ENGL 1005H Lecture Notes - Lecture 4: A Red, Red Rose, Sonnet 130, Platonic Love
20 Jun 2018
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ENGL1005H: Love and Hate
Week 4 – Love Poems
What does each word mean?
What are the most important words and how has the author highlighted them?
What ideas or feelings are being expressed?
Is there patterns? – repetition, opposition, evolution, parallelism
What parts seem intentionally confusing?
Troubadours
Disorganized group, musical and poetic movement, musicians, poets and singers that travelled and looked for
positions of patronage, sang all kinds of songs (stories of Arthur and his knights)
Short songs which celebrated love – modern love was not celebrated by them, but they invented a way n falling in
love – a poetic language of personal love, how it feels, what its like, etc. and their version expanded until almost
everyone spoke about their love in the same way that they did
The world's first love poem:
oAsking for physical affection and attractiveness to each other, desire to be together, then turns to a chant
to the king, deeply religious importance
oThis kind of language is what the troubadours
The song of songs – old testament:
oIntensely personal – overwhelming love and desire
oAbout the love often individual for god or the church itself, and the love of the church and god for people
The essential tensions:
oThe lover desires the woman physically but admires her inner worth: a passionate chastity on both sides
oThe lower is religiously devoted to the beloved – problematic at this time – supposed to be religiously
devoted to god
Love which celebrates human love but in religious terms
George Herbert – "Love":
oWanted to be welcomed by love but feeling unworthy
o Speaker is raising human love to the level of divine love – both are happening at the same time
How Do I Love Thee?:
oMove downwards to another kind of eternity to a level of daily action
oStarts in a space of divine and complete desire for the other to more of a human/smaller space – lessening
or realistic love
oDoing something a man is doing, even though it is a woman who wrote it
Loving Love Poetry
Shakespeare's Sonnet 17:
oPraising poetry, not a love poem, this kind of poem was common because the best language available to
show devotion to someone was romantic language, will be immortalized in poetry
Sonnet 130:
oItemize the beauty of the person you are talking about, this goes against this by saying it is not the same
to compare people to items, but still thinks she is very rare, talks about love of her but also himself
A red, red rose:
oSimilar to sonnet 130 – about the person he loves but also his own love
She walks in beauty:
oSimiles – aspect and eyes, light and dark – she is the embodiment of this light
oUnity of aspect – have lost this at the end – taking her apart in some way and particularized her
oLooking at someone and trying to render her in a particular way
oDeeply sentimentalizing approach of young women in portraits – embodying the ideas – sweetness,
innocence, focus on bright eyes
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