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Love and Nature in Pastan's Poetry

Linda Pastan's poem "Love Poem" explores the depth of feelings between two lovers. She compares their love to a stream that grows more powerful over time, carrying away leaves and branches as the frost melts, representing how emotions intensify when the lovers embrace. The poem depicts love as both beautiful yet dangerous, with the potential to overwhelm like a turbulent stream. It explores these themes through metaphors of nature, with the narrator expressing their powerful emotions for their lover while in a natural setting as everything awakens in the morning.

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280 views1 page

Love and Nature in Pastan's Poetry

Linda Pastan's poem "Love Poem" explores the depth of feelings between two lovers. She compares their love to a stream that grows more powerful over time, carrying away leaves and branches as the frost melts, representing how emotions intensify when the lovers embrace. The poem depicts love as both beautiful yet dangerous, with the potential to overwhelm like a turbulent stream. It explores these themes through metaphors of nature, with the narrator expressing their powerful emotions for their lover while in a natural setting as everything awakens in the morning.

Uploaded by

CiroDiMarzio
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
Available Formats
Download as DOCX, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd

Love Poem

by

Linda Pastan

Linda Pastan is one of the most important American poets. Her talent was noticed during
school years when she won hers first major awards. After marriage, she neglected writing poetry,
but after a few years, under the influence of her husband, doctor and scientist Ira Pastan, she
came back to writing and since that, she’s been at the forefront of the American and world’s
poetry. She is a winner of the most prestigious awards for poetry.

At the heart of '' Love Poem 'is the story of a love couple. A woman writes a song to a
man and thus tries to portray and represent the depth of hers feelings. It is well known in history
that great love was celebrated in poems. Great examples are '' Sonnet 116 '' by William
Shakespeare or 'My River' 'by Emily Dickinson. Also, love and emotions are a common theme in
the Bible. If we take into account that Linda's work is largely autobiographical, there is a
possibility that she had addressed her husband here.

As far as the actions and dramatization, poet’s main theme focuses on the love and
compares it to the stream. The representation of a stream often occurs in literature and of course
as a symbol, it can mean a lot but usually means a change. So the love from poet’s perspective
can be beautiful, but it can be dangerous, because the stream can easily take everything with his
flow and that signifies that love can be turbulent. Also, a stream means strength. Here we can see
that the poet writes about a stream that carries leaves and branches as the torrents that follow
when the frost melts. The force of the stream indicates that emotions will manifest when they
grab each other at the end. It seems that poet wish to say that the two of them must embrace in
order to preserve themselves from the power of their feelings and emotions.

It can be said also that a storyteller has abstract component here and that is because in the
poem we see using of a '' we '' as a pronoun that refers to a couple in love. Of course, we know
that the writer is Linda Pastan.

As for the location, the narrator is somewhere in nature, so we see metaphorical approach
to things and events combined with feelings. The motive for narrator’s expression in such way is
presence of a large and powerful emotion such is love and in the same time, presence of a desire
that lovers feel for each other. Time of this event is most likely in the morning, when everything
is awakening, when the frost melts and when the stream starts to flow.

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