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Love In Philip Larkin's Arundel Tomb

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Discuss the presentation of love in Larkin’s Arundel Tomb

The poem, Arundel Tomb, written by Philip Larkin explores the theme of love and how at times can be ambiguous. A notable example of this is in the first line of stanza one, it says “their faces blurred”. This could be symbolic of their universal love. Their facial appearance and physical qualities have wasted away but their love still remains and can’t corrode away as easily. However, Larkin could be suggesting that their love deteriorated over time due to the challenges they may have faced, just like the stone corroded due to oxygen and the climate. Larkin uses the trochaic tetrameter rhythm to write his poem and follows the rhyme pattern of abbcac. By his usage of this traditional form of poetry could symbolise how time has gone by. In the poem, much time has passed as the effigy have started to corrode so the structure corresponds with what Larkin is writing about.
In stanza one, the sculptures have their “little dogs under their feet”. Having their dogs as part of the effigy is significant to the presentation of love in the poem as dogs usually represent devotion and loyalty. This could represent the love that was shared between the people who existed before the sculpture. This alludes that their love is not …show more content…

The enjambment used throughout the poem also emphasises the idea of love withstanding the obstacle that is time and time passing by. This line endorses the idea that love will triumph any challenge even time. However, love here can also present love as an illusion. The effigies are there to give the people a nice final memory of them and the ‘love’ is not eternal. The line “what will survive of us is love” is an example of where Larkin’s use of a trochaic tetrameter accentuates the love and emotions the couple had while they were

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He uses many rhetorical devices such as rhymes, metaphor, repetition, alliteration etc… Firstly, the whole poem’s structure is structured in a poetic way using rhyme schemes. He uses words like “dreamed” and “schemed(line 6 and 8), “wreathe” and “breathe”(

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752 Words | 4 Pages

The application of these figures expressly underline its impact on the semantics of this poem: It disrupts the flow of reading and thus again is connected to the method of \textit{Syncopation} and strengthens its position as a Blues poem. However, on a more subtle level the use of these figures underscores the tension and the emotional atmosphere of the situation the poem depicts. It appears that the lyric I is taking stock of its surroundings and happenings that accompany the course of the timespan that the poem claims for itself. Last yet certainly not least are the semantic and rhetorical figures or the imagery, of which only the most important will be studied due to reasons of space.

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• Identify any literary devices (symbolism, allusions, or metaphors/similes). - In the poem E.E. Cummings uses a lot of symbolism, throughout the entire poem the speaker is figuratively carrying around his lover’s heart, it shows unity between the two lovers, and Cummings starts and ends the Poem with almost the same line, showing from the begging to the end, the speakers love for his lover. - E.E. Cummings also refers in the last stanza to a tree of life, from a root grows larger than a soul or a mind. Roots and buds are symbolic to the start of life, and since the tree is higher than our souls and mind, it is referring back to the speakers love for his lover something not contained in this world, that branches out.

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Each object expresses the pain in a different way, whether missing the intimacy from the “caress”, the lack of understanding of “their motives” or the fact their lives are now meaningless because their lives no longer give “our lives meaning”. Hobsbaum emphasises the amount of things and various ways that these objects are affected by giving them each their own stanza. Whilst each is short, the nine stanza’s reflect how many ways their lives have changed. Each stanza being relatable to how the ex-lovers may now feel shows the many ways in which their lives have changed and become less meaningful. However, as each has “no way of knowing/

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Similar references are also made later in this paragraph - when the poet portrays the couple being “clamped together” and how “they can see no one older than themselves”. There is a lack of any emotional feelings in this stanza signifying that once this relationship is over, it would be “forgotten about”. The use of the verb “pretending” in “pretending to be looking at the waterlilies” shows that the couple is

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418 Words | 2 Pages

Images and inanimate happenings- those were carved on the Grecian Urn which is in accordance to what the speaker sees. The poem is all about how the images and inanimate happenings be able to connect the philosophy of beauty, truth and life. The images and happenings carved on the Grecian Urn depict that not everything that you see, have to be seen by the eye. It must be also seen with spirit so as to understand the nature of the image. For instance, “Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard/ Are sweeter; therefore, ye soft pipes, play on”, the urn can’t play melody, therefore the speaker should hear nothing, but the image that shows playing melody does.

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954 Words | 4 Pages

The imagery continues to contrast the liveliness of nature that surrounds the man, “squirrel’s granary is full…harvest is done”, as compared to the near-death condition of the man, “…alone and palely loitering…haggard and so woe-begone”, emphasizing how love has abandoned him and he too is “wither’ing” away from life similarly like the sedge is from the lake. On the other hand, the contrast between the young and old in “Piazza Piece”, raises the question as to whether love arrives on everybody’s doorstep, or in this case, piazza. The use of natural imagery, “roses of your trellis dying”, symbolizes how the lady is ignoring the fact that she is growing older and the idea that love is coming for her is becoming bleak, very similar to the man in “La Belle Dame Sans Merci”, who is said to have “lily on thy brow … cheek a fading rose”. In both cases, the natural imagery is used as a metaphor to foreshadow how the lack of love in the character’s lives eventually leads to their

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1341 Words | 6 Pages

The main character, Ulysses, is loving to the dog, while the other characters do not show affection towards the dog and want to continue with their day. In the painting, the dog is looking up to Ulysses wanting his presence and Ulysses appears to be loving to the dog, showing his care for him. Coincidentally, even though in the scene dog appears abandoned and has a droopy physic, the dog has a very masculine look. The painting has no colors to it using only black and white shades, giving it a depressed look to the

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1269 Words | 6 Pages

For example, roads in different directions lead to different futures, dead ends can represent the end of moving forward, and the lines in the road are there to guide you from getting lost along the way. If McCallum wanted to, I bet she could had gone into much further details relating to the poem and

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Secondly I will explain the characters in the poem, and lastly I will explain the shifts in the poem. Some of the poetic symbols I found in the poem were diction and hyperboles. For diction, the author used the words, “nothing” and “everything” interchangeably. He started off the first stanza with the word

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943 Words | 4 Pages

Trethewey immediately uses imagery to set the scene inviting your senses to help illustrate the image she has already relayed. This helped depict a more in-depth image of her poem “elegy”. After reading this poem several times, to build understanding, and break down literary elements; I came to the conclusion that Trethewey emphasizes the struggle to find balance. The balance between metaphor and symbolism, increasing throughout the entire poem showing battle between connotation and detonation. The struggle in which she used to connotation to portray the bigger picture, but also balanced out by denotation to show the subliminal messages of the relationship shared between the narrator’s father and herself.

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The imagery is also used to prepare the reading for the end with the line “the air was damp, the silence close and deep”. This line showing that death was near and soon after finding this Myop comes across a dead

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1282 Words | 6 Pages

In the “By chance or nature's changing course untrimmed./But thy eternal summer shall not fade,/Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow'st;/Nor shall Death brag thou wander'st in his shade,/When in eternal lines to time thou grow'st” (Line 8-12), the speaker uses personification that letting “[d]eath” as a person who cannot easily bring the speaker’s beloved into another world. The speaker is very confident that his beloved’s beauty will not fade because not only is beloved’s beauty he always believes but also is the best poem the speaker can write to beloved. However, the reason that the speaker feels a little bit sad is he cannot find the precise item to describe his beloved, which indicates that the speaker is very strict with himself and the way he loves his

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The poet compared the graves like a shipwreck that is the death will take the human go down and drowning to the underground like the dead bodies in the graves. The last line “as though we lived falling out of the skin into the soul.” is like the rotting of the dead bodies. The second stanza there is one Simile in this

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