Romeo and Juliet Essay Example

In this essay I am going to compare ‘Romeo and Juliet’ to four love poems which are ‘Porphyria’s Lover’, ‘Cousin Kate’, ‘Valentine’, and ‘A Married State’. Romeo and Juliet is a basic story of two young lovers - Romeo and Juliet - from opposing families in Italy (Montague and Capulet). These two families were involved in a feud that goes a long time back. Due to the feud and hatred between the two families the two lovers weren’t able to join Capulet’s chose Paris to be Juliet’s husband. Yet she refused. These events lead to the death of two lovers. Porphyria’s lover is about the speaker's lover, Porphyria, who is a young woman who came out of a storm and into the cottage where the speaker is. The speaker does not talk, but Porphyria tells him that she loved him and embraces the speaker. Then, he strangles her with her own hair. They speaker sits with her body for the entire night. The speaker remarks that God has not yet moved to punish him. Cousin Kate is a poem about a young girl who gets seduced by a Lord and makes her pregnant (the young girl is not Kate however the Lord didn't love the narrator of the poem and just used her. He then goes onto marrying her cousin – Kate. But Kate is only in the marriage for money as she comes from a poor background, towards the end of the poem we find Kate cannot have a child with the Lord and all the Lord wants now is the narrators son however as it was conceived outside of marriage this would have been unethical in Victorian times. “Valentine” is a controversial love poem written by Carol Ann Duffy. Throughout the poem the poetess compares love to an onion and she does that by using a variety of techniques such as imagery, symbolism, word choice and structure. All these techniques justify why “Valentine” is an unusual love-poem as they help the poet express her different point of