Friends with Benefits

Friends with Benefits from Filmofilia.com

On my third blog for my English 102 class, we had to choose one of six poems, analyze and identify all the categories we have covered during the previous classes. I decided to write an entry about Sharon Olds' "Sex Without Love," which was written in 1984.

Sharon Olds, the speaker of the poem, provides a personal interpretation and understanding about sex without love by asking and responding her own question “How do they do it, the ones who make love without sex?”. The poem of twenty four lines has an ironic tone and is intended to those who do not believe in love.

In this poem the author seems to dislike the idea of having sex without love. Throughout the poem, Olds uses metaphors to compare beautiful situations of life with the act of having sex without love; however this is an act that cannot be compared with beauty. In her first lines, olds compares sex without love with two ice skaters dancing over the ice; the dancers are just performing an act to entertain the public and the ice suggests that having sex without love represents cold and something dispassionate. From lines 6-8, olds uses metaphors to compare sex without love with the joy and love that is felt by parent when having a baby; however these parents would give the baby away because of the absence of love. Then, from lines 13-17, Olds uses religion as a metaphor to point out that sex is an act of love not an act of pleasure and how people lie to themselves to satisfy their physical needs.

Some keywords are:

1.       The ones who make love without love- refers to whom the poem is intended to.

2.       Beautiful as dancers- refers to the couple having sex.

3.       Faces read a steak- refers to their body expressions.

4.       Wet as the children at birth- indicates body response.

5.       Love the priest instead of the god- indicates hypocrisy.

6.       Mistake the lover for their own pleasure- refers to a mind driven by pleasure, his own pleasure.

7.       They are like great runners- Compares this act with loveless sex as a physical and mental need.

8.       Single body alone in the universe- refers to a physical need satisfied but an empty soul.

The poem “Sex Without Love” is a straight forward and honest personal interpretation about a topic that is controversial in every society. In contrast, the poem “Porphyria’s Lover” by Robert Browning is a narrative story of a dramatic event in which a man commits a homicide as an act of love.

Sharon Olds from Poetry.org

My First Poem Interpretation

Interpretation of  Porphyria's Lover
Photographer: Richard Avedon
Magazine: The New Yorker
Date: November, 1995

From: Alafoto.com 

On my second blog for my ENG 102 class, I am suppose to read a variety of poems and pick one that stands out for me. The poem I have chosen for my blog is "Porphyria's Lover" by Robert Browning. 

Porphyria's Lover is a dramatic monologue in which a man decides to strangle his wife in a cruel manner. Even tough, I was in shock when i realized that he had killed the woman he loved, I liked it so much because poems are usually romantic, descriptive, narrative but this one was dramatic and that is what makes it interesting. There is romanticism at the beginning of the poem, but all of the sudden the poem turns into an assassination and this is when the poem becomes more appealing and I felt curiosity about the end. Different ideas came to mind about this poem, I thought that this man was dead and that the women, who was alive was suffering due to an illness. However, the fact that he decided to stop the life of another person makes believe that he did not believe that god existed. Besides being atheist, I also thought he was a psychopath and fetishist. On the other hand, when the speaker says "to-night's gay feast", I became confused, was the speaker actually a woman and not a man? or was this phrase was used just as comparison?

In the poem, we clearly see that her name is Porphyria. This is also the name given to a serious and terminal illness in the blood. The speaker repeatedly makes allusion to her illness within the poem, an example is "too weak to set her passion free". People with this illness experience a horrible death, this is why I believe he decided to help her dying as an act of love. Clearly, Robert Browning is giving a different sense of love.

I have chosen this image because it clearly represent "Prophyria's Love". It Portrays a women with a rope around her neck and her body giving us a visual way on how she die; But it also shows a good image of a women suffering. The skeleton dress as men underneath her shows two think. One is the love and feeling that the men had for the women by trying to get her out the rope. And also, that he always had her in his mind and now that their are together their love will be forever. This feelings can be seen in one of his lines "And thus we sit together now, And all night long we have not stirred, And yet God has not said a word!" This also show his atheist side, by challenging god what he had done in the past. 

This poem stuck so much in my head that the first thing I did once I read it, was to emailed to my wife. I told her in the email how hard it is to see the person you love suffering and even harder is to know that the only way to stop that suffering is by killing them. This poem really put me to thing and compare this poem with the same feeling a person's feel when they have their love one's in a state of comma.    

Red Rose Mother of Flowers

Red Roses
 from Mr. Qualitative

My first blog from my English 102 class is about symbols and allusion; therefore I am posting something that have a thousand meanings, and that is red roses.  

A passage that cought my attention in my research is:

"Almost any flower can represent a girl, but the rose has always stood for the most beautiful, the most beloved – in many languages "Rose" remains a popular given name – and often for one who is notably young, vulnerable, and virginal. Shakespeare's Laertes, when he sees his sister Ophelia in her madness, cries "O Rose of May!" (Hamlet 4.5.158), bringing out not only her uniqueness but the blighting of her brief life. Othello, on the verge of killing Desdemona, thinks of her as a rose which he is about to pluck (Othello 5.2.13–16); Orsino tells Viola, "women are as roses, whose fair flower / Being once display'd, doth fall that very hour" (12N 2.4.38–39). The French poet Baïf vows, "I will not force the Rose / Who hides in the bosom / Of a tightly closed bud / The beauty of her flower" ("La Rose," in Livre des Passetems II)."

I have chosen this passage because it gives a good description of a rose; it compares roses with the beauty and other qualities of women. It shows how roses had being a symbol of inspiration of almost every poet, writer and artist. I like this passage because they all have a different meaning of what a rose is.

As we see Comparison and Similes can be seen any one these lines from many poems:

1. "Almost any flower can represent a girl, but the rose has always stood for the most beautiful, the most beloved – in many languages "Rose" remains a popular given name – and often for one who is notably young, vulnerable, and virginal." On this line we can see how he compare the beauty of a rose with the beauty of a women.
2. Shakespeare's Laertes, when he sees his sister Ophelia in her madness, cries "O Rose of May!" (Hamlet 4.5.158), bringing out not only her uniqueness but the blighting of her brief life. This line shows that roses cry like women.
3. "women are as roses, whose fair flower / Being once display'd, doth fall that very hour" (12N 2.4.38–39). On this line shows how women need to be conservatives as roses.
4. The French poet Baïf vows, "I will not force the Rose / Who hides in the bosom / Of a tightly closed bud / The beauty of her flower" ("La Rose," in Livre des Passetems II)."

"Rose." Dictionary of Literary Symbols. Ed. Michael Ferber. Cambridge, United Kingdom: Cambridge, 1999. 172-177. Gale Virtual Reference Library. Web. 7 Mar. 2012.