I personally, am not a fan of love poems. Neither the contents, nor the formatting interest me. Specifically the poems we have read. The wording is confusing and so is the way the author writes them.
I mainly don’t like these poems due to the contents. Each poem is about the lover telling the beloved that they are going to die and their beauty is going to fade without anybody loving them or admiring them. To me, something like that is definitely not the way to seduce somebody. If anything, that would make me disgusted and angry at them. Besides, it’s not the lovers place to tell the beloved what to do. And, if they really loved them, they would respect the beloved’s choice rather than write a poem about why they should spend the night with them.
So far, all the poems have had the same plot where the lover is admiring and begging the beloved to get back with them. Sometimes, its not even admiration really, its just creepy acknowledgment of their beauty.
“An hundred years should go to praise thine eyes, and on thy forehead gaze; two hundred to adore each breast, but thirty thousand to the rest” (p. 5)
Then there are several times where the author says something really weird like,
“My vegetable love” (p.5)
Which makes me wish more that anything that they would just say what they needed to in normal English instead of being so concerned with the words rhyming. I understand most of these were written a long time ago when metaphors like;
“And this same flower that smiles today tomorrow will be dying” (p.4)
“The glorious lamp of heave, the sun, the higher he’s a-getting, – And nearer he’s to setting” (p.4)
Were popular, but they could have also just explained how they feel in words that I have seen them use, because they are in the poem, that people in the future, such as myself, would understand.
Lastly, in all these poems, to me, the lover always seems like a pitiful, lonely, desperate man even though that is not how the rhyme scheme is supposed to portray them.
That is all, and overall, I would give these Love Poems a 5/10. I don’t really care for the contents of the poems and I don’t like them, but, I find it much easier to take notes on and ask questions.