barriers to love

Question 1

Gatsby and whoso list: main point of comparison

Answer 1

• both speakers engage in a desperate conquest for their love, but are stopped by barriers
• Wyatt’s speaker is not willing to try and transcend these, Gatsby is

Question 2

Gtabys and Whoso list

Answer 2

• pursuit of unattainable love is linked to a conquest - extended metaphor of the deer who ‘fleeth afore’ and is initially shown to be unattainable due to her evasive nature
• goddess Diana was associated with deer and was the goddess of both hunting and virignity, hunting therefore serves as an extended metaphor for the pursuit of a woman, reflecting the sense of patriarchal ownership
• ‘faier neck rownde about’ - sense of ownership and possession - speaker suggests the hind is impossible to capture not because of her evasive nature, but because she has been taken my a more powerful man
• ‘noli me tangere, for Cesar’s i ame’
• like Gatsby he is a courtly lover: Wyatt was inspired by Petrarch and brought the sonnet to England - Petrarch developed courtly love into an art form, celebrating the physical and spiritual qualities of an idealise beloved. HE addressed much of his poetry to an idealise Laura, fitting within the troubadour tradition of adoring from afar and worshipping his love

Question 3

Whoso list and Gatsby: Gatsby

Answer 3

‘I think he revalued everything in his house according to the measure of response it drew from her well-loved eyes’ - like the courtly lover Gatsby creates a grand facade ‘your place looks like the World’s fair’
- Like Wyatt’s speaker he engages on a quest ‘after that I lived like a young rajah… collecting jewels, chiefly rubies’ - but his quest involves formulating his sentiment in monetary terms to try and win daisy back - he believes he can transcend social class boundaries but these are ultimately impossible (the same way myrtle is punched in the face) - the baby represents his realisation that daisy will not leave tom:
- ‘he found that he had committed himself to the following of. grail’ - sacrifices everything, religious imagery given here to his love parallels the religious journey of the pilgrims to the new world and the intensity of the vision of the dutch sailors who first saw the shores of this ‘original land’ - FSF therefore makes a connection between the sexual destiny of Gatsby and the national destiny of America - linking gutsy to a courtly lover

Question 4

Whoso List and the garden of love: main point of comparison

Answer 4

• barriers to love generate suffering and pain

Question 5

Whoso list and the garden of love: Whoso List

Answer 5

• unattainable love creates a sense of hopelessness
• ‘helas, I may no more’ - expression of anguish: assonance on ‘m’ makes them appear longer, making the tone more weary - he is exhausted and drained and pities Himself
• ‘weried me so sore’ - assonance on ‘so sore’ combined with ‘weried’ emphasises pain, heartache manifests itself physically
• semantic field of despair ‘farthest cometh behind’ implies that he lost the race, and illicit a sense of hopelessness
• Carol rumens: the rhyming couplet at the end of the poem ‘instantly transports us to a hinterland of erotic excitement and registers the extent of the poet’s hurt and loss now that the king has claimed Wyatt’s deer as his own - the deer is not just there to be loved, but also owned and controlled ‘

Question 6

the garden of love and whoso list: whoso list

Answer 6

• ‘binding with briars, my joys and desires’ - briars are thorny plants, therefore serving as a powerful metaphor for the church’s restrictive control - illustrates the pain christ suffered at his crucifixiona

Question 7

the garden of love and Gatsby

Answer 7

both present man-made systems as a barrier to love - religion, versus a lawless society based on consumerism

Question 8

the garden of love and Gatsby: the garden of love

Answer 8

• sees religion and legalistic moral approach of the church as restricting love
• links to Romantic emphasis on the free love movement
• ‘the gates of the chapel were shut’ - excluding, exclusive nature of the church
• ‘thou shalt not writ over the door’ - legalistic, blanket of authoritarian control - 10 commandments
• ‘priests in black gowns were walking their rounds’ - closed way of thinking and behaving
• he subverts the edenic image of the garden of love, an innocent world of beauty and play, into a corrupted world with a chapel built on the green - religious imagery to highlight church hypocrisy
• simplistic and basic verbs reflects childlike innocence - romantics perceived children as closest to god
• ‘that so many flowers bore/and I saw it was filled with graves’ - oxymoronic contrast, juxtaposing Beauty and corruption - church has corrupted the pastoral idyll

Question 9

garden of love and Gatsby: Gatsby

Answer 9

• the same innocence Blake mourns Fitzgerald also shows is lost in corrupted American society
• lack of morality is a barrier to love in society - Fitzgerald argues the moral decline of America is irreversible
• absence of morality in society: Fitzgerald juxtaposes appearance versus reality - romantic possibility gives way to corrupt reality, with thegreenenss of the new world the settlers discovered giving way to the valley of ashes and atmosphere of corruption - idea of a just god gives way to merely the eyes of Dr TJ Eckleberg, an advertisement, overlooking a physical wasteland and characters who consistently missee things
• ‘terrible place, isn’t it,’ said tom, exchanging a frown with Doctor Eckleberg’ - corrupt, ironic - scale of buchanan mansion is equally as corrupt and morally debaucherous
• ‘I’ll tell you god’s truth’ - Gatsby claims that his story is god’s truth, but it actually turns out to be a lie - absence of religion in the creation of an immoral facade
• the motif of seeing is ironic, as eyes are supposed to be a symbol of clear sight - however, these people cannot see clearly.