There are two sides to every story. Where one might see love and passion another sees burden and indifference. Such is the case with Peter de Vries “To His Importunate Mistress”, a comedic parody of the 17th century work by Andrew Marvell, “To His Coy Mistress”. Peter de Vries uses satire and rhyme as a way to present a humorous approach to the reality and consequence of a modern day extra-marital affair.
While poetry is a literary art that takes on many somber subjects, some feel that humor and profound thought reside on opposite ends of the spectrum. In reality, the use of humor can open a pathway to a new perspective, yet still maintain depth and meaning. With “To His Importunate Mistress”, the narrator accomplishes this by separating concepts and finding their opposite meaning; dividing words, gender and symbols. While the subject being parodied is a somber story of love, Peter de Vries presents the tale of adultery with less merit.
The opposing view begins with the title and establishes a tone by substituting the word coy with importunate. When one reads the word coy, its syn...
...seful miscommunication between men and women. Lastly, when looking through the imagined perspective of the thoughtless male tricksters, the reader is shown the heartlessness of men. After this reader’s final consideration, the main theme in each of the presented poems is that both authors saw women as victims of a male dominated society.
One of Hogarth’s bitterest satires, Marriage à la Mode, showed the disastrous results of a marriage of convenience concluded between the son of a poverty-stricken nobleman and the daughter of an aspiring merchant (Jarrett 88). Yet this background information is not necessary to appreciate each painting independently. From the first painting, in which the ambitious fathers of the couple exchange money and titles, to the final two prints that show the husband and wife’s melodramatic deaths, each of the six prints tells both a episode in the story of this doomed arranged marriage and a story in and of itself. The first two Marriage à la Mode prints, The Marriage Settlement and Shortly After the Marriage, both contain numerous works of art, architecture, period dress and other carefully placed props that allow each work to tell a story without being dependent on the context of the series.
In the 16th century romances of chivalry had enjoyed a tremendous vogue. He wrote a humorous parody of these high-flown chronicles. His original intent was to write a book for wide popular appeal, addressed not to the few of...
"What say you? can you love the gentleman? This night you shall behold him at our feast; Read o'er the volume of young Paris' face, And find delight writ there with beauty's pen; Examine every married lineament, And see how one another lends content; And what obscur'd in this fair volume lies Find written in the margent of his eyes. This precious book of love, this unbound lover, To beautify him, only lacks a cover: The fish lives in the sea; and 'tis much pride For fair without the fair within to hide: That book in many's eyes doth share the glory, That in gold clasps locks in the golden story; So shall you share all that he doth possess, By having him, maki...
Beauty’s sisters marry rich men, who seemingly have acceptably desirable attributes as husbands. One man is detailed as a man of good looks. The other man is noted for having great wit. The two possess qualities most women seek in a husband, but it is indicated in descriptions that the two sisters are both unhappy in their marriages. Although the first husband is handsome, this serves him as a drawback, for he is a narcissist, only concerned with himself. The second husband’s wit is also a severe disadvantage due to the fact he uses his wit to torment other people, including his wife. It is when Beauty reviews her sisters’ marriages and the unhappiness her sisters experience in relation to their husbands that helps Beauty realize The Beast’s true worth and her love for him: “I should be happier with the monster than my sisters are with their husbands; it is neither wit, nor a fine person, in a husband, that makes a woman happy, but virtue, sweetness of temper and complaisance and Beast has all these valuable qualifications.” (9). The juxtaposition made between the husbands and The Beast create the disclosure of the appropriate masculine qualities a man should encompass. De Beaumont presents the contrast of characters to the reader as a method of emphasizing the
...into works of literary art. In particular, structural and textural ironies, in conjunction with other literary elements, can add dimension to short stories to help enhance their literary merit. The dynamics of these short stories are then studied for years and years in the scholarly world. Through the use of the previous four short stories the impact and influence derived from textual and structural ironies are exemplified in great detail. Zora Neale Hurston, William Sydney Porter, Guy de Maupassant, and Nathaniel Hawthorn heavily incorporate these two forms of irony into their stories in order to achieve a greater literary merit. While doing so structural and textural ironies have managed to also intrigue their audiences to read further, present a moral warning to their readers, and finally provoke discussion through adding depth and purpose to their contents.
Shakespeare’s story, Love Labour’s Lost, focuses the story on the endearing lust of men. Women are a powerful force, so in order to persuade them men will try to use a variety of different resources in order to attract the opposite sex. Men will often use their primal instincts like a mating call, which could equivocate today to whistling at a woman as she walks by. With the use of lies to tell a girl what she wants to hear, the musk cologne in order to make you appear more sensual, or the cliché use of the love poem, men strive to appeal to women with the intent to see his way into her heart. William Shakespeare is a man, who based on some of his other works, has a pretty good understand and is full of passion for the opposite sex. Nonetheless, whether it had been honest love or perverse lust, Shakespeare, along with most men, aimed to try to charm women. With keeping this understanding of Shakespeare in mind, his weapon of choice, to find his portal way into a woman’s heart, was his power of writing.
Authors use poetry to creatively present attitudes and opinions. “A Man’s Requirements,” by Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and “A Letter to Her Husband, Absent upon Public Employment” are two poems with distinct attitudes about love that contain different literary approaches. In both of the poems, love is addressed from a different perspective, producing the difference in expectation and presentation, but both suggest the women are subservient in the relationships.
Everyone in the literary world is familiar with Shakespeare's two “star-crossed lovers” Romeo and Juliet. Their love story, doomed by fate and feuding families has been an inspiration to many other literary works, movies and even music. Yet it is unknown what makes these couple’s story to popular and interesting across the globe. Is it their youth, their love of first sight quickly followed by their terrific death, the tragic events that lead to their demise, or a mixture of possibilities? One aspect of the play that causes an image in the reader' mind and has a profound impact is the exquisite language of Shakespeare. The language gives each character a distinct personality and character; each character has a different sense of humor, wit and love. Shakespeare’s words show society in Verona, different beliefs, values, and behaviors in both men and women are present in his play. The main characters of the play, Romeo and Juliet, are even affected by these beliefs and value, but mainly role of gender.
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.
How does one define a perfect match? Society defines two equally attractive individuals as perfectly matched, and that a woman’s beauty defines her attractiveness. In “Litany,” Collin’s speaker presents and describes a true, unconditional and unequally relationship as a picture-perfect puzzle. The speaker names characteristics and attributes that his lover lacks while also listing others attributes in as backhanded manner. While using “you” the speaker portrays and addresses his lover with unusual comparisons and with ordinarily undesirable. He describes himself more attractively and the fact that despite his superior characteristics, he still needs and loves her. Many of his comments are backhanded with double meanings. “Litany” much like Shakespeare’s, “My Mistress’s Eyes Are Nothing Like Sun,” mocks the perfection and romantic idealism of love. Through metaphors, an effective use of syntax, structure, and contrast, Collins effectively conveys humorous satire towards traditional love poems while describing a view of a perfect match.
Sir Philip Sidney’s “Sonnet 31” paints the portrait of a lover scorned. Sidney examines the subject of unrequited love through the sonnet’s male persona, Astrophel. Rather than using a precise enumeration of the sequence of events that led to Astrophel’s painful rejection, Sidney instead leaves the reader to infer the condition of the speaker based on a scene in which Astrophel projects his sorrows onto the moon. Unable to accept the cruelties the “beauties” of his world perpetrate against those who love them and moreover unable to make his particular “beauty” reciprocate his feelings, Astrophel seeks to delineate his understanding of the injustices of unrequited love to an audience devoid of the capacity to either disagree with his assessment or further injure his already wounded pride.
In the poem “To His Coy Mistress”, the speaker is trying to seduce his wife. In the assumption the mistress is his wife; she is being bashful towards losing her virginity. The speaker, which is the mistress’s husband, develops a carefully constructed argument where the speaker seeks to persuade his lady to surrender her virginity to him.
The Rape of the Lock deals with the issues of vanity, frivolity, conceit, pride and the indulgence of elite of the English society in trivial matters of love, romance, sexuality and flirtation. In the mock-...
In Shakespeare’s sonnet 130, the speaker ponders the beauty, or the lack thereof, of his lover. Throughout the sonnet, the speaker presents his lover as an unattractive mistress with displeasing features, but in fact, the speaker is ridiculing, through the use of vivid imagery, the conventions of love poems and the way woman are portrayed through the use of false comparisons. In the end, the speaker argues that his mistress may not be perfect, but in his eyes, her beauty is equal to any woman who is abundantly admired and put through the untrue comparison.