Analysis of two or more poems* - Essay Example

By being in love, everything else pales in comparison. The cowardice follows from the fear of disappointing the loved one. The lover feels compelled to forsake all others and take whatever consequences may flow from this in favor of holding onto his loved one. Crane’s use of the phrase “like a tender veil” metaphorically explains how vulnerable love make him to his loved one and cold and uncaring toward the rest of the world. Frost’s To Earthward, likewise demonstrates the contradictions of love by aligning the stages of love with a slow march to death.

To this end, rather than focus on the pain the being in love brings to others, as Crane does in And You Love Me, Frost draws on the pain that love brings to lovers. Frost, however, emphasizes from the outset that the first kiss was filled with euphoria: The line “down hill at dusk,” can be interpreted to mean that love, euphoric as it is at first goes down hill from there onward, to the unprepared and unsuspecting, smitten young lover. Downhill at dusk is also an alliteration in that it draws on the poem’s title To Earthward.

Love, while uplifting in the sense that the narrator “lived on air” also brings the lover down from all that euphoria when love is lost. Musk too must be construed as a metaphor for the attraction and appeal of love, since musk can be a sexual stimulant. The young, smitten lover soon learns that as beautiful as love is, it involves pain and suffering. In order to make the point, Frost uses “sprays of honeysuckle” to symbolize the contradictory nature of love. (Frost) Love, like the honeysuckle, when “gathered shake dew on the knuckle.

” (Frost) Frost uses the nature of honeysuckle’s gathered to effect imagery into his poem, bringing the reader into sharp focus with the contradictory nature of love, particularly in its early stages. Love like the rose, which is