How Is the Theme of “Love and Loss” Portrayed in ‘Plena Timoris’, ‘Remember’ and ‘Refugee Mother and Child’?

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The three poems ‘Plena Timoris’, ‘Remember’ and ‘Refugee Mother and Child’ all demonstrate how love is affected by death and show us how some types of love, for example spiritual love, is able to transcend death or the loss of someone while other types of love such as physical love (infatuation) cannot and is therefore lost. In ‘Plena Timoris’, Thomas Hardy takes a pessimistic tone about the permanence of physical love (lover’s “tryst”) and suggests that such physical love will not last as lovers will eventually get tired of each other. On the other hand, ‘Refugee Mother and Child’ by Chinua Achebe demonstrates the strength and permanence of spiritual love in the form of a refugee mother’s love for her child which shines through amidst all the poverty and chaos of the “diarrhoea of unwashed children”. ‘Remember’ by Christina Rossetti then shows that while death or loss may expel physical love, spiritual love can still live on in one’s remembrance and by the process of letting go. Although in ‘Remember’, it is not explicitly confirmed whether the speaker dies or is just leaving to a place far away, however, the second line of the poem telling the reader that the speaker has gone “into the silent land” suggests that the land the speaker is leaving to is the land of the dead which is “silent” in that no one speaks of the place because nobody alive knows what the land of the dead is like. This however shows how strong spiritual love (the romantic love between the speaker and her lover) is, that it can still last after death, transcending death into the land of the living through memories of the speaker’s lover when physical love cannot as seen in the poem where the speaker’s lover can “no more hold (her) by the hand” now that she is dead. However, while ‘Remember’ shows how spiritual love can stay constant even in death, ‘Plena Timoris’ shows how a death can bring

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