Nevertheless, Elizabeth Barrett Browning advocates that the strength of love can help overcome the obstacles. In contrast, F. Scott Fitzgerald sees the world dissolved in excessive corruption shown through The Great Gatsby as it exemplifies the failure of the American Dream as well as the broken world where love struggles to exist. Love through the two texts is shown to be powerful and necessary for fulfilment. The love presented through the Sonnets from the Portuguese suggests that her life was completely changed as a result of the dominance of love. Prior to this her life was shown as dark and deathly through the personification of the “mystic shape” that moves behind her.
Browning’ poetry explores the consequences of obsession. How effectively does F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby deal with this issue in a different context and form? An idea that continually preoccupies and intrudes on a person’s mental and physical state is a term referred to as 1obsession and can lead to a character’s salvation or undoing. Elizabeth Barrett-Browning’s, “Sonnets from the Portuguese”, composed in the Victorian age of unparalleled power and industrial revolution, reflects significantly on the ideas of obsession and it’s ramifications through figurative language, poetic devices and techniques. Ideas such as idealistic love and societal expectations are heavily embedded within the Petrarchan sonnet form, which, on the
Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Fitzgerald both discern their exploration of the universal human concerns of love, hope and morality according to their own contextual influences. Notably one of the best known piece of American prose fiction, Fitzgerald’s Great Gatsby, critiques the hedonistic lifestyle of the roaring twenties and the failure of the fruitless promises of the American Dream to highlight the illusion of love and hope. Fitzgerald ultimately develops a pessimistic point of view on the materialistic and superficial society presented in the 1920’s, which prevented the ideas of pure love. Elizabeth Barrett Browning however, through her sonnets from the Portuguese, challenges the established patriarchal values of her time by subverting our expectations through the manipulation of the Petrarchan sonnets. Elizabeth Browning presents an idealistic and an optimistic view towards love and hope through sonnets I, XIV and XLIII.
Compare how ideas about love are presented in Shakespeare’s Sonnet 116 and Barrett-Browning’s Sonnet 43. In the course of the essay, I will compare and contrast both poems’ idea of love. Both poems generally give a positive overview of love; both poets suggest that love is never ending and can battle through bad situations. Shakespeare’s sonnet takes the form of argument, talking about the unchanging and eternal qualities of love whilst Browning’s sonnet is like a direct poem to her husband discussing the nature of her love for him. Shakespeare starts the poem with the imperative “let me not to the marriage of true minds” which sets the tone and exploration of true love.
They both explore the theme of love or rather painful love. the poet revels the link between the two poems’s through a verity of techniques which is done very effectively but also shows the difference between the obsessive love in “Havisham” and the possessive love of “Valentine”. The pain of love is evident from the beginning in both poems. “Carol Ann Duffy” uses the tone in the first couple of stanzas to show the unorthodox nature of the love. “Not a day since then I haven’t whished him dead”-Havisham This is very effective as the aggressive tone shows “Havisham” has been rejected and her love is causing her pain.
Through a comparison of how the authors depict this theme the responder gains an insight into the different human experiences of each time and the composers. In both texts the two protagonists search for the platonic form of the universal desire of love; however love is undoubtable transformed by their respective contexts which are why the texts offer an insight into two different human experiences. The persona in the sonnet sequence figuratively speaking wishes to be loved ‘for loves sake only’. Similarly Jay Gatsby metaphorically seeks a love that ‘went beyond her artificial world’. Although the two protagonists both idealised and sought a platonic love, because of the historical context of 1850’s England and 1920’s America experienced by the composers, it was only possible for the persona in the sonnets to achieve this while Gatsby couldn’t realise his ideal; this is reflective of the composers themselves.
The seriousness of their love results from the lovers’ disrepudance (?) of artificial language of ‘love’ and superficial code they had tired by at the beginning of the play. This is seen through the development of language form beginning with rhyme (Levin- “Comedy set the pattern of courtship embodied in dance (rhyme)) heavily used in the first act to its replacement of Blank verse which representative of a for more logical and realistic tone. This also reflects a common Shakespearean comment on Appearance versus Reality which is often a deeper theme discussed in tragedy. Tragedy is said to be further represented in Shakespeare’s use of opposites or antithesis.
However there is a change in tone of the final stanza. Courtly love is a central motif in “Les Grands Seigneurs”, evoking knights, castles, damsels and troubadours. However, courtly love is ultimately acknowledged as only “play”, which has to give way to the serious reality of marriage. There is an ironic tone to the poem, and a hint of black humour. This is a light hearted view of the gap between what we expect of relationships, and what we actually get.
Gatsby’s Fairy Dream In the early 19th century, at the end of the “Romantic Period”, an English poet named John Keats composed a poetic masterpiece called La Belle Dame sans Merci. The Romantic writers, along with Mr. Keats, created a political, social, and literary movement that explored how much love defined the human nature. La Belle Dame sans Merci, on the surface, may seem to be just another Romantic poem revolving around the tale of courtly love, but in truth, there is a deeper meaning and story associated to the love that the knight feels for his fair lady. The romantic encounter that the knight and the beautiful fairy have in the story abruptly ends in tragedy for the smitten, young man as he becomes so enraptured with the mythical,
introduction I am going to explore the ways in which writers present different variations on the themes of love, Courtly/Petrarchan Love, Sexual love/the art of seduction and true love and finding similarities and differences within Romeo and Juliet, The Flea, To His Coy Mistress, Sonnet 116 and Sonnet 130. Petrarchan/Courtly love Petrarchan/Courtly Love is the main type of love that appears in the poems of Petrarch. It is very self centered as it isn’t having contact with what you are in love with, just being inside the head. This is shown in Romeo and Juliet at the start of the play. Romeo expresses courtly love for Rosaline although he hasn’t met her yet, this shows that Romeo is very childlike.