In loved
A lot of people have shared their views as to what love really is and devoted their whole lives to sharing love or, at least, searching for true love. Each of us has our own understanding of what love is, and most of the time we base on our definitions from feelings and experiences. “There is no rose without a thorn.” Everyone who falls in love knows that is true. Love can make you happy and often it hurts, love is only special when you give it to someone who really worth it. Equally, in poetry, “love” is an extremely factor. “I am not yours”“A Ballad of the Two Knights” written by Sara Teasdale. Those two poems are my favorite; they have given a new annotation to love. That makes her poem easy to read but also let the readers learn from her poem.
The first poem is called “I Am Not Yours”. This poem is narrates about the time when the narrator falls in love while it is desirable for her to be approved of and be loved; she does not need it to survive. She still wants to be herself, because she knows that the love of a man and disoriented woman will never be part of their true love.
This poem is quite clever in its use of the phrase "to be lost in you” to the expression of two different meanings, obsessed with you and get lost in you. The author refers to herself as "candle, snowflake", that “you” is "light at noon, the sea" (Teasdale 1). This poem indicates that "I am obsessed with you", also expressed the author wants in combination with each other like “lost as a candle lit at noon, lost as a snowflake in the sea.”
The poem contains four stanzas. In the first stanza of the poem, the author said “I am not yours, not lost in you”, originally means I have a crush on you and addicted to you, but also means I am a part of you. Because in the third line, the author says that they are lost as a candle lit in the noon. Just the imagery brought by that description is enough to make one feel how lost the poet felt. Noontime is by default, a sunny time of the day where the sun shines its rays on all the objects on the earth and the reflection comes with vivid colors. Save for the less common rainy noontimes, we all expect noon to be a period of day that needs neither adjustments nor improvements. A candle lit at this time of day seems not useful because it simply is not. It does not add to the beauty of the day, it doesn't enhance one's vision if lit then; its impact is very small compared to that of the sun. The poet is really lost.
In the second line of second verse, the poet indicates that she knows that she is loved. She also finds the spirit of the person who loves her beautiful. That means that she finds the person beautiful. This is to say that the love that she is shown does not go unnoticed as she also has an opinion of the person who loves her. In the third and fourth lines, she gives us more details about her longing to be lost, she wants the feeling, and it is not an uncontrollable impulse. Falling in love is a choice that she can make. She goes further to emphasize her feeling to be lost by comparing it to a light in the dark. A light in the dark is an indication of seeking control over a situation.
She wants someone to be in control of her falling in love. She goes further to emphasize this by asking her lover to put her senses out and leave her deaf and blind. Deafness and blindness bring a feeling of lack of control over a situation thus making one need another person to take charge. However, she is left with an avenue to express herself as she is not mute. In this verse she bottles our imagination unlike in the previous two, she makes us imagine we cannot hear or see. She can still feel the love in the situation despite her impairment.
The feeling of being lost in love is emphasized in this poem. What is clear about her message on love is that it is a rush of feelings which if one attempts to control them only leads to a greater thirst to lose control. In this work, the poet feels the need to show us that as one falls in love, they need to be cautious and take charge of matters. However, there comes a point where one just has to throw caution to the wind and let love consume them. No matter how cautious a person tries to stay as they fall in love, eventually things will take their course.
Poem number two is titled, "A Ballad of the two Knights". It follows two knights who are on a quest. Knights are noble gentlemen and as is the norm with such people, they have to have a strategy on a quest. Both of them want to find a woman to love, but each has a set of standards that they put on the woman that they want to love. One night is fascinated by looks and he describes the features he wishes to find in the ideal woman. The other is more interested in the moral standing of a woman and an upright moral standing is what he seeks. Both argue what is good about their opinion trying to show why their criteria are the best. After all is said they part ways in search of their women. They meet in the end and the former is not the perfect beauty that he had earlier described whereas the latter brought one of questionable character.
The poet's use of language is superb. She uses old English words like "spake" in place of spoke. Her structuring of the statements also sends the reader to the medieval period where people made statements like "I care not for her face, but she I love must be a dove" (Teasdale 1). It has been centuries since people spoke like that. It is also in these centuries long ago that the order of the knights was really active. Speech in this poem throws our imagination back to this period.
In that period long ago, knight were noble men, whose acts of nobility included saving princesses in distress, protecting their king from dangerous assailants and even if the task at hand was as scary as the prospect of having to slay a fire-breathing dragon, they would rather have died than leave a quest incomplete. Each knight had his quest laid out and one would expect them to have succeeded since getting a woman for a knight is not half as fatal as facing a dragon. However, both fail in their seemingly simple quests and not because they lose their lives which are in contrast to what would happen with the stereotypically presented knight.
The poet makes good exploitation of irony in this work. Our first knight described his ideal woman as one who is fair with gold hair on her head. The second one wanted a graceful and pure woman. In a laughable twist of fate, the latter came back with a wanton wild whereas the former had a woman with brown hair. Each got a stark contrast of what they wanted. Irony here is used to reveal a deeper message. It brings out the fact that what we profess to not want is usually the thing we want most, we just say it out loud to convince ourselves that we do not want it. Initially, the first knight didn't want a brown-haired woman, the second one didn't want one of questionable character but alas, that is exactly what they brought back, meaning that those features impressed them most. Love is ironical.
She also uses humor to describe the situation. Knights are dedicated to their cause and this is proved by them setting off on their quest at dawn. They were also known to be committed to their quest until it was finished. Love is described as a feeling that nobody can control. Once it hits, you just move in the direction it takes you. Not even noble knights are able to resist it as was the case here. However, it never ends in disappointment as whatever one gets turns into something beautiful. Even the knights couldn't hide their delight as they are both seen smiling at each other, both having realized that none got what they intended.
The other thing to note from this poem is that seeking love with some predetermined expectations is pointless. Love cannot be forced upon a person; neither can one with full certainty be sure that if they do particular things in a certain sequence they will achieve love. It is a difficult phenomenon to comprehend and control. Love is spontaneous and should be left as such.
Works Cited
Teasdale Sara. "I Am Not Yours," and A Ballad of the Two Knights". Nd
