When I read the love poems, I had a lot of different thoughts about them. Some were interesting because the authors would use such a large variety of metaphors and played with the different words so much, but some others felt kind of confusing to me. One poem that made me think a lot was To His Coy Mistress by Andrew Marvell. The first time I read it, it just sounded like a guy talking about love. Later, after hearing other people’s opinions in the class discussions, it kinda made me rethink some of my ideas. Some people said the speaker might actually be trying to rush the girl into marriage because life is short. A line that shows this idea is when he says, “The grave’s a fine and private place, But none, I think, do there embrace” (ll. 31–32). After thinking about that line more, the poem felt a bit weird to me, because I think that true love shouldn’t be forced or rushed.
One poem I liked more was One Perfect Rose by Dorothy Parker. It starts off sounding very romantic and serious. For example, she writes, “A single flow’r he sent me, since we met” (l. 1). It sounds nice at first, but later the poem changes and becomes kind of funny. She basically jokes about how people always give roses as a romantic gift.
Something I noticed is that a lot of love poems compare the person they love to flowers. A good example is Song (1645) by Edmund Waller, which starts with the line “Go, lovely rose.” I liked that because it’s a simple way of showing how beautiful the person is.
There was also a poem by E. E. Cummings that I didn’t really like at first. I thought it was about a 5 out of 10 because the way it was written was a bit strange. But after reading it again, I understood it better and started to like it more, so now I would give it around an 8 out of 10. Overall, the love poems were overall interesting to read with lots of sneaky and hidden meanings behind a lot of the lines, but some of them were harder to understand, so overall, i would give all the poems a 7/10.