The Modern Approach to Love - Essay Example

Sappho’s poetry is very feminine portraying jealousy, insecurity, and she had a way of evoking the sight, tongue, heart etc. as though they belonged to someone else. In her poetry, passion reigns supreme. Naturally, her poetry is old fashioned and it projects old-fashioned love. My muse, what ails this ardour? Mine eys be dym, my limbs shake, My voice is hoarse, my throat scorched, My tong to this roof cleaves, My fancy amazed, my thoughts dull’d, My head doth ake, my life faints sowle begins to take leave, So great a passion all feel, To think a soare so deadly should so rashly ripp up.

 ELIOT Compared to Sappho’s love songs, Eliot’s ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock Let us go then, you and I, When the evening is spread out against the sky like a patient etherised upon a table let us go, through certain half-deserted streets muttering retreats of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels And sawdust restaurants with oyster-shellsStreets that follow like a tedious argument insidious intent. There are many differences between the two.

Naturally, Sappho’s lines are ancient and Eliot’s modern. Apart from this, Sappho has written in passionate fervour of love, whereas Eliot shows the most unromantic side of it. Sappho is bristling with romance, passion and sexual desire, while Eliot’s love is dreary and without imagination. Her poetry brims with imagination and she even uses the limbs as external think tanks. On the contrary, Eliot does not show much imagination or creativity in this song. It is a dry, matter-of-fact kind of song showing a very ordinary life, devoid of all sophistication.

Sappho creates a world full of love, peopled by lovers with imaginative and creative dreams and desires. In this song, T.S. Eliot shows the bare modernity with the basest things in life and here love does not create an aura, but an ordinary, drudgery like living together and going around together. In a way, both these poets reflect the ancient approach and modern approach to love. In ancient days, love is considered to be an ethereal feeling, reserved only for the lucky few. Physical desires did exist, but they were clothed in decency and fascinating, yet erotic love.

Even though Sappho’s poetry was extremely feminine, she does not vulgarise it. In the modern approach, love is shown more as sex and the mental involvement comes as an afterthought and the poets represent this basic difference in their works.