Free Essay About Love And Life In Poems

Poems are literary works that express the thoughts and emotions of the poets. Poems use metaphors and other figurative language to express thoughts indirectly. The contexts of poems are embedded with symbolisms and unique structural arrangements that reveal the messages with a different impact. The poems “My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun” by William Shakespeare and “Daybreak” by Octavio Paz are two legendary poems that holds themes about love, life, and death. These poems use metaphors and figurative language relating to nature to describe the messages of their texts.
The sonnet by William Shakespeare “My mistress eyes are nothing like the sun” is a poem about love. In this poem, the speaker compares his lover to the beauty of the nature. He compares the features of his lover one by one with the beauties found in nature. The sonnet is structurally built with freedom, devoid of the conventional poem structures of most of Shakespeare’s other love sonnets. There is the use of extraordinary metaphors that compares the woman features with the natural beauty of the surroundings. The idealized comparison of the beauty of her lover creates an impact such that the reader is brought into the sphere of imaginations.
The comparison of the features of the woman is made one by one. Accordingly the eyes of his mistress are nothing like the sun. This line signifies that the eyes of her mistress bring more sunshine from him more than the sun does. Her lips are compared with the corals, the snow with her breasts, her hairs with the wires, and her cheeks with roses. These visual insights create a radiant beauty of her mistress. Furthermore, he describes her smell more delightful than perfumes, and her voice more pleasing than any music. Evidently, the full sense of man is used to describe the beauty of the woman in its entirety. However, the descriptions of the woman are nothing compared with beauty of the nature. For him, there is nothing that can compare with his mistress. He even compares her to a goddess, where nothing else can compare.
The deeper context of the poem signifies the essence and effects of love. Evidently, the speaker is intoxicated with love to his mistress. The images he portrays in his lines project a woman that is perfect and impossible to exist. It is an idealizing poem of love that depicts not the perfection of a woman, but the imperfection of man. There seems to be an indication of the man being bemused of the physical features of a woman. However, if studied deeper, all his comparisons, where the woman exceeds the beauty of all the things around him is just an effect of his utter adoration to the subject of his affection. Love affects man deeply such that there are strong emotions of elation, happiness, and infatuation when one is in love. For the speaker, his world revolves around the woman where his life radiates from her deeply.
The second poem, “Daybreak” by Octavio Paz, is a poem about life and death. The poem is structured with simplicity and brevity, but the impact of its meaning holds issues of life and death. There is freedom in the overall structure of the poem where there are no rhythmic patterns and no signs of the conventional poem structures. It is very much similar with the first poem in the usage of metaphors. There is a comparison of the things in the poem with the things seen in nature. There is also the use of personification where the speaker creates the things in nature with features that are for human beings. In the first two lines, “Hands and lips of wind, heart of water”, the matters from nature such as the wind and water are painted with images where they are described to have body parts such as the hands, lips, and the heart. The speaker paints a picture of the nature to behave like man, where they move and talk like man. He even went further to give the water with a heart. There is a strong implication that the things of the nature are very much alive and part of the human dynamics in every single day. They beat for humans in the day to day activities of the world.
The aspect of life and death is the main theme of the poem. In the line “the life that is born every day” explicates about life, while the line “the death that is born every life” talks about dying. In the closing lines “I rub my eyes: the sky walks the land”, the speaker concludes his poem. Basically, the poem summarizes the life of man in a single day events. Every day, man encounters the things in nature that nurtures man to be alive. The wind embraces man which is a basic need of man for breathing. Water nurtures man proving him his daily needs. The eucalyptus represents all the vegetation and plants that provides man for food. Every day, there are number of people that are born, while there is also number of people dying. The speaker sees this reality before his eyes as he reflects the essence of every day break given to man.