This is a light hearted view of the gap between what we expect of relationships, and what we actually get. The poem is quite conventional in four stanzas, and reflects a conventional view of love. It is in two parts, with the first three stanzas about romance, before a ‘bolta’ in the final stanza, which turns things on its head. The first stanza has only three lines as it shows this twist. The poem has 15 lines, one more than a sonnet, which is normally about love, which gives a wry sense of humour and irony to this poem.
Compare the ways the poet explores ideas of power in lgs and one other: The form of the poem seems quite conventional, laid out in four stanzas, and the poem begins by reflecting on conventionality. It is structured in two parts, however, with the first three stanzas describing romantic love before a dramatic turnaround in the final stanza showing how once married the man loses his power over the women and becomes less controlling and manipulative, the women becomes more ‘equal’ and gains more power over the man. The title Les Grands Seigneurs sounds grandiose, partly because it is French, a language associated with chivalry and courtly love in the medieval era. The term originally referred to aristocratic or noble men which means that men have a certain power and very much noticed for it. The third and fourth stanzas depict the narrator as she is viewed by men.
‘Maude Clare’ has an intrusive narrator who tells the story of a wedding day and a rejected lover. This omniscient narrator actually only gives us three stanzas and the rest of the poem is speech. The narrative voice starts with the mother, Maude Clare, Thomas, Maude Clare again and finally Nell. The effect of this dialogue is that it is like watching a scene in a play rather than reading a poem. In this conversation the poet uses colloquial language to bring the characters alive.
The first line of each stanza has internal rhyming, which rhymes inside the same line. This poem is written in 16 syllables per line, and Poe only has seven syllables in each of the lines. The unusual rhyming style of “The Raven” sets the poem on a different level than other poetry. The mood of this poem is calm, yet dark, sad, angry, depressing, and lonely. Poe’s words themselves give the poem its mood.
This sense of control is only further strengthened by another technique used by both poets, the regular inclusion of caesuras. Molloy and Browning deploy caesuras to create a blunt and snappy tone to their controlling characters narrative. This bluntness illustrates the characters expectance of respect they will get from the reader, just like the respect gained from their respective loved ones due to their dominant and powering demeanour. However, there are also some stark differences in between the two texts as well, with Les Grands Seigneurs being written in four stanzas compared to only the one stanza being used to narrate the entirety of My Last Duchess. This difference in structure deployed by the authors could represent the different manners in which opposite genders will refer to love in, with the female character in Les Grands Seigneurs being composed and polite in her acknowledgement of the importance of males in her life.
It upset her greatly that George Wilson (Myrtle husband) was not able to purchase his own suit. That one situation destroyed their marriage forever. Myrtle was not necessarily a beautiful woman. However, she was attractive in the sense that “There was an immediately perceptible vitality about her as if the nerves of her body were continually smouldering” (Fitzgerald, 25). This was what men saw in Myrtle that made her an object of longing.
He and his men fit the stereotype of men overcoming their feelings, at times hiding their fright and doubts about the journeys ahead. Within the tale of the Odyssey men are also weak to the enchantment of women; they are easily seduced even when they might not love the female character. Take for example when Ulysses falls subject to the charm of the legendary sirens (Homer, 800 B.C.E) he begs his men to let him loose of the ship’s mast in order to be able to get to the sirens. In a way men are looked at as weak when it comes to the female human flesh, this is not only true within The Odyssey but in real life as well. Overall the men in this narrative are very confident because no matter what they believe they will make it home without regard to the roughness of the situation they might find themselves in; this is especially true about Ulysses who is the leader of most of the males.
The most ironic thing that the reader should notice while analyzing this poem is that even though they are in two different time settings, the same persuasions are used as an argument in Marvell’s time as well as the present. Although he uses love and time as reasons why she should have sex with him, his main focus is her body. Marvell utilizes three distinctly different attitudes in each of the three stanzas to convince the reader that it is okay to make this argument to a woman. The young lady in “To His Coy Mistress” is definitely not to be taken for a mere fool because the narrator, an old man, would not have gone to great lengths to convince her to give her body to him. Marvell’s use of the word “coy” to describe the young lady shows her as bashful, hidden, and ‘a hard-to-get’ woman, in effect showing that she is still a virgin.
“My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun” is an easy sonnet compared to other love poems. The quatrains/couplet is the conflict and answer in the sonnet, of which there are three quatrain in this sonnet and one couplet. Shakespeare uses four comparisons, one for each line. Shakespeare states, “My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun” (1) which makes the first line mean he compares eyes like the sun. Shakespeare then says, “Coral is far more red than her lips’ red” (2) her lips are like coral.
April 4, 2013 Attitudes Towards Women in John Donne’s Poems John Donne’s Songs and Sonnets, considered to be his most popular since they were published in 1633, challenge the popular Petrarchan sonnet tradition of the time in which women’s beauty features were described (Greenblatt 1372). Donne’s poems about love and women tell the reader very little about the women, yet some of the Songs and Sonnets provide various representations of women that are often argued to be misogynistic. In this paper three of Donne’s Songs and Sonnets – “Song”, “Woman’s Constancy” and “A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning”- will be examined their misogynistic elements will be explored and discussed in the context of Donne`s life and the English society during Elizabethan England (1558 to 1603) and the Jacobean era during the reign of James 1 (1602-1625). Donne’s Songs and Sonnets, known as his love poems, were written over the course of two decades, from about 1595 to 1615, both before and after his marriage to Anne More in 1601, who died in 1617 ((Nutt 2). Poetry was a popular activity at the time and considered an important part of courtship (Nutt 2).