It is a gift and a wonder this quality that we humans have, the ability to love, transmit and exchange emotions in countless ways. However, this does not mean that all emotions are a wonder. Some feelings are pain. People and their perceptions of love or the beauty of life can go from the total absence of feelings and delight to the elixir of love. Its complexity can hardly be comprehended in a universal manner but poetry has served as a source of all kinds of emotions. In the next pages, we will discuss three great examples of two poets who managed to capture the sadness, the balance, the exaggeration and beauty of love. The first story to address is “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” by T. S. Elliot. This narrative follows a well-educated man named Alfred Prufrock who feels miserable with his monotonous, not very pleasant life that lacks love and does not help him be interested in building relationships with other people but makes him more of a coward who will not even start a conversation with someone but will put up walls to continue to be an enigma for the world despite the peculiar, intelligent person he is. Afterward, we will treat two sonnets. In one of them, William Shakespeare exposes deep feelings towards his beloved in Sonnet 18. This sonnet is titled: Shall I Compare Thee to a Summer’s day? And it starts off by offering a question at the very beginning; a doubt that is refuted with multiple reasons given throughout the poem that lead to the conclusion that summer does not compare to the beloved’s beauty, since this one does not fade away by nature’s inevitable changes and it never will because his poetry will keep it alive. In the last sonnet to be addressed, we can see that despite the description of love he made in Sonnet 18, William Shakespeare contrasts us by illustrating another different way of loving in Sonnet 130, also referred to as “My Mistress’ Eyes are Nothing Like the Sun”. He presents his mistress as a woman whose appearance is not perfect at all, and how when he compares her to other beauties, she does not measure up, but then, he changes his voice and states that notwithstanding her flaws, his love for her is authentic.
Alfred Prufrock describes to us his city in a pallid way while he addresses the reader by saying “let us go, you and I”. “When the evening is spread out against the sky/ Like a patient etherized upon a table; /Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets” Prufrock invites us or his companion to go walk with him around the city. This is a bad image of the town that makes it look like an unconscious, motionless patient, of frigid voice. The town is obscure and Prufrock lets us know that when he describes how foggy and boring it is. With the fog we find the personification. “The yellow fog that rubs its back upon the window-panes, /The yellow smoke that rubs its muzzle on the window-panes, /Licked its tongue into the corners of the evening.” It gives the impression that what he is describing is...
