The Love Poems of Rich, Marvell and Campion :: Adrienne Rich Andrew Marvell Essays

The Love Poems of Rich, Marvell and catchflyAdrienne Richs Twenty-One Love Poems, which explore the nature of homosexual love, differ strikingly from classic love poems written by a man to a woman, such as Andrew Marvells To His Coy Mistress and Thomas Campions There Is a Garden in Her Face. Richs poems focus on the us aspect of love, the concept of two strong, so cold imperfect wo men facing all oppositions together, while the love poems written by men are far more reverent, almost worshipful of their subjects. The lesbian poems have a sense of love being square, a connection based on far more than physical attraction, whereas the mens poems focus on an idealized view of the woman beautiful, pure, distant. The women in Marvell and Campions poems are lovely faades, storybook figures without any(prenominal) real wisdom or imperfections. Perhaps the lesbian love poems could be seen as less(prenominal) eloquent, or less flawlessly romantic, but the romance in them is make up in the genuine nature of the love. Rich is doubtlessly writing about experiences she has had, real people she has loved, whereas Marvell and Campion could ostensibly be writing about any beautiful, but otheriwse characterless, woman that theyve seen.The stress that Rich places on the two members of the agree as equals is a striking contrast to Marvells and Campions poems, in which the female subject is placed on a infrastructure and kept at a distance. There is little sense of a real-life relationship between the man and the woman. The mens poems are unmixed descriptions of the woman and their love for her, with little discussion of how they interact, or how they may relish about her personality. Rich, however, creates an atmosphere of us against the world, writing I feeling you knowing we werent born tomorrow, / and somehow, each of us will inspection and repair the other live, / and somewhere, each of us must help the other survive (Rich 237). Certainly, this discrepancy is at least partially a product of the polar eras in which the poems were written Campion and Marvell were writing in the 16th and seventeenth centuries, respectively, while Richs Twenty-One Love Poems was written in the mid-1970s. Victorian and Elizabethan culture dictated that the woman be far more removed from the often vile realities of life revered, but not seen as an equal partner in a relationship. Sexuality would not have been a topic to be openly discussed.