A Birthday and Remember by Christina Rossetti, and My last Duchess by Robert Browning Essay Example For Students

A Birthday and Remember by Christina Rossetti, and My last Duchess by Robert Browning Essay I am studying three poems from the Romantic Movement anthology Love and Loss. They are A Birthday and Remember by Christina Rossetti, and My last Duchess by Robert Browning. The Romantic Movement was the start of a creative revolution. Romanticism is the term used to describe a movement in European literature, art and music. In England the movement was led poets such as Keats, Byron and Wordsworth. The principal theme of the movement was that reason and logic could not explain every thing. The Romantics listened to the individual conscience rather than the demands of society. They reacted against the intellectuals of the Classic period and against the rigidity of the social structures. Common themes found in the Romantic include Nature. You can find reference to nature in almost all Romantic poems. Some writers use it as a refuge; as a way to escape modern life and the social demands that are associated with it. Others involve nature in their poetry because they believed nature had healing powers, whilst some believed that nature was just a divine work of art from God. Another common theme of the Romantic Movement is the growing importance and interest in imagination. Romantics considered imagination as the ultimate tool for creating art. It was also another way of escaping reality. One poet who uses both themes in her work is Christina Rossetti. There are many references to nature, especially in her poem A birthday For example, there is a lexical field of fruit surrounding this poem apple-tree, pomegranates and grapes. Fruit is a very natural product, being wholesome and lifegiving. It suggests you can be reborn through the recycling of a life and Rossetti uses this because it is almost as if she will be reborn when her lover returns. Apples, pomegranates and grapes are all circular fruits, implying that their love is never ending and she will always love him. One of the poetic techniques used by Rossetti is her use figurative and literal images. Figurative images can be found in the mentioning the apple. Apples are often red (implying lust) and have a rough heart shape to them. This implies that she wants you to think of the heart. However, she also includes a literal image of the heart on every other, line in the first octet, My heart is like a singing bird. Another poetic technique used in this poem is word painting. The use of many vivid nouns which depict colour put a clear image into your head. Lexis like rainbow , purple dyes, gold and silver illustrate the poem. She uses phrases such as work it in gold and silver grapes, in leaves and silver fleur-de-lys. Not only do these words and phrases paint a clear and imaginative picture in your minds eye, but they also appeal to our senses. The Romantics were very sensuous and enjoyed using descriptive expressions. A birthday has many adjectives that describe sight, smell, touch, taste and the sound of her imagination. To appeal to our touch she uses words such as silk and down. These two materials have very different textures. The Romantics liked to touch and feel things because the Romantic Movement was based on sensing and experiencing. Words like singing bird gives us a sense of what kind of noise she is hearing. You generally sing when you are happy so it gives the poem a euphoric feel. The theme of fruit appeals to our taste buds, grapes, and apples. She mentions birds elsewhere in the poem, doves and peacocks. These repeated references to birds could imply tht she wants to be free and fly away from the inner turmoil that has been her mind since her lover went away. Doves and Peacocks juxtapose each other in relation to their symbolic meanings. Doves are generally thought of as a symbol for peace and love but Peacocks are showoffs and are thought to be a lot more exotic. This poem implies she is throwing a party and the fact she mentions the peacocks hundred eyes could mean that this relationship is very public and she will be in the spotlight with all eyes on her. Yet Messina EssayIn the two Rossetti poems we can see some similarities in the structure of the poem. Both are sonnets, however, Remember is fourteen lines and a birthday is sixteen lines. The structure of A Birthday is a lot more complicated than that of Remember A Birthdays structure being ABCB, which is almost like a song. B is the chorus, my love is come to me and A and C, the verses. They are very contrasting, A Birthday is full of similes telling us how happy she is by comparing herself to nature, my heart is like a singing bird. She structures it so we dont know why her heart is gladder than the most beautiful parts of nature, until the chorus (B). This intensifies the readers curiosity. The second verse (C), is full of imperatives and verbs, like raise me, hang it, carve it and work it, rather than similes. This makes it seem as though she is talking directly to the audience. It also gives the work an immediacy. Remember has a structure of ABC. The B section is four lines long. This is when the speaker starts to change their mind and contradict them selves. We know this by the use of the verb forget which is a total juxtaposition to the verb she has used previously three times, remember. Its as if she is having an argument in her head. By the last two lines of the poem she has come to the conclusion that its better to forget and smile than remember and be sad. The poem is called remember not Remember me. I think this is because at the beginning she wanted them to just remember her. We can tell this through her use of personal pronouns. Remember me when I am gone away, but by the end of the poem she telling him to remember the love they shared together. (Note: Amy, is this them or him? Perhaps its better to use the same each time Ive underlined either him or them, but not both of them?) In the poem Remember, Remember me is repeated three times being imperatives, she is telling her lover to remember her because she doestnt want to be forgotten. This has an impact on the reader because it is something we can all relate to. By the end, Rossetti has come to the conclusion that it is better by far that you should forget and smile than that you should remember and be sad. I think she included this because it gives the reader a sense of respect for her. The Romantics wanted you to gain something from reading their poems. Another poem with a surprising ending is La Belle Dame Sans Merci by John Keats. One of Keats techniques is to create a bubble in his poems. He often tries to portray a dreamlike quality with his use of fictional words and characters such as faery and elfin grot. He then bursts the bubble often (move to He then often bursts the bubble .) by telling the audience it was a vision or hallucination, I awoke and found myself here. This results in the audience not obtaining the sense of satisfaction and therefore not enjoying the ending. The beginning is so idealistic full beautiful that Keats maybe thought anything so unspoiled would never be able to last. He wants to take the reader out of reality to a happy place and then the shock of reality will be even more forceful. In this poem, as before in Christina Walshs poem, the woman is dominant over the man. At that time, women were tied down with chores but here the girl is liberated. At the time it was written, this would have caused a sense of unease in the reader, especially as the woman wasnt human, but a faery.