The More Pessimistic Side of Love Displayed by Heinrich Heine and William Blake.
A piece of yarn or string can hold something together, or with one pull, it can make something fall apart. It seems as if love works in the same ways; putting you together, or pulling you apart. These two extreme sides of love can be shown in the lyric poem "The Lotus Flower" by Heinrich Heine and "Broken Love" by William Blake. Heinrich Heine's poem is a self-therapy type of work portraying a girl as a lotus flower, getting excited when her lover comes to her at night, but showing the sorrows of love when he leaves. William Blake's poem is a speaker, possibly himself, giving advice that one is better off not announcing one's affection for another, but rather should remain "silent and invisible." So while Heine's poem explains love and its sorrows, Blake's poem suggests not being in love at all, which author portrays the more pessimistic view on love-and how do they? Although both authors have a shift of cacophony to euphony (or vice versa), Blake's poem shows the more pessimistic side of love by using negative diction, and repetition of the same words. Heine also shows a pessimistic side of love, but he shows more of the optimistic side by using a metaphor to compare the girl to the lotus flower and her lover to the moon.
In Blake's poem, there is a lot of negative diction, whereas not nearly as much in Heine's poem. Blake continues to use the words "weep" and "sin" (Blake line 4), to suggest that there is a lot of pain in his current or past love affair. The speaker felt as if the love or adoration for the woman was so inappropriate that it was, indeed, a sin. He knew it was wrong and would be deemed as such, but he continued to love this woman, regardless of how sinful it was. The author uses negative diction choice words such as "tears" and "fears" to describe the feelings the speaker has towards his love affair and how it is tearing him apart, slowly but surely(19, 20).
