Marie De France's Poetry Analysis

Western Literature serves as the foundation all literature. In Marie de France’s poetry, she incorporates the work of Homer, the Bible, and Ovid into her own poetry. Both Marie and Homer use detailed writing styles in order to portray their devotion to family and their Gods. Similarly, Marie borrows inspiration from the Bible in order to show her devotion to God as a savior. She also uses Ovid’s stories in order to depict morals throughout her fables. Throughout Marie de France’s Poetry, she adopts the work of Homer, the Bible, and Ovid through her detailed writing style, her devotion to family and God, and her use of morals. One aspect of Homer’s work that Marie de France adapts is the concept of one’s devotion to family. Throughout their

Both of these texts incorporate moral lessons throughout their stories in order to express human nature. For example, in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, he uses the story of Icarus in order to warn humans about arrogance. The speaker explains, “And the boy thought This is wonderful! and left his father, soared higher, higher, drawn to the vast heaven, nearer the sun, and the wax that held the wings melted in that fierce heart … Father! he cried, and Father! Until the blue sea hushed him” (Ovid 8. 200-230). When his father lends him his wings to fly, Icarus becomes overwhelmed with his new ability to fly that he becomes arrogant and overestimates his human abilities. He gets carried away with his new divine power that he starts to think of himself as a god instead of a human. Similarly, in Marie’s fable “The Hare and the Stag,” the hare underestimates his own strength simply because he envies the stag’s horns. The speaker explains, “[The stag] could not hold these horns up, though, and how to move he did not know; more weight the horns had than the hare, a little animal, could bear” (197). Even though the hare cannot physically handle the weight of the horns, he ignores the warnings and tries to wear them himself. Similar to Icarus, the hare becomes arrogant and overestimates his abilities. This contributes to a common theme shown throughout these texts concerning humans being punished for trying to act like Gods or more powerful figures. Both of these stories use morals in order to warn humans about the danger of believing themselves to be more powerful than they actually