Love can take many shapes and forms. There are many different kinds of love between human beings. Though it is often overlooked, intentionally or not, loss comes hand in hand with love; it is the second face of love that no one wants to see or experience. With love comes the potential to lose it as well. Nicole Krauss’s book, The History of Love, is really about loss.
Saying Goodbye To Someone You Love : Your Emotional Journey Through End Of Life And Grief. New York: DemosHealth, 2010. eBook Collection (EBSCOhost). Web. 25 Feb. 2014
If I were asked who the most precious people in my life are, I would undoubtedly answer: my family. They were the people whom I could lean on to matter what happens. Nonetheless, after overhearing my mother demanded a divorce, I could not love her as much as how I loved her once because she had crushed my belief on how perfect life was when I had a family. I felt as if she did not love me anymore. Poets like Philip Levine and Robert Hayden understand this feeling and depict it in their poems “What Work Is” and “Those Winter Sundays.” These poems convey how it feels like to not feel love from the family that should have loved us more than anything in the world. Yet, they also convey the reconciliation that these family members finally reach because the speakers can eventually see love, the fundamental component of every family in the world, which is always presence, indeed. Just like I finally comprehended the reason behind my mother’s decision was to protect me from living in poverty after my father lost his job.
As the millennia pass, the one recurring theme in all recorded literature within every culture and creed and can be witnessed in the animal kingdom at times, is the pursuit of love. A search for this unrequited passion taps into some of the most primal of urges and manifests itself biologically into a chemical high in the brain as a reward if it can be found. The lack of this natural intoxication can induce depression, amongst other side effects commonly found in substance abuse. When Lord Tennyson Alfred wrote “Tears, Idle Tears”, he composed a series of metaphors indicative of the aforementioned withdraw symptoms suffered by love. The poem suggests that he found a love that moved on through either death, or by estrangement of another means and the depressing struggle of reminiscing about those days that are no more.
This poem reflects on how when you lose someone you truly care about it affects you mentally. When we lose someone who we're really close to, we tend to hold a grudge and start questioning our love for the world. We lose ourselves when we
Biologically and emotionally, our hearts are more complex than many of us are aware of. They pump blood throughout our body, let us feel emotions, and is unrestrained to a multitude of possibilities. Brian Doyle in his essay “Joyas Voladoras” states “so much held in a heart in a lifetime. So much held in a heart in a day, an hour, a moment” to explain the numerous feelings the heart constantly expresses in every human and animal’s body. It can go from feeling love and happiness to sadness and despair within seconds. With the use of this essay, Doyle is conveying to his readers the immense possibilities of emotions that all of our hearts can hold.
when my husband died it was as if I also died. Over the 30 years we had been married my identity had become so interwoven with his that I hardly knew where he ended and I began. My own death, I thought, was perhaps the price I had to pay for deeply loving another — a suttee of the self on his funeral pyre. All the safety and security, all the sense of common purpose, meaning, and identity vanished. (2012, p. 2).
Overcoming the grief that is felt after losing a loved one is a physically and mentally agonizing task. According to Dr. Christina Hibbert, a clinical psychologist who graduated from the California School of Professional Psychology, three main stages of grief include anger, depression and acceptance. Each one of these emotions can be seen in William Shakespeare’s Hamlet and The Descendants (2011, Payne) as the artists explore the effects of grief and the different emotional responses that one can have due to the loss of a loved one. Additionally, in Ismail Kadare’s Broken April, the Berisha family feels the sufferance that is associated with unexpected death, as well as the various temperamental reactions that one will have after losing a loved one. Each of these works of art represent a powerful example of the stages that one will go through after feeling the intense sorrow that is connected with death, as well as the unavoidable effects of grief.
Loss and isolation are easy, yet difficult to write about. They are easy because every human being can empathize with loneliness. If someone denies this, they are lying because loneliness is a common feeling, anyone can relate. It’s hard because we don’t discuss loneliness or loss publicly very often, and when we do, we forget about it quickly. These poems contrast each other by speaking of the different types of loneliness and isolation, distinguishing between the ones of loss, and isolation in a positive perspective.
John Donne’s “A Valediction: Forbidden Mourning” is a poem written about a man who is explaining to his wife the state of their love and how it will be as he is preparing for a journey. The title illustrates a farewell to the speaker’s wife forbidding her to be unhappy and mournful at his depart. Donne compares the leaving to death of a man, but not as unfavorable because his absence is only temporary: “As virtuous men pass mildly away / and whisper to their souls to go... / Twere profanation of our joys / To tell the laity of our love” (1-8). The saying “Absence makes the heart grow fonder” parallels Donne’s words closely. The title of the poem uses the word mourning, suggesting that his leaving could cause similar actions that accompany death and grief. Perhaps the speaker does not want to see his wife mourning his leave of absence, because it will make his departure harder for both of them: “No tear-floods or sigh-tempest move” (6). The mere sight of his wife’s tears and the heartbreaking sound of her sigh could hinder his departure. Donne speaks of how earthquakes are very destructive, but their time apart will be a constructive activity that will inevitably strengthen their relationship. In addition to earthquakes, Donne also compares their feelings to the movement of the planets, in that they will know it is taking place: “But trepidation of spheres / Though greater for, is innocent” (11-12). Donne depicts the strengthening of the couple’s love by comparing it to someone hammering out gold. Their love may be stretched thin but it remains connected: “Not a breach, but an expansion / Like gold to airy thinness beat” (22-24). Near the end of the poem, Donne indicates that the couple’s love resembles a mathematical
Love is precious to every living soul on this planet. With the absence of love, people start contemplating their own worth. Every year, more than two million people die in the United States and this leaves millions of loved ones behind to grieve (Kerr). This can be said for someone who has lost a dear love, their spouse. The loss of a loved one can be the most traumatic event in a person’s life. According to the Psychiatric Times by the age of 65, “more than half of American women and ten percent of American men have been widowed at least once” (Hensley). My 83 year old mother became a widow some years back. The devastation she felt was true and all those around her could see the struggle she was beginning to face.
“In Memoriam A. H. H.,” a large collection of poems written by Alfred Lord Tennyson, is an extended expression of the poet's grief for the loss of his beloved friend Arthur Hallam. The poem takes the speaker on a journey that describes an individual’s struggle through the stages of grief. In 1969, Elisabeth Kübler-Ross first proposed five stages of grief which include denial, anger, bargaining, depression and finally acceptance in her book titled, “On Death and Dying.” Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’s universal stages of grief are expressed in Alfred Lord Tennyson’s poem “In Memoriam A. H. H.”
Love is a universal concept that has survived through the ages. With time, though, it also has become more complicated. Although, the concept of love becomes more complex, the story remains the same. In the poem, 'Parting, Without a Sequel,'; by John Crowe Ransom, the story of love is almost over, and the reader becomes a part of it at the end of the affair.
...remarkable capacity to go beyond and above what can be grasped by the senses. ?The Company of Lovers?, which literally associates love and death, contains a raw essence that supports attributes of reality which explores the connection between inner existence and actual reality, which is effectively and concisely represented through these use of poetic devices, such as paradox? and personification. Wright?s concern with love and death, a feminist and metaphysical issue, had been constantly in her thoughts. However, later in her life, once she had met her lover and had their daughter, she was able to accept death as not an enemy but as phase in the cyclical nature of life. Through the use and develop of poetic techniques, such as structure, language, imagery and movement, Wright has been able to address her concerns with love and death in a vivid but compacted manner.
Judith Wright’s 1946 poem “The Company of Lovers” makes a juxtaposition of two essential forces of major impact upon human existence, the effects of love and those of death. Within the poem it can be noted that the two stanzas reflect each of the certain themes. The first, a universal description of love and the ambitions two lovers might have, whilst the second a reflection of how quick all may soon be lost through the loneliness of death.