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My Last Duchess And La Belle Dame Sans Merci Poem Analysis

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A French poet, Victor Hugo, once said ‘Life is the flower for which love is the honey.’ Love is an universal passion or an intense sense of affection towards. Love takes an infinite form. A love for a hobby; a love for an animal or pet; a love for a person. Love can be seen as stereotypical, something that is interpreted as humble and embracing. However, love can be harsh, cruel, harmful and restrictive, a more realistic perspective than a prejudice fantasy. This essay will compare and contrast six poems that reflects the positive and negative forms of love,

The authors Robert Browning and John Keats portray the negative perspective of love in their poems, ‘My Last Duchess’, ‘La Belle Dame sans Merci’, while Chinua Achebe conveys the positive aspect of love in ‘A Mother in a Refugee Camp.’ ‘A Mother in a Refugee Camp’ was written during the civil war era in the late 1960s. Chinua Achebe worked as an ambassador for the Biafran government. Due to this, he was personally able to experience the struggle of the refugees living in poverty. It conveys the attribute of the unconditional love between mother and son in the form of filial love. This is contrasted by Robert Browning’s dramatic monologue, ‘My Last Duchess’ which expresses the infatuated love between the Duke’s obsessive nature towards his duchess. The Duke treats the Duchess materialistically, as if she was an object. This poem was published in 1842 in a book of poems titled Dramatic Lyrics. ‘La Belle Dame sans Merci’
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