Love but Harsh

In Claude McKay’s sonnets, “Flower of Love” (75) and “Jasmines” (88) they both share a thematic approach towards a connection of a woman’s beauty by describing her sweet scent, and comparing her to a flower. I believe the poem “Flower of Love” was a continuation of the poem “Jasmines” but may also be vice versa depending on the poem wanting to be considered a happy or sad story, since “Flower of Love” is approached as a poem of love while “Jasmines” theme involves a deep sadness in leaving his lover. 

In the “Flower of Love ” poem, there are 16 lines and falls within a Shakespearean sonnet. In addition, on line 10 there begins the volta, however, doesn’t seem to have another line within the poem that would rhyme with line 10: “Here let us linger indivisible”. Although the volta didn’t have a pair, the rest of the poem did have about 3 quatrains, but on line 15-16 the poem doesn’t end with a rhyming couplet, rather it ends with what seems in another quatrain. In other words, the speaker is breaking the traditional form of what a Shakespearean sonnet is supposed to originally be. Therefore, enhancing this poem’s meaning by not being able to divide this specific line into any other rhyme scheme in this poem, it was meant for the speaker to approach it as an undivided affection toward his woman, nothing can separate one another, not even traditional values. Furthermore, this poem represents a strong love towards a woman in which line 4 mentions “I worship at your breast.” It may sound peculiar for the speaker who would want to worship his lover’s breast, it is a way for him to describe how her scent becomes so captivating that his feelings become overpowering. Not only does the scent describe the woman’s beauty but a flower is used as a metaphor towards the petal as temptation. Which leads me to my next point in the poem “Jasmines”. 

In this sonnet there are 15 lines and it was difficult to really tell what sonnet this poem was because on the first line it states, “Your scent is in the room” but there would be no rhyme scheme to go with this line so I thought it may be considered a volta but in the third line, it also takes a turn as it also doesn’t have a rhyme in the poem. I think an extra line was added to this sonnet to really give the idea of how chaotic a relationship can be as this poem showed how messy it can get. To add on, I thought this poem really brought out the “Flower or Love” as one story as they share the similarities of the struggles and beauties of love. In “Jasmines” the aroma is powerful or as mentioned by the speaker, “Swiftly it overwhelms and conquers me!” (2). In addition, I found it rather interesting that a jasmine is not only describing his lover’s scent but also describing her as the flower itself; a night jasmine. A “night jasmine cannot bloom in this cold place” (9) is meant to portray the sadness and loss of memory the speaker had with his woman. Not only that, but at night jasmine can’t bloom in a dark cold place otherwise the scent will be lost and its petals won’t blossom. It is as if his woman and the speaker are parting from one another as her scent is leaving, and the last couple of lines in the poem began to describe nature with harsh weather. This follows with “Flower or Love” as love at first can be really beautiful that it begins to grow onto you such as the scent, but it can also be really cruel.

Celeste Tejeda-Menera

The Humanity of Love

In Ode 44, Hafez paints a beautiful image of the love exchanged between two. The implied metaphor of love as wine and drukeness in this dream-like state highlights both the giving and recieving end of love and furthermore makes a statement about the universality of this emotion which can be drawn back to Islamic theology. The woman figure in this poem is also implied to be a flower throughout the poem, with comparisons to Narcissus (who famously turned into a flower) and a dewy rose; this shapes the nature of lovers who can be self-indulging as much as they are charming.

Interestingly, this idea of self-indulgence is also discussed through the concept of love as wine. “Drunkards we are by a divine decree … Foredoomed to drink”, still the forgiveness for this self-indulgence has already been granted. Engaging in love is natural, inevitable, and at times incomprehensable but nonetheless universal and beautiful. But where is “incomprehensibility” alluded to in the poem? “Go to, thou puritan … this wine for us, not for thee”. It is implied by the mention of the puritan, who is assumed to not carry the understanding of love beyond certain ideas in contrast to “us”, as in those who can understand or even care to understand the complexity of this drunkeness and the transendence of it.

The idea of universalism posed by Islam, as minor or major as it may appear to different people, is certainly present in this poem through these implied metaphors. There is not a sense of perfectness or purity by any strict regulations or earthly ideas, rather it is found in the blissful acceptance that love is simply human.

Darah Carrillo

See everything and see nothing, see-saw!

from lain illustrations by Yoshitoshi Abe (2006)

by Andrew Perez

I prefer H.D.’s poem because it shows an attempt at trying to leave this hopeless cycle of desperate validation both of these poems depict. Although the sea rose does not achieve a grandiose victory against the systems it ferociously rebelled against, it doesn’t need to. To have reached the ocean, to have persisted, and to have hoped for a better tomorrow, is what makes “Sea Rose” most effective in challenging the traditional symbol of the rose.

H.D. and Puente are separated by a near half-century of social change and feminist thinking that cannot be ignored by the comparison and evaluation to follow. To contemporary readers, H.D.’s poem usurps a tired cliché we have already discarded in the pencil boxes of our middle school backpacks. But to flip the metaphor of the “rose”, one which rejects the feminine objectification of Victorian society and proposes a new kind of feminist tenacity, was an incredibly novel idea for H.D.’s time. She removes the rose from its usual congregation in a garden bush to a lone existence on the tides of a beach. Caught between the “drifts” of the ocean waves battering against “the crisp sand that drives in the wind”, the speaker illustrates the transitionary period many women of the Victorian era were braving despite the various patriarchal institutions shackling them down. This struggle for independence and autonomy has left the sea rose “marred” and “thin”, but is precisely what gives it value over the patriarchal convention of the “spice-rose”. H.D.’s sea rose is beautiful because it does not aim to please the men who behold it, but instead confers a reality of conflict and suppression they have injured it with.

Puente’s “The Rose and The Poppy” feels like a mirrored continuation of H.D.’s “Sea Rose”, in which the battered subject has resigned itself to a quiet and invisible existence. She makes a comparison between the amorous passion of the rose to the sedated sleep of the poppy. “Forgotten”, “rarely chosen”, and “rotting into umber”, the speaker’s outlook on the future is colored by feelings of hopelessness and death. They no longer wish to be a vehicle of relationships and memories cherished and forgotten, but to instead expire alone in the vast expanses of nature and its many orchards. The final stage of this poppy’s life is particularly morbid: its corpse is collected and displayed at the table of all the people who have ignored it in life, eventually to be discarded once the fragrance of its “potpourri” has vanished into thin air. Thus, the sad existence of this poppy terminates as it started: unloved, unseen, and expendable.

Not Love but Loneliness

Jackeline Salazar

When people think or see roses or even received a rose, they think of love and romance. Roses are usually a symbol of love but a rose can also symbolize of other meanings too. A poem called “The Rose and The Poppy”  by Adrianna Puente felt like it was challenging the traditional symbol for a rose. In the beginning of the stanza she mentions how she is not a red rose or the type of rose or flower that you will usually give to your loved ones. This type of flower that she is describing is the poppy and that is obviously not a rose but it also does not represent the traditional love and romance situation. The reason why I chose this poem was also because the writer was talking about how she is this poppy and that she is this flower who is very bubbly and how they have this electric orange color as a flower. She is describing herself as a fun person not romantic. Which is basically challenging the symbol of the rose in this case, this author is saying that they are not all about love or not even about romance at all, they are the opposite of a loving rose. The author is a poppy and she describe the poppy as a “wild in fields of green and blues” meaning she is the funnest person or a happy person when there is a crowd that is mostly sad and boring. While the rose is always about love and people tend to buy roses all the time or just share roses all the time, the poppy can be forgotten sometimes. Which can mean that she is describing the situation of how she can also be forgotten. Which can symbolize that she has had a hard life sometimes due to the fact that she might also be forgotten through her friends or maybe a loved one has forgotten about her. She felt like she was very lonely and that maybe being something ordinary or different can help her brig happiness instead of love. This is why “The Rose and The Poppy” has a different way of symbolizing the rose as love and romance.