Havisham And Love After Love Comparison

The poems I chose, “Havisham” and "Love After Love", are comparable, with their common subject of how a person responds to the end of a relationship, but they are very contrasting in the paths they take. The persona in “Love After Love” talks about returning to yourself and loving who you are: without the need for someone else, “You will love again the stranger who was yourself” as if you lose yourself in a relationship so much that you need to learn how to look after yourself again. Whereas “Havisham” shows the result of not letting go and dwelling in old memories, “Whole days in bed cawing Nooooo at the wall”, the decay of the relationship is shown in the desperation of the character.

Firstly, the structure of the two poems represent the anarchy of love: its unpredictable nature and lasting devastation. Neither of them have a rhyme scheme, nor set line lengths, albeit in “Love After Love” the stanza length decreases, as if something is coming to an end and, the stanza length stays the same throughout “Havisham”, possibly to
show the monotonous life Miss Havisham lives in. Looking deeper into this, both poems encompass the use of enjambment, the free flowing sentences are used to show the unordered thought processes of the writer and how ideas cannot be contained within a line, just as this is only the beginning of what the writer needs to say.

Furthermore, “Havisham” is written from the perspective of a character from Great Expectations, Miss Havisham; as the story goes, her lover deserted her at the alter.
Eliciting a life of solitude and sorrow, she shut herself away and remained within the wedding decorations, wearing a “once white, now yellow” wedding dress, in the same way the poem refers to “the dress yellowing”. On the contrary, “Love After Love” is rather ambiguous, Derek Walcott uses direct address to relate to the readers’ own experiences, “You will greet yourself arriving”, this poem isn’t written about himself, instead he is talking to the audience about moving on and living your own life. This difference in address shows a contrast in character of the two personas, Carol Ann Duffy (written as Miss Havisham) is shown as a self-orientated character, caught up in past events; whereas, Walcott speaks from his experiences to alleviate other people in similar
situations.

The language used in “Havisham” is very negative, talking about death and hatred- “[...] I could strangle with.” and “Give me a male corpse for a long slow honeymoon” are examples of images with negative connotations. The persona appears to be ridden with troubling thoughts, the imagery for taking a corpse on a romantic holiday is gruesome and disturbing, this could symbolise her love for death; the corpse being a metaphor for death itself. The language used in Duffy’s poem makes the reader sympathise with personna, especially the last line- “Don’t think it’s only the heart that b-b-b-breaks.”, despite Miss Havisham’s bitter exterior and hatred filled heart, it all comes down to a woman who has had their heart broken and is left alone and scared. However, in response to “Love After Love” the audience isn’t inclined to show compassion, but more respects the person in the poem as they are working hard to become a newer, better person