Literary Paper 1

The Loss of a Loved One The poem “A Song of Despair” by Pablo Neruda and the song “Over You” written by Miranda Lambert and Blake Shelton are two works of literature that show how one feels and how one laments after losing someone he or she deeply loves. In the case of “A Song of Despair”, the persona Pablo Neruda had created is lamenting over the loss of his woman, while “Over You” is about Blake Shelton’s (one of the song’s composers) personal loss of his brother. Although the two works of art have different losses, they were able to express their sadness and sorrow eloquently, enough to make any reader feel as if they had lost someone dear to them themselves. In order to fully appreciate and interpret the two works of art, their dramatic situations, images, and figurative languages used have to be closely analyzed and understood. The first comparisons we are going to look at are the likeness and differences of the two works’ dramatic situations; “A Song of Despair” has its dramatic situation set at the shore, while the man who lost his love was alone and feeling lonely. This could be seen from the lines 1 to 4, which say “The memory of you emerges from the night around me. The river mingles its stubborn lament with the sea. Deserted like the wharves at dawn. It is the hour of departure, oh deserted one.” “Over You”, on the other hand, doesn’t have its dramatic situation set clearly; however, one could infer that it is set at home and at the cemetery, based on the lines 1 to 2 of the second verse, “Living alone here in this place. I think of you, and I’m not afraid”, and line 1 from the third verse “It really sinks in, you know, when I see it in stone.” Both dramatic situations almost have the same atmosphere, the atmosphere of longing for and missing the person they had lost. One difference though is how they deal with their sorrows; the persona in “A Song of Despair”, reminisces about his loved one who he had lost, and likens her to the sea, because of