Comparing Love after Love and This Room Essay -- Derek Walcott Imtiaz

Comparing Love after Love and This Room The two poems with which I compare each other are both poems of celebration. Celebration of life, love and your identity. The first is â€Å"Love after Love† by Derek Walcott. This poem is about self-discovery. Walcott suggests that we spend years assuming an identity, but eventually discover who we really are - and this is like two different people meeting and making friends and sharing a meal together. Walcott presents this in terms of the love feast or Eucharist of the Christian church - â€Å"Eat...Give wine. Give bread.† And it is not clear whether this other person is merely human or in some way divine, this is also an imperative which would suggest that they are divine and so have a right to give orders. But it could just be advice. The second poem, with which I will be comparing â€Å"Love after Love† is Imtiaz Dharker’s â€Å"This room† a poem again, about the joys of life and how it should be enjoyed and absorbed. This is a quite puzzling poem, if we try to find an explicit and exact interpretation - but its general meaning is clear enough, it suggests that Imtiaz Dharker sees rooms and furniture as possibly limiting or imprisoning one, but when change comes, it is as if the room â€Å"is breaking out of itself† this line is obviously a metaphor, which I believed to mean that the room is alive and it is liberating itself.., I think this means that if the mere room is doing this, that you should liberate yourself. She presents this rather literally, with a bizarre or surreal vision of room, bed and chairs breaking out of the house and rising up - the chairs â€Å"crashing through clouds† suggesting upward motion. The crockery, meanwhile, crashes together noisily â€Å"in celebration†. And... ... â€Å"This Room† In the poem our homes and possessions symbolize our lives and ambitions in a limiting sense, while change and new opportunities are likened to space, light and â€Å"empty air†, where there is an opportunity to move and grow. Like Walcott’s Love after Love, it is about change and personal growth - but at an earlier point, or perhaps at repeated points in one's life. In my opinion, both poems do an excellent job of encouraging a love of life, and making it seem very attractive and using metaphors for it to make it seem less serious. This is definitely a good thing. Both tell that you should live your life as you wish and should take advantage of every second of it. To conclude, I believe these poems both hold a strong moral point. Why should you become someone else to satisfy society’s needs? The resounding answer from both poems? You shouldn’t.