass and a woman peacefully knitting. This is very much a more stereotypical pastoral poem. I believe I like it better since I prefer this idyllic scene to the cityscape.  Both describe the world that surrounds, as well as the idea of love and companionship (though this is mostly found in the classical pastoral poem). 

They Flee From Me-She Walks in Beuty

They Flee From Me by Sir Thomas Wyatt confused me at first, but then I realized that these things fleeing from him is a womb. Barefoot and scantily clad she takes his food and kisses him, I found this ironic because usually it's woman giving food to the men (just kidding). But I feel ba dfor this guy because every time he gets close to these women they just get up and leave him behind, he is stuck in a vicious cycle.
She Walks in Beuty by Lord Byron is very different from that os Sir Thomas Wyatts, Lord Byron describes this perfect woman that is in front of him, and that is the main difference. The woman is actually in front of him, not running away with his stolen goods. He uses more imagery like the dark night skies to describe his far maiden so his diction makes her seem beautiful.

I'd like to be able to agree with Lord Byrons perspective but that is not the case, I don't have dat but that's fine with me because Im ok with saving money. So in that case I see Byron in a nice steady relationship rob ably in his later years, and Sir thomas Wyatt is like a college kid doing a one night stand.

Love is a Disease Which Makes Us See What We Want

Love hurts and it sucks and generally is a very silly disease that curses us humans. It can cloud our judgement and be our biggest downfall as well as our greatest strength - what extreme it takes us to really seems to depend greatly on circumstance. One would actually be quite impressed how love can changes one's outlook on another person or even life in general.

For that reason I chose to contrast the poems "She Walks in Beauty" by Lord Byron and "True Love" by Robert Penn Warren because both speakers seems to be greatly effected by their love. They both seem to portray it in a completely different way though. "She Walks in Beauty" focuses on a woman who is so bright that she can light up the darkness - she indeed blinds the speaker simply by existing, and because of her mere existence brightens up everything. Of her, "all that's best of dark and bright/meet in her aspect and her eyes" and the daylight cannot do her the justice with which to allow her true beauty to shine through. In this case, the woman who is the object of the speaker's affections is clearly better, she is the embodiment of beauty and good.

Whereas in the poem "True Love", which uses similar imagery with light and dark, the woman is also portrayed as the most wonderful thing in the world. Everything around her, as well, pales in comparison to the sheer beauty she presents. However, in this case, the world around her is definitely portrayed as being worse than her, as his feelings for her are something that "makes you feel dirty" and her situation in life, with a drunkard father and the foreclosed home do not present the situation of someone who walks in beauty in wonder. Rather, she has to deal with the ugliness of real life and shines out among it. This makes one wonder if she truly is as great as the speaker thinks, or if she simply seems to shine from where he (and she) are in comparison.

So pretty much, the two poets both seem to think that love can change your perception of things, thought one focuses more on how there is nothing wrong with it - indeed, he doesn't even address the fact that that is happening - while the other shows that their view of the person they love might not really be true - though it may indeed be true, it's just kinda hard to grasp from the poem. In that way I feel like I have to take a step back and say that I really don't know whether I would side with one or another, or even if there is really a side to take. Mostly, the two poets simply portray two different types of relationships/pining/etc and therefore I feel like either could be right, depending on the specifics of the relationship.

I sincerely doubt that I managed to convey my thoughts on these two poems just right ugh

Let's talk about sex baby / Let's talk about you and me

I chose to contrast The Flea by John Donne and Mi Fea by Pablo Neruda. I'm not sure if I could have found two poems so drastically different.

So Donne's poem is an unabashedly erotic seduction poem, although one that never actually makes direct reference to sex. Instead, the concept of sex, and the speaker's attempt to convince his lover to perform that action with him, is pursued through an extended metaphor of a flea. "Mark but this flea, and mark in this / How little that which thou deny'st me is; / It sucked me first and now sucks thee, / And in this flea our two bloods mingled be;". Donne's introductory lines address a series of important issues, most notably that while the act of non-marital sex may be grossly immoral, the same concept of mingling but done in the body of a flea is quite normal. He points out that if the mingling of blood is fine, then the denial of sex on moral grounds is "little"; of no import. This first stanza has a cute lil bit of innuendo in it too: "Yet this enjoys before it woo, / And pampered swells with one blood made of two". Yes friends, that's a boner pun. Stanza two introduces the concept of trinity, holding that the flea, the man's blood, and the woman's blood are inextricably intertwined. Combined as they are in the belly of the flea, that "marriage bed, and marriage temple is", they are as closed to married as any other married couple, parental objections be damned, and since they're married it's a-ok for her to have sex with him (at least that's his idea). At this point, she ,either fed up with his incessant thirsty blather or simply driven by habit, moves to kill the flea, and he points out that in that act she commits "sacrilege, three sins in killing three." The crafty bugger then uses her killing the flee to his advantage when he says that she would lose no more honor "when thou yield'st to me" than when she took the fleas life. aka pls sleep w me.

Neruda takes a slightly more reverent tone to the concept of love. His poem is written entirely in a series of contrasts: he begins a line with "Mi fea" and points out some hideous flaw of hers, then begins the following line with "mi bella" and points out her impossible beauty. In this he expresses his love for her in all forms, flaws and perfections. The poem is even more touching when considered in context - he dedicated it to his wife and intended the poem to be a passionate one addressing a real attitude towards love, not filled with idealism but instead recognizing the nature of love once youth, passion, and beauty have been replaced by age and maturity.

There's definitely an obvious difference from the lusty whore monger style literature of Donne and the passionate and mature work of Neruda, but I've gotta say I don't think I picked very well because I agree with neither. Disregarding my uncertainty on whether or not the concept of love as we know it is even a true thing, I'd have to say that for me love isn't about lust and it's not about a passion for another person's flaws, but instead seems more about having enough of a commitment and trust for someone to where their flaws no longer matter. I've never met people who were so in love that she loved his incessant snoring, or he loved her odor, or anything, but I have met people who just didn't care anymore. And I feel like that - the not caring about flaws, the recognition that everyone has problems, and that willingness to not pass judgement - is the closest that people get to love.
Also love does not equal sex. And sex does not equal love.

Love, or it's the Intention of Love, is Almost Never Clear

Love is messy and tricky and often times cumbersome. If it weren't, there wouldn't be hundreds upon thousands of poems dedicated to the notion. However, to borrow a line from Moulin Rouge "love is a many splendid thing" as well. For that reason, humanity's collection of love poems, and poems disregarding love or revering it, keeps on growing.

The two poems I chose to contrast were John Donne's "The Flea" and Edna St. Vincent Millay's "Love is not all." Donne compares love to the bite of a flea in his poem -- the speaker points out a flea that his bitten both him and his lover. He makes a rather blunt assumption that since their blood is mixing inside the bug, and that no one would consider that sinful, then why should they not swap fluids in bed? Further, once the lover tries to squelch the flea, the narrator ascertains that if she were to kill the bug she would also be killing their (metaphorical) marriage since that is what the bug symbolizes for him. She kills the flea. However he's a wily feller and he twists this new outcome and tells her 'look, the bug is dead. but you however or not - thus us swapping fluids isn't that detrimental to your honor.' In honor, he wants their love to manifest in the physical sense, and he is not beating around the bush to make that clear to her.

In contrast, Millay's poem begins promptly with the repetition of her title - "love is not all" - fooling her audience to think she is quite serious in making the statement that love is not as important as other aspects of life. She claims love is not above meat or drink, or slumber, breath, or blood. She is firm in her stance that love should not be placed above over qualities and aspects of life -- that is, until she isn't. In the ninth line, her tone shifts; now she paints a story of difficulty, and pain and moaning, a time in which she "do[es] not think [she] would ... be drive to sell your love for peace" or "trade the memory of this night for food." Thus, she goes back on her definition of what love is not -- yet it is in this juxtaposition that the true purpose of her sonnet emerges.

The two authors have two contrasting attitudes towards love, although that may be difficult to see from the very beginning of their poems. Funnily enough, it seems as if Dunne is more invested in the idea of love that Millay is from comparing the beginning of their two poems when in fact, it is the opposite. Beneath Dunne's flowering diction lies his true motive in which all he desires from his lover (or at least so it seems) is the physical act of love. However, Millay, who may seem apathetic towards love in the beginning by claiming all the things love is not, is the author more driven towards accepting love in all of its forms. Although she claims love cannot replace sustenance such as food and air, it is a sustenance of a different kind, one that cannot be replaced by anything else, and one that, in its absence, demonstrates just how powerful of an impact it can have. 

The Passover- Liberation

Do to migration and high birthing rates, Egypt was very overpopulated a long long time ago. In order to decrease the population in Egypt, the Pharaoh came up with a plague and he would kill the first born son of every family. The only way to save your son was to slaughter a lamb and use its blood to paint the front door. Then you had to roast the lamb and eat it. God would "pass over" the homes that had blood on the doors, and the holiday Passover was created. 

(http://wp.patheos.com.s3.amazonaws.com/blogs/faithwalkers/files/2013/03/passover-lamb.jpg)

Here is a paining of a man rubbing the blood of a lamb onto his front door so that the Pharaoh will not take his son as a sacrifice during the plague. 

To be honest, I'm not sure how this has to deal with liberation. Liberation is the act of setting someone free from imprisonment, slavery, or oppression. I guess killing the lamb liberates the first born son from being sacrificed. His life would no longer be in the control of the Pharaoh, but rather his own family and self. This would also liberate the parents from fear. Instead of fearing that their child will be taken from them, they can rest easy knowing they sacrificed a lamb instead.