Write a 8 page essay on Love Poetry.The children are described as “lambs / disarmed, adoring” (10-11), rightfully taking their place as the center of the family’s religion. Into this picturesque

Write a 8 page essay on Love Poetry.

The children are described as “lambs / disarmed, adoring” (10-11), rightfully taking their place as the center of the family’s religion. Into this picturesque marital image is interjected a somewhat bitter and sarcastic slant through the voice of the speaker. From the first stanza forward, Rubens presents an image of marriage that is both perfection and painful through her use of symbol,

tone and language choice.

Throughout the poem, Rubens illustrates the man’s apparent wedded bliss as well as the speaker’s inner conflict by filling her stanzas with both pleasure and pain laced with a dose of unreality. She opens the poem by indicating “he trails burr-like fragments” (1), suggesting something sharp, unpleasant and clinging. Fragments do not satisfy and emphasize the concept that what is seen in London is not complete. The picture imagined by the speaker is necessarily missing several important elements. Thus, from the very beginning, Rubens intends the reader to understand that this is an interpretation of a relationship brought out through a glancing impression. Nothing is real or absolute but is instead an image developed in the speaker’s mind based upon ‘fragments’ that have been presented to her like burrs, which prick her painfully and refuse to let go. At the same time, however, he is accompanied to the office by a bag of “soft, yellow apples” (3) and “a sense of being loved and laundered” (4). The alliteration used in the latter statement allows the words to flow smoothly, suggesting a blissful existence while the apples, a major symbol for the poem, remain soft and welcoming.

The use of apples as a major symbol within the poem brings out another element of the negative within the positive. The man provides apples not only for his wife, their children and the children she presumably teaches (“Later she’ll carry a boxful / of apples to school” 21-22), but also is able to bring a bag of apples