Literary Analysis Of Poems Essay Sample

Love is a theme that is often used by poets to show how humans express their feelings to one another. There are many forms of love, conditional and unconditional, between family members, friends and lovers. In “When You Are Old” by William Butler Yeats and “What Lips My Lips Have Kissed” by Edna St. Vincent Millay, love deeply affects the personas in these two poems. The poets use stylistic devices and through the use of imagery and end rhyme, the reader easily recognizes both positive and negative effects love has in human beings and how different love can affect each one of us.
In the last stanza of the poem Yeast uses imagery by painting the picture of the old woman “.. bending down beside the glowing bars.” The woman reflects upon the lost chance she had at love and all the woman does is “murmur, a little sadly, how love fled.” Through this stanza, Yeats shows how elusive love is, and how much bitterness it can cause a person when he or she misses a chance at it. The poem implies how the persona missed out on a chance of loving when she was young. When old age set in and the persona just realizes that she is too old, and her beauty had faded. But then, one man saw it all and loved the soul that seemed not to love him back. Through the poem, one thing is clear, love is unconditional. The persona still has concern for the woman, and that is why he chooses to extend a helping hand by giving her a book, “And slowly read, and dream of the soft look/ Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep.” But then the woman will always be loved by this man and that is why he says that he will always watch over her, “amid a crowd of stars.”
Millay, on the other hand, laments her lost lovers. Imagery is seen through the raindrops hitting the windowpanes, and she compares the raindrops to ghosts. These raindrops are the lovers in her life whom she still remembers. These memories are the lost lovers who she sees as ghosts. In the third and fourth line, she says that “Under my head till morning; but the rain/ Is full of ghosts tonight, that tap and sigh.” On the other hand, she uses the image of the window pane to show the difference between the past and the present. She uses the lonely tree as an image to represent herself. Generally, Millay uses the images of nature to show how her past love vanished and where she is today. Some of the examples are winter, lonely tree, birds, boughs and summer. Some of these images show pleasure and love, for example, the first line which says, “What lips my lips have kissed.” and “ arms have lain/ Under my bed till morning.”
In both of these poems, we see how love is depicted under the different circumstances. It has had different effects on the personas. It can upset people when it is no longer there. It is even worse when the people involved are no longer in the lives of those whom they loved. Yeats and Millay depict how love can be a bad experience. The poems show us what love can do to us in the case of an unconditional love that has been lost.