Sharon Olds was born in 1942 in San Francisco. After graduating from Stanford she moved east to earn a Ph.D. in English from Columbia University. Olds describes the completion of her doctorate as a transitional moment in her life: standing on the steps of the library at Columbia University, she vowed to become a poet, even if it meant giving up everything she had learned. The vow she made--to write her own poetry, no matter how bad it might be--freed her to develop her own voice. Olds has published eight volumes of poetry, includes The Dead and the Living (1984), The Wellspring (1996), The Gold Cell, (1987) etc. As in her earlier works, she has been praised for the courage and emotional power of her work which continues to witness pain, love, desire, and grief with persistent courage. "Sex Without Love," by Sharon Olds passionately describes the author's disgust for casual sex and her attitude toward loveless sex as a cold and harmful act. She brilliantly uses various poetic techniques to animate the immortality of loveless sex through her words and her great description evoke clear image in the reader mind. One of the characteristics of Sharon Olds' poems is she likes to focus on bodily experience. And inside this poem, Sharon Olds frequently uses similes to help the audience to imagine the actual events of sex. For example in line 2, Olds uses "Beautiful as dancers" to describe the beauty of making love, but at the same time she also questions how people can do such a beautiful thing with someone whom they are not in love with. Another simile the poet uses in line 6, 7 and 8, "As wet as the children at birth whose mothers are going to give them away," and line 11, 12 and 13, "light rising slowly as steam off their joined skin... ... middle of paper ... ...e people sexual desires just like runners concern about their health. As in the end of the poem, Olds reminds people the truth, "the single body alone in the universe against its own best time", after that short period of happiness, individual is still alone in the universe and "competing" against "its own best time". Sex is more than just a physical act. It's a beautiful way to express love. When people have sex just to fulfill a physical need, as the poet believes sex outside of love-based relationship only harms and cheapens sex. In the beginning of the poem, Olds brilliantly describe the beauty of sex, and then in the second half of the poem, she continues reference to the cold and aloneness which clearly shows her opinions about causal sex. Through this poem, Sharon Olds, has expressed her complete disrespect for those who would participate in casual sex.
“We make love and the dry sheets crackle in blue sparks” (25). This was clearly a reference to a sexual encounter by the main persona in the poem. “Water slides vein by vein over the face of stone” (25). This is the physical act of weeping by the main character. At this point, I do not feel like the author has conveyed anything significant, but that is when I noticed something interesting. The author just described two very intense and opposite emotions in quick succession; sex, which is an emotionally uplifting experience, and then weeping, a form of emotion that occurs in extreme distress. The act of sex could not prevent the main persona from feeling piercing sadness immediately after the act, a sadness which pushes the main character to the point of
"Sex without Love" is a poem by Sharon Old, who states in the opening line "How do they do it, the ones who make love without love?" It starts out with judging those, who have sex outside of having feeling for one another. It describes the sex in the third line as without feeling more as a techniques, which is describe "beautiful as dancers.. over each other like ice skaters." Sex without love to the author is described more as an act, which is performed instead of two people in love, who sex is in love not because of the act but instead of the love of the person. The author seems to climax in the literal sense at line nine : come to the Come to the … then God comes in picture after the act is done. Judgment and sin is the mood of this poem of how two people can commit an act of a heart and soul without disappointed God.
The speaker compares the moment before a kiss to “syntax,” suggesting that, oftentimes, much thought goes into the forming of an emotion. He quickly juxtaposes this, however, against a relationship with nature. Immediately following this kiss, he remarks that this prior mentality has caused him “wholly to be a fool” (cummings 5). Throughout the middle of the poem, he compares the human body to the flourishing of the world. This is first introduced this in the second stanza, as he writes that “Spring is in the world” (6). This evokes imagery of life, of rebirth, of the sun rising to vanquish the cold winter behind us. The speaker goes on to speak of “kisses” from his lover, stating that “my blood approves,” in other words, races at the introduction of unreserved affection (7). If we analyze the symbolism in these lines, we can read them as the short narrative of a moment of enlightenment. The speaker, who has previously approached life in an analytical manner, has been suddenly inspired by the tenderness of a kiss. He realizes, in a flash of emotional impulse, that his prior lifestyle, his careful attention to “the syntax of things” has been dishonest (3).
Everyone in the world has one thing in common. Every single person wants love. Ted Hughes’s beautiful poem “A Moon-Lily” uses an extended metaphor to compare a moon-lily to love. At the poem’s beginning, the speaker describes the “moon-lily” as “marvelously white” (1). The speaker uses the color white as a symbol of purity, wholeness, and completeness. A person feels whole and complete when they are in love. The speaker is implying that the flower is love and that the love is pure. The persona uses this image of love to describe the type of love one person tries to give to another. In this poem the person giving the love is the woman and the person refusing their love is the man. In Hughes’s “A Moon-Lily” the speaker compares a moon-lily to
In her eyes, cucumbers are pesky perverts with an anal fetish, carrots are passionate but worried lovers, peas are prudish, and onions are entirely self obsessed. The poems are at once funny and relatable, covering various ways sex is seen by people in society in a way that’s not alienating or deliberately button-pushing. It’s simple truth through a lens of good humor, a signature trait of her
Passionate love has a sexual theme to it in Sharon Olds’ poem Last Night. The poem takes different twists and turns while the speaker is living through this passionate sexual experience. In the first line the speaker declares: “I am almost afraid” (1). The speaker is implying that they are afraid of this experience and love. The second line of Last
In the poem "To his Coy Mistress" Andrew Marvell tells a subtle and valid argument as to why women should fall in love with him. He attempts this through form and imagery and through manipulatative reasoning. Marvell, a well-known politician, held office in Cromwell's government and represented Hull to Paraliament during the Restoration. Sharon Olds' poem "Sex without Love," uses imagery to question how sex is fullfilling without love. Sharon was born in San Francisco on Novemeber 19, 1942. She earned a Bachelor's Degree at Stanford University and a PhD at Columbia University.
"Your girl catches you cheating" (Diaz 1) and from the first line readers are thrown into the chauvinistic tendencies and sexist point of view of one Yunior de Las Casas. Readers are guided through Junot Diaz’s “The Cheaters Guide to Love” by the misogynist Yunior who sees women in an exclusively sexual sense, some of whom he does not even give the honor of naming. Feminists might look at Diaz's story and be skeptical of the themes presented, seeing as Yunior sexualizes and demeans all women. So then, how can readers understand the story to be anti-sexist if the only point of view presented in "The Cheater's Guide to Love" is a discriminatory one? The ultimate horizon for anyone with this much bottled up machismo is an empty sexual relationship with a parade of objectified women. Diaz, however, does not give Yunior the what the reader expects as his desired ending. He rather shows the reader that Yunior's behavior results in persistent unhappiness because what he really wants is a true human connection. Therefore, Diaz provides a sexist character
Immeasurable passion surges through her body, saturating her sensations, until they steadily seep out, exposing her raw and natural desires. Words of a woman can only be conveyed by she who has felt the intense infatuation and deep withholding of desire to cherish a person as her lover. Emily Dickinson achieved this through the expression of her words as she captivated and enraptured her audience through brilliant metaphors in her poem “Wild Nights—Wild Nights!” Her poem elucidates her longing to sexually sanctify her adoration with someone she is deprived of.
“The meeting of two personalities is like the contact of two chemical substances: if there is any reaction, both are transformed” (Jung, 1965). This quote accurately sums up the biological/neurobiological aspect pertaining to love. It is from this quote that we may deduce that when love is reciprocal, it is due to the chemical balance of both individuals. However, the biological aspect of love focuses on one individual and their physiological reactions when love is experienced. According to Chapman (2011), “in order to understand the brain’s response to love, one must examine the brain and fully comprehend the myriad array of structures involved. One of the main structures involved with falling in love is the limbic system. The particular
Adrienne Rich’s “Twenty-One Love Poems,” which explore the nature of lesbian love, differ strikingly from classic love poems written by a man to a woman, such as Andrew Marvell’s “To His Coy Mistress” and Thomas Campion’s “There Is a Garden in Her Face.” Rich’s poems focus on the “us” aspect of love, the concept of two strong, yet imperfect women facing all oppositions together, while the love poems written by men are far more reverent, almost worshipful of their subjects. The lesbian poems have a sense of love being “real”, a connection based on far more than physical attraction, whereas the men’s poems focus on an idealized view of the woman: beautiful, pure, distant. The women in Marvell and Campion’s poems are lovely façades, storybook figures without any real depth or imperfections. Perhaps the lesbian love poems could be seen as less eloquent, or less flawlessly romantic, but the romance in them is found in the genuine nature of the love. Rich is doubtlessly writing about experiences she has had, real people she has loved, whereas Marvell and Campion could ostensibly be writing about any beautiful, but otheriwse characterless, woman that they’ve seen.
But when the images are examined more closely he finds "something narcissistic in the performance of fine dancers and ice skaters" (line 20) Sutton. "Sex without love." Shows a "contrast between surface approval and deeper criticism of the ones who make love/without love" (Line 2). Many images within the poem appear to suggest that the speaker appreciates when partners pursue in sex without love, but when the images are closely analyzed within the poem, a more weary tone is shown from the speaker. Olds beautiful way of using imagery makes this poem come to reality. Olds uses similes every time throughout the poem to make the spectators to imagine the pictures in their minds. For example, Olds describes being intimacy as being as “beautiful as dancers.” (Line 2) In this line, she questions how one can do such a beautiful act with a person when you are not even in love with
... as a helping hand to such people with grief and sorrows. All in all, Sexton was a wonderful poet at heart. Her poetry has left a deep impact on me. It can never be easy to read and clearly understand a person, whose writings are mainly touching the topics of mental illnesses and suicide. It is morally difficult for me to read the poetry that is imbued with death and depression. Anne Sexton’s creations were as controversial as day and night and I could clearly see that in every single line or verse. The absence of rhyme gives the impression of the free flow of independent thoughts. She was the author that wasn’t ashamed to write about things that were prohibited; moreover, her poetry makes every reader think and cogitate. It isn’t the type of poetry you read for fun over a cup of coffee, it was written for the purpose of bringing the reader aesthetic satisfaction.
Similes such as “glinting like bent plates of blood behind his head” ease the reader into the foretelling of the dysfunction that awaits this ill-fated couple (Olds lines 4-5) (Seeley 7). The comparison to blood is harsh and unexpected and directly contrasts to the mention of the formal gates of the college in line one. Her clear cut imagery and contrast between the beautiful and unexpected contribute directly to the tone of anger felt towards her parents. The alliteration in lines four to seven is also an example of how Olds forms rhythm while still keeping her own style. Olds jumps from the image of seeing her parents as if in a picture to picking them up like paper dolls. “ I take them up like the male and female paper dolls and bang them together at the hips like chips of flint as if to strike sparks from them” (Olds 26-29). The jump from one abstract image to another could cause the reader to lose touch with the original image, but this line gives the reader a feeling of both sexual excitement and the resulting disaster this excitement will cause (Seeley 8). Although the jump may be risky, it gives the illusion that the power is in the narrator’s hands, when in fact it is not. Pictures in this poem are comprehensible and immediate and are perceived by the senses and mind (Asian Journal of Literature 82). Without the specificity of her images, the pictures created would
The poets integrated ?metaphysical conceits? as focal parts of these poems. Along with these, they used effective language as a basis for their convincing arguments, they included subjects of periodical importance (e.g. ?courtship? and ?religion?), and use very clever structures that are manipulated in order to make the poem read in the desired way. The very clear indication of the theme in question was strongly aided by the way in which the personas portrayed the emotions they felt and the way they showed their attitudes towards the subject. Considering all these factors, the poets made critical arguments to the mistresses in order to alter their views, thus changing their minds, on denying the poets the sex that they desired so strongly.