Love According to Browning, Dickinson, Shakespeare and Harris
Men and women are very different creatures. We express our emotions differently. Women are typically ready to marry, settle down and have children much earlier than men. Men tend to want to experience life before settling. Yet, there is one thing we have in common. In relationships, men and women want to be loved for the person they are and for the rest of their lives.
When people begin dating, they are usually playing the field. Few have a strategy for finding their life mate. It is something that happens over time and as you continue to see that person and get to know them, a bond builds that is not easily broken. This is demonstrated in "Wild Nights - Wild Nights!" By Emily Dickinson. "Futile - the winds-/ to a heart in port-/ Done with the compass/ Done with the chart" (line 5-8). No matter how hard outside forces try to tempt you away, you are finished searching for your true love. You have found it and are holding fast.
We are all initially searching for romantic love that will hold fast through a lifetime. Romantic love is defined as love that is unrealistic, fanciful, passionate and fabulous. In "Beginning of the Songs of Delight", Papyrus Harris 500 demonstrates fanciful love through "…apportioned to you is my heart,/ I do for you what it desires,/ when I am in your arms" (lines 1-3). In Shakespeare's "Othello", the Moor and Desdemona declare their love for one another, at the protest of her father and the disbelief of the councilmen (Act I, scene iii). Their romantic love was unrealistic because of their age difference, and fanciful because she was intrigued by the stories of heroism and daring that he imparted to her.
Passionate love is, by definition, ruled by intense emotion and marked by intense feelings as is expressed in "My body thrives, my heart exults/ At our walking together;/ Hearing your voice is pomegranate wine,/ I live by hearing it./ Each look with which you look at me/Sustains me more than food and drink" (lines 24-29). Love such as this can sustain us through all the joys and challenges life has to offer if it is without condition. Unconditional love endures over time. "But love me for love's sake, that evermore/ thou mayst love on, through love's eternity" (Browning, 260), speaks of love that is grounded in love alone and will last all forever.
Elizabeth Barrett Browning follows ideal love by breaking the social conventions of the Victorian age, which is when she wrote the “Sonnets from the Portuguese”. The Victorian age produced a conservative society, where marriage was based on class, age and wealth and women were seen as objects of desire governed by social etiquette. These social conventions are shown to be holding her back, this is conveyed through the quote “Drew me back by the hair”. Social conventions symbolically are portrayed as preventing her from expressing her love emphasising the negative effect that society has on an individual. The result of her not being able to express her love is demonstrated in the allusion “I thought one of how Theocritus had sung of the sweet
The 1800’s were a bad time for the United States. A new country and already we had vastly differing opinions on one topic: slavery. People were on one extreme or the other, resulting in heated debates and fights over laws and regulations. A revolutionary of her time and an escaped slave, Harriet Tubman was singlehandedly the most effective Underground Railroad “conductor” there ever was. If it were not for her, many slaves would never have been freed from the institution of slavery. Rebellious and set on attaining her freedom from a young age, she never let anyone keep her in her “place.” The 11th child in a family and illiterate her entire life, she managed to set over 300 slaves free in a period of about ten years.
The ideal love within the drama is the one existing initially between the hero and Desdemona. Francis Ferguson in “Two Worldviews Echo Each Other” describes the love existing between the protagonist and his wife and how it is an easy prey for the antagonist:
Love is a powerful emotion, capable of turning reasonable people into fools. Out of love, ridiculous emotions arise, like jealousy and desperation. Love can shield us from the truth, narrowing a perspective to solely what the lover wants to see. Though beautiful and inspiring when requited, a love unreturned can be devastating and maddening. In his play, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, William Shakespeare comically explores the flaws and suffering of lovers. Four young Athenians: Demetrius, Lysander, Hermia, and Helena, are confronted by love’s challenge, one that becomes increasingly difficult with the interference of the fairy world. Through specific word choice and word order, a struggle between lovers is revealed throughout the play. In A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Shakespeare uses descriptive diction to emphasize the impact love has on reality and one’s own rationality, and how society’s desperate pursuit to find love can turn even strong individuals into fools.
In "A Midsummer Night's Dream," William Shakespeare explains the difficulties of the nature of love. Both false love and true love prevail in the end, leading the reader to come to the conclusion that all types of love can triumph. Hermia and Lysander represent the existence of a "true love", while Helena and Demertrius represent the opposite extreme. Shakespeare presents the idea that love is unpredictable and can cause great confusion. Love is something that cannot be explained, it can only be experienced. Shakespeare challenges us to develop our own idea of what love truly is.
She was an abolitionist who guided many, many, many slaves to their freedom, and she was very important during the Civil War as a nurse. Harriet married a man named John Tubman, who was a free black. John didn’t support her wanting to escape to Philadelphia so she went alone. When Harriet came back to rescue him, she had discovered that he had already remarried. A little while after that, she married a man named Nelson Davis and they adopted a little girl named Gertie. As Harriet got older, her head injury got worse and she just became sicker and sicker. She died of pneumonia in 1913 when she was 93 years old. After she died, The U.S. postal service issued a stamp in her honor and her gravestone is listed on the national register of historic places. Yes, to someone who only knew about the awards and recognition she received, and had no idea what her childhood was like, she sounds like someone who had an amazing life, great education, and was overall a privileged person. But as you can see, that is not the case. It is astonishing how Harriet Tubman was able to put up with all of that torture from her childhood, and still do great things. Her childhood was horrible, but if all of those things never happened, she never would have had the strength and determination risk her life everyday, causing her to be one of the most famed people in US
A historic phenomenon known as the Underground Railroad left an immense impact on the history of slaves and abolitionists. A notorious woman by the name of Harriet Tubman had a paramount role in this audacious and venturesome event. She was even nicknamed Moses from the Bible! Multitudinous slaves had followed Harriet, trusting her as their leader to guide them through the routes of the Underground Railroad; therefore, it is suitable and appropriate to say Harriet Tubman was an extraordinary heroine. Her fervid and passionate determination made her capable of traveling to the Underground Railroad. Using that driven motivation, she assisted countless slaves to their freedom.
William Shakespeare, an illustrious and eminent playwright from the Elizabethan Age (16th Century) and part owner of the Globe theatre wrote A Midsummer Night’s Dream in which he portrays the theme of love in many different ways. These include the paternal love seen in the troubled times for Egeus and his rebellious daughter Hermia, true Love displayed with the valiant acts of Lysander and Hermia and the destructive love present in the agonizing acts of Titania towards her desperate lover Oberon. Through the highs and lows of love, the first love we clasp is the paternal love from our family.
In his discussions of constitutions and cities in Politics, Aristotle makes it very clear that his top priority is to provide people with the opportunity to pursue and achieve the good life. An integral part of this is the stability of the constitution. Although Aristotle explicitly states that a kingship is the best system of rule for any given generation, its lack of stability from one generation to the next disqualifies it from being the best in reality. In his attempts to find a constitution with stability, Aristotle comes to the decision that the middle class would be the ruler of such a constitution. This, he says, will minimize the corruption that can easily take place within the rich or the poor, and will ensure lasting stability. In order to enable the middle class to take a role of power, Aristotle allows them to obtain wealth, and more specifically private property—a huge diversion from the opinion of Aristotle’s mentor, Plato put forth in the Republic.
One of Harriet’s greatest achievements is that Harriet had worked as a nurse in the civil war. During the Civil war Harriet had worked in a hospital helping wounded soldiers. For four years and hard effort she did not ...
As explained in the last paragraph, love is one of the major emotions in Othello. In the play, the actions committed by characters consumed by love are greatly amplified. Two characters that exemplify this are Othello and Desdemona. Throughout the first two acts, some of their actions are unrealistic for a couple in love. Take this quote, for example: ?Brabantio: Raise all my kindred! Are they married, think you? / Roderigo: Truly I think they are. / Brabantio: O heaven! How got she out? O treason of the blood!? (I:i:166-168). Othello and Desdemona are so consumed by love that they elope with no intention of telling anyone else, as evidenced by Brabantio?s reaction in the quote. They just acted according to their love without thinking of the effects of their elopement. Roderigo is also a prime example of how an emotion like love has near complete control of the characters? actions in the play. Roderigo is in love with Desdemona, and it seems that his actions are almost solely dri...
In all of Shakespeare's plays, there is a definitive style present, a style he perfected. From his very first play (The Comedy of Errors) to his very last (The Tempest), he uses unique symbolism and descriptive poetry to express and explain the actions and events he writes about. Twelfth Night, The Tempest and A Midsummer Night's Dream are all tragicomedies that epitomise the best use of the themes and ideology that Shakespeare puts forth.
Attitudes Towards Love in Pre-1900 and 1990's Poetry “The Despairing Lover” written by William Walsh was written pre 1900 whilst the second poem “I Wouldn’t Thank you for a Valentine” by Liz Lockhead was written in the 1990’s. These poems are almost a century apart. Attitude towards love changes over time and these poems represent this. I Wouldn’t Thank you for a Valentine is about how people think about Valentine’s Day in the 1990’s, while The Despairing Lover is showing what people think and how important they see love in the 1990’s.
Art has had its roots, one may argue, when civilization was born. With each respective civilization and time periods from the past, humans have formed a diverse and unique society, a group of people with their own individual characteristics, cultures, as well as philosophies within which all kinds of differing ideas, thoughts and opinions are always brought upon for challenge and evaluation. These distinct aspects of a culture and/or time period may be recorded by people in varying forms of expression we all know as art. Directly from where culture had originated, events and/or emotions from that time period have been reflected or directly recorded in the arrangement of pictures i.e. paintings from the past which inform us about the people’s experiences and events in the past historical periods. Ultimately, History is the record of the development and how we have evolved as humans together in a society. History can be expressed and reflected in different kinds of music, sculptures, as well as paintings. There are several different periods of Art, each has contributed and reflected to how a society was. Art has been usually used by historians as one of the vehicles of history to illustrate and illuminate it as they are able to recognize that some types of art may be able to help them identify and explain the nature of societies and periods in history. Art and society have counteracted with each different type bringing forth new arts and new societies for many generations to come. Ideas have caused responses by citizens and therefore bring forth several different types of influences on a period’s background, heredity, and environments. These influences are then translated into new a idea, which then triggers the circle to repeat it...
Art has been one of the most inspiring actions to humans throughout the whole history of mankind. Art represented in its various forms is