The Portrayal of Love in Two Poems

Full text of the explicated poems are avaliable at the end of this essay.

Love is a complex and mysterious concept: It is impossible to truly define, despite the fact that everyone experiences it at one point in this life. Countless men and women have tried to capture love with words, and while they have been able to portray many aspects of it, they always fall short of true definition.

Despite the fact that no piece of literature perfectly captures the concept of love, reading writings about love is useful. The poems "Alms" by Edna St. Vincent Millay and "Variations on the word love" by Margaret Atwood are especially useful for the reader - these poems express two different intepretations of love, which the reader can use to understand the love in his own life.

The poem "Alms" by Edna St. Vincent Millay takes an interesting approach when explicating the speaker's experience of love. It uses an extended metaphor, portraying the speaker's heart as a house and her lover's love as a frigid winter that surrounds it. "My heart is what it was before,/A house where people come and go" (Millay, 1-2) the poem begins, thus establishing the poem's setting. The speaker's heart/house is surrounded by frigid weather: "...it is winter with your love,/The sashes are beset with snow" (3-4). Millay continues to use cold weather imagery: "The frost is thick upon the pane" (8); "The leaves are listless on the boughs" (10).