Both Catullus 5 and “Parentheses” by Khaela Maricich and Melissa Dyne’s band The Blow illustrate a love story that acts as a haven from society’s judgement. Despite being written over two thousand years apart, both works of poetry share a feeling of complete and all-encompassing love that is powerful enough to bring out one’s most vulnerable self. Sharing stylistic choices such as brevity and repetition, both works instill similar emotions of simplicity and contentment. The two poems even follow the same structure: beginning by addressing how the concerns of others do not matter, transitioning by using imagery of night to show comfort, and ending on an affirming description of love. While Catullus is mainly concerned about what specific men …show more content…
Pointing to the perceived imbalance of the passage of time, Catullus describes a “brevis lux” and “nox…perpetua” (Catullus 5.5-6). Though the day is commonly considered the main part of one’s life, Catullus flips night’s and day’s perceived lengths, denoting their respective significance to him. Both he and Lesbia go through their lives, experiencing little joy or time to show their true selves, leaving them in wait for the next time they see each other at night. The day, experienced with little critical thought or observation passes as a blur of inactivity and anticipation. For the two of them, it is a time for rest while others do business. However, as the sun sets, the roles switch. Though the night is slept by most, Catullus and Lesbia are together when it falls, unwilling to sleep due to their utter devotion to each other. This long-awaited nighttime lasts forever in their eyes, as they are free from others critical sight and allowed to be truly in love. While Catullus uses night and day to show importance, “Parentheses” personifies the daylight, reflecting the situation of the audience. Maricich and Dyne, supporting their argument that one needs to rest now and again, write, “Even day takes relief every day from its work making light from the night” (Dyne and Maricich 9-10). Though masking its meaning in repetition and ambiguity, Maricich and …show more content…
Catullus uses anaphora with “dein,” “mille,” and “centum” to describe the overflow of love that has been withheld during the day (Catullus 5.7-10). Each repetition of the words brings an over-the-top demeanor to the poem, evoking more powerful emotions in the reader due to their love. The thousands upon thousands of kisses that Catullus describes serve as hyperbole to further emphasize the inordinate scale of their affection. By stating that he and Lesbia are unable to keep track of their kisses, Catullus creates a situation in which they are so in love that their time in each other’s company swirls together, lost in a sea of passion and dizziness. This time spent together is when both Catullus and Lesbia are truly at peace, comforted by each other’s presence. Likewise, Maricich and Dyne sing of a time that mirrors Catullus’s, in which another person serves as a haven of safety and acceptance. Continuing the imagery of the strength of the letter “I,” Maricich and Dyne write, “When you’re holding me, we make a pair of parentheses,” creating a sweet depiction of two people embracing, enclosing something unsaid between them (Dyne and Maricich 11-12). With the company of another, the constant need to stay strong and presentable is broken down, allowing for one to feel safe and accepted as their true and unfiltered self. The love between
Love. Love is generous, boundless and is one of the greatest gifts one can obtain from God, however when in love anything can transpire. And that is exactly how the poets Mariam Waddington’s, “Thou Didst Say Me” and Alfred Tennyson’s, “Now Sleeps the Crimson Petal” navigate their poems. Both offering conflicting sentiments toward love relations to the table and ultimately delivering a unique testimony about the subject of, love.
Love, partnership and commitment have been the subjects of a multitude of novels, plays poems, movies and great works of art. Throughout these works, the image of love and commitment in love have taken many different forms. Today, we easily recognize symbols of commitment in love to be items such as hearts, wedding bands, roses, etc. However, in literature, especially, more abstract and creative symbols of commitment to a loved one are often present. Additionally, the symbols of devotion that exist in literature do not always involve romantic love as opposed to many movies, painting and sculptures. For example, in the short story, “Saving Sourdi” by May-Lee Chai, symbols of loyalty to a loved one manifest between two sisters. In opposition to symbols of loyalty existing in a platonic manner as it does in “Saving Sourdi,” Peter Meinke’s “The Cranes,” provides symbols of commitment in an amorous relationship.
Charlotte Lennox’s opinion towards love is expressed clearly in her piece “A Song.” The poem’s female speak...
The speaker’s rocky encounter with her ex-lover is captured through personification, diction, and tone. Overall, the poem recaps the inner conflicts that the speak endures while speaking to her ex-lover. She ponders through stages of the past and present. Memories of how they were together and the present and how she feels about him. Never once did she broadcast her emotions towards him, demonstrating the strong facade on the outside, but the crumbling structure on the inside.
This poem includes quotes with informal language that children or teens would better understand. It’s narrative-based style is easy to follow, and although the poem covers very basic concepts, it’s message is still communicated subliminally. This particular poem is interesting because it focusses on the universal experience of pain and it’s relation to time. Similar to this is “The Householder”, written in a cyclical style, opening with a “house” and ending with a “home”. With only three stanzas, it is
In poem number five; Catullus is expressing his love for Lesbia. He says that their love that they posses is internal and how he is so fond of her kisses. After reading this poem you get the idea that they kiss very often and their kissing is the symbol of their love. This is relevant to today’s society with young couples starting a relationship. Once the relationship starts to become intimate, then they couple start to kiss more often and devote their love to one another. Although in no place in the text does it say if they were in a relationship or even married, you could infer that they were very intimate with each other.
I have elected to analyze seven poems spoken by a child to its parent. Despite a wide variety of sentiments, all share one theme: the deep and complicated love between child and parent.
Literature shows us the changes of our society from time to time. It also gives us an idea about people, culture, politics, gender traditions, as well as an overall view of previous civilizations. As a part of literature, poetry introduces us to different cultures with different perspectives. Ancient Egypt and ancient China may differ in terms of culture, politics, economic stability, tradition, or even in religious belief. However, in poetry, especially in love lyrics both Egyptian and Chinese poems portray common area of describing women, social attitudes toward love, sexuality and the existence of romance or selfishness in relationships. . If we look at the Egyptian poem “My god, my Lotus” and the Chinese poem “Fishhawk”, we will see both poems have similarities in describing relationships. Also, they have the similarity of imagining the lovers and their expression of love toward each other. However, both poems have some significant differences in terms of representing female sexuality, gender disparity and the display of love.
The Lais of Marie de France is a compilation of short stories that delineate situations where love is just. Love is presented as a complex emotion and is portrayed as positive, while at other times, it is portrayed as negative. The author varies on whether or not love is favorable as is expressed by the outcomes of the characters in the story, such as lovers dying or being banished from the city. To demonstrate, the author weaves stories that exhibit binaries of love. Two distinct types of love are described: selfish and selfless. Love is selfish when a person leaves their current partner for another due to covetous reasons. Contrarily, selfless love occurs when a lover leaves to be in a superior relationship. The stark contrast between the types of love can be analyzed to derive a universal truth about love.
Pablo Neruda’s “My ugly love” and William Shakespeare’s “Sonnet 130” are commonly well-known to describe beauty in a way hardly anyone would write: through the truth. It’s a popular fact that many modern-day poets compose poems that make love seem perfect and use phrases that often costume the truth by masking true beauty with words. Yet, Shakespeare and Neruda, both sincere people, chose to write about what love really is, it matters more what’s on the inside than what is found on the outside. The theme of true beauty and love are found through Shakespeare and Neruda’s uses of reflection of imagery, uses of organized structure, and uses of sensory devices to describe the meaning of beauty and love.
This poem dramatizes the conflict between love and lust, particularly as this conflict relates to what the speaker seems to say about last night. In the poem “Last Night” by Sharon Olds, the narrator uses symbolism and sexual innuendo to reflect on her lust for her partner from the night before. The narrator refers to her night by stating, “Love? It was more like dragonflies in the sun, 100 degrees at noon.” (2, 3) She describes it as being not as great as she imagined it to be and not being love, but lust. Olds uses lust, sex and symbolism as the themes in the story about “Last night”.
Robert Browning’s “My Last Duchess” is a haunting poem that tells the story of a seemingly perfect wife who dies, and then is immortalized in a picture by her kind and loving husband. This seems to be the perfect family that a tragic accident has destroyed. Upon further investigation and dissection of the poem, we discover the imperfections and this perfect “dream family” is shown for what it really was, a relationship without trust.
The purpose of this essay is to analyze and compare and contrast the two paired poems “My Last Duchess” by Robert Browning and “My Ex-Husband” by Gabriel Spera to find the similarities presented within the pairs. Despite the monumental time difference between “My Last Duchess” and “My Ex-Husband”, throughout both poems you will see that somebody is wronged by someone they thought was a respectable person and this all comes about by viewing a painting on the wall or picture on a shelf.
In “Sonnet XVII,” the text begins by expressing the ways in which the narrator does not love, superficially. The narrator is captivated by his object of affection, and her inner beauty is of the upmost significance. The poem shows the narrator’s utter helplessness and vulnerability because it is characterized by raw emotions rather than logic. It then sculpts the image that the love created is so personal that the narrator is alone in his enchantment. Therefore, he is ultimately isolated because no one can fathom the love he is encountering. The narrator unveils his private thoughts, leaving him exposed and susceptible to ridicule and speculation. However, as the sonnet advances toward an end, it displays the true heartfelt description of love and finally shows how two people unite as one in an overwhelming intimacy.
This was shown in the quotation “You still flowered in songs, you still broke in currents, oh pit of debris, open and bitter well.” From this the floral imagery of “flowering” is used to describe the speaker’s love, as being beautiful as floral imagery is, yet by pairing it with the nautical imagery of “broke in currents” with being a ”pit of debris” shows this love transforming as something undesirable, and the ruins of a structure “debris”. In this piece the use of anaphora emphasises the idea of the change of the love between the pair, as from line 45 the repetition of “you still” describes things their lover had done, such as blossoming like a flower, yet emphasising the change as the woman’s fluidity is similar to that of the