A02 Love Through the Ages - Poetry Language

Who So List to Hount (Wyatt)

Conceit - woman as a deer, status of pursuers, wildness, game / chase of love.
Fricatives, "fleeth afore / Faynting I followe"
Classical / religious reference (John C20) - "Noli me tangere for Cesars I ame / And wylde for to hold though I seme tame."

Sonnet 116 (Shakespeare)

Classical - "ever fixed mark... Lov's not Times foole"
Religion - "marriage of true mindes", love is a recognition of equality, not religious.
Rhyming couplet at end, highlights certainty of this position.

The Flea (Donne)

In media res - part of a greater argument.
Conceit - Compares sex to blood in a flea, meaningless, or irrelevent.
Shows argument, but implied woman's voice is never actually heard.

To His Coy Mistress (Marvell)

Flattery - "Thine Eyes, and on thy Forehead Gaze. / Two hundred to adore each Breast: / But thirty thousand to the rest. / An Age at least to every part, / And the last Age should show your heart."
Threatening - "Times winged Charriot hurrying near... The Grave's a fine and private place, / But none I think do there embrace."
Lust - "while youthful glew / Sits on thy skin like morning dew... let us sport us, while we may... like am'rous birds of prey."
Carpe Diem - "we cannot make our Sun / Stand still, yet we will make him run."

The Garden of Love (Blake)

"Garden of Love" - Adam and Eve, childhood innocence, liveliness.
Intrudes - "A chapel was built in the midst / Where I used to play on the green."
Innocence to Experience - "filled with graves / And tomb-stones where flowers should be." (polysyndeton)
Strangling the past - "priests in black gowns were walking their rounds, / And binding with briars my joys and desires."

Song (Ae Fond Kiss) (Burns)

Regret - "Had we never lov'd sae kindly, / had we never lov'd sae blindly! / Never met - or never parted, / We had ne'er been broken-hearted." (epinome)
Adoration - "thou first and fairest!.. thou best and dearest" (fricatives, plosive)
"Thine be ilka joy and treasure, / Peace, Enjoyment, Love and Pleasure!"

She Walks in Beauty Like the Night (Byron)

Duality - "all that's best of dark and bright / Meet in her aspect and her eyes"
Internal - "Where thoughts serenely sweet express / How pure, how dear their dwelling place." (Sibilance)
Admiration - "So soft, so calm, yet eloquent... But tell of days in goodness spent, / A mind at peace with all below, / A heart whose love in innocent!"

La Belle Dame Sans Merci. A Ballad (Keats)

Distraught - "Alone and paley loitering?... So haggard and so woe-begone?... lily on thy brow... on thy cheeks a fading rose / Fast withereth too."
Time - "The sedge has withered from the lake, / And no birds sing... The squirrel's granary is full, / And the harvest's done."
Romance - "faery's child... her eyes were wild... sing / A faery's song... relish sweet, / And honey wild, and manna-dew"
Sexual - ""fragrant zone; / She looked at me as she did love, / And made sweet moan... I set her on my pacing stead"
Her - "sure in language strange she said - / 'I love thee true'... she wept and sighed full sore... I shut her eyes / With kisses four."
Death of romance - "pale kings and princes too, / Pale warriors, death-pale... starved lips... horrid warning gaped wide"

At an Inn (Hardy)

Romance - "warmed as they opined... That we had all resigned / For love's dear ends."
Lack of love - "never the love-light shone... And palsied unto death / The pane-fly's tune."
Change - "As we seemed we were not.... now we seem not what / We aching are... once let us stand / As we stood then!"

Non Sum Qualis Eram Bonae sub Regno Cynarae (Dowson)

Lingering love - "And I was desolate and sick of an old passion... I have been faithful to thee, Cynara! In my fashion."
Gothic - "betwixt he lips and mine / There fell thy shadow, Cynara!"
Lust - "Night-long within mine arms in love and sleep she lay, / Surely the kisses of her bought red mouth were sweet... Yea hungry for the lips of my desire:" (zeugma)
Escape - "forgot much, Cynara! gone with the wind, Flung roses, roses riotously with the throng, / Dancing, to put thy pale, lost lilies out of mind"