How Do the Poets Convey Their Attitudes to Love?

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How do the poets convey their attitudes to love? Shakespeare shows all different kinds of love and emotions in the poems Havisham and Cousin Kate. Although the poems are very different, they do have some similarities. In Havisham, we can tell that love has turned the poet into someone who is extremely vengeful. We get this impression as she says “Not a day since then I haven’t wished him dead”. This shows us that she is full of aggression towards this man as he has suddenly walked out of her life and broken her heart. As she starts the poem off saying, “Beloved sweetheart bastard”, this suggests that she once knew a sweet and loving man, who has turned into someone completely different and ruined her life. The words ‘beloved’ and ‘bastard’ are very harsh sounding words due to the effect that phonology gives it. Another point that shows her aggression is when she says, “Bang. I stabbed at a wedding cake.” The word ‘bang’ is also another phonological word which gives a destructive and violent emotion to the poem. What makes the poet seem aggressive is how she stabs into the cake, and the fact that it is a wedding cake shows, what I think, her hate for the man that ruined her wedding day. She begins to talk about what she would do to this man as she says, “My fluent tongue in its mouth in its ear then down till I suddenly bite awake.” The way she refers to him as an ‘it’ shows that she can’t even address him by his name because she is so angry at what he has done to her. Also, she talks about how she would bite his manly parts off which means that he would not have anything to signify him as a male. Love has also changed the poet into someone very distraught and depressed. “Trembling if I open the wardrobe; the slewed mirror, full-length, her, myself, who did this to me?” This shows that she is so upset that she cannot bring herself to look in a mirror because

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