{"id":712,"date":"2021-09-15T22:39:06","date_gmt":"2021-09-16T02:39:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/403lit\/?p=712"},"modified":"2021-09-15T22:39:06","modified_gmt":"2021-09-16T02:39:06","slug":"the-anxiety-of-losing-love","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/403lit\/2021\/09\/15\/the-anxiety-of-losing-love\/","title":{"rendered":"The Anxiety of Losing Love"},"content":{"rendered":"

In Michael Field\u2019s Underneath the Bough, <\/em>there seems to be a recurring pattern of switching back and forth between an emphasis on love or an emphasis on death.\u00a0 Specifically at the beginning of book five on page 80, Michael Field quite directly switches back and forth either one line after another or by having the mentions broken up by a few lines.\u00a0 The speaker seems to be lying on her deathbed in the first stanza, then imagines two lovers together, and then returns to the present as the speaker and her companion await a dreadful fate. \u00a0In the first stanza, Field states \u201cA woman is lying in her shroud\/ To whom a lover has never vowed\u201d.\u00a0 Here, the death of this woman highlights the absence of romantic love in her life.\u00a0 Death seems to extinguish any potential for love.\u00a0 When the second stanza mentions the two lovers, it describes them embracing as \u201cthe winter daylight died\u201d.\u00a0 In the last stanza, Michael Field states, \u201cThen we forgot the lovers; for the room\/ Was filling with a doom\u201d, which again brings together this union of love and death.\u00a0 The speaker and her companion cannot acknowledge love, for themselves or others, as death is upon them.\u00a0 Love only exists in the silent expression of holding hands.<\/p>\n

This brief poem of book five highlights a recurring pattern across all the books in Underneath the Bough.\u00a0 <\/em>Field makes direct connection to love and death all throughout.\u00a0 As the speaker grapples with their existence between these two harsh outcomes, the collection offers perhaps the idea that death often allows people to realize that authentic love is present.\u00a0 Across books, another brief example of this pattern is at the end of book three in the poem titled \u201cDaybreak\u201d.\u00a0 Field writes, \u201cAnd yet choose to wake in death? \/ Eros, while my Love has breath \/ I will breathe beside her\u201d (55).\u00a0 The speaker will express their love until ultimately death consumes one or both of them.\u00a0 In this collection, as I have tracked through these two brief instances, any mention of love seems to be immediately followed by a mention of death.\u00a0 It\u2019s almost as if Michael Field\u2019s acknowledgement of love, and the happiness and warmth it provides, simultaneously identifies their anxieties about an impending death, often for only one half of the couple.\u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In Michael Field\u2019s Underneath the Bough, there seems to be a recurring pattern of switching back and forth between an emphasis on love or an emphasis on death.\u00a0 Specifically at the beginning of book five on page 80, Michael Field quite directly switches back and forth either one line after another or by having the … Continue reading The Anxiety of Losing Love<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3893,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[145909],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-712","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-2021-blog-posts"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/403lit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/712","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/403lit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/403lit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/403lit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3893"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/403lit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=712"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/403lit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/712\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/403lit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=712"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/403lit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=712"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/403lit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=712"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}