Love in Literature and Poetry: Chopin, Millay, Sexton and Shakespeare
Love provides the underlying impetus and thematic content in many works of literature, especially poetry. In its various forms and expressions, love is the driving force of life, the magnetism uniting mother to child, lover to lover, friend to friend. However, love is not always portrayed as a liberating, life-giving force in works of poetry and poets especially disagree on the role romantic love plays in the human experience. Millay and Shakespeare use the sonnet, a form of poetry reserved almost exclusively for the theme of love, to convey starkly different opinions about love's power and its impact on human beings. Written by a male poet, Shakespeare's Sonnet 18 also reveals specifically how romance has affected men. On the other hand, Edna Millay, Anne Sexton and Kate Chopin both write about romantic love from a female point of view and their respective works share several core thematic elements in common. For Millay as well as for Chopin and Sexton, love is an
The narrator admits that if she were able to sell or trade love for food or for peace, "I do not think I would," (line 14). As she contemplates her loss, Louise becomes emotionally and psychically liberated, a "goddess of Victory. " Having lived her life through and for her husband, Louise notes, "There would be no powerful will bending hers in that blind persistence with which men and women believe they have a right to impose a private will upon a fellow-creature. Whereas flowers fade and the sun is occasionally obscured by clouds, love is eternal. Distanced from each other in spirit, the narrator feels "alone" and ultimately she claims that her husband would be better off dead. The farmer's wife knows but "will not say" that "there / must be more to living," (line 11). Using the medium of a sonnet to paint an ironic picture of love's impact on human beings, Millay states in the first line that "Love is not all: It is not meat nor drink. Although the poet mentions death: "Nor shall Death brag thou wander'st in his shade," he does so to illustrate love's everlasting power. Sexton describes "that old pantomime of love" in her free-verse poem "The Farmer's Wife. Edna Millay shares Sexton's and Chopin's view of love as a fatal and imprisoning force. Similarly, Kate Chopin describes the oppressive and fatal force of live in her short story "The Story of an Hour. oppressive, even fatal force; whereas for Shakespeare love means the opposite: eternal life. In stark contrast to the visions of romantic love conveyed by the female writers, Shakespeare presents an innocent, uplifting, and possibly naive ode to romance in Sonnet 18. Yet, the narrator observes how people easily become "pinned down" by the need for love, driven toward romantic interludes as if out of a death wish (line 10). " The titular narrator laments the sad routine into which she and her husband have slipped.
Common topics in this essay:
Sexton's Chopin's,
Farmer's Wife,
,
Protagonist Louise,
Kate Chopin,
Millay Shakespeare,
Chopin Sexton,
Nor Death,
Love Louise,
Shakespeare's Sonnet,
romantic love,
oppressive fatal force,
impact human,
view love,
edna millay,
kate chopin,
farmer's wife,
fatal force,
sonnet 18,
oppressive fatal,
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Acceptance Essays
