Gatsby + Love Poetry

• Love as unattainable/unrequited love


  • Physical distance
  • Daisy's marriage
  • Fitzgerald portrays love cynically as no relationship lasts or survives
  • Appears to be an unattainable concept which cannot be fully grasped or brought to maturity or fruition
• Nick: 'The world being divided into four types of lovers (or non-lovers) "the pursued, the pursuing, the busy and the tired"'
• Gatsby's love of Daisy

  • Unreciprocal
  • Eventually shatters
  • Leaves him with a new vision of the world, a "raw", "frightening" one in which a rose is "grotesque"
• Whoso List to Hunt

  • The speaker chases a woman whom he cannot and must not catch, for she is a prize of the ruler of the land
  • If the speaker continues to pursue her, he will incur the wrath of the ruler and probably lose his head
• King Henry VIII accused Wyatt of committing adultery with his wife, Anne Boleyn (apparently the hind in the poem), and imprisoned him in the Tower of London in 1536
• It was Ann Boleyn who lost her head in the same year as Wyatt's imprisonment after she fell out of favour with the king
• Garden of Love


  • Blake applies this negative and repressive teaching to himself
  • Believing as he did in free love, he feels his natural, loving 'joys and desires' in other words his sexual drives are restricted and suppressed
  • The 'binding with briars' is a metaphor for the distorted teaching of the Church, which generates pain rather than a sense of God's love
  • It is also an obvious reference to Jesus's crown of thorns, and therefore symbolises pain and humiliation
• Love as powerful


  • Love is imperfect for many, and varies according to people's different natures
  • Some can see inner beauty in a plain person
  • Love remains an 'ever-fixed mark', that is, it is consistent
  • Love is able to view or 'look on' 'tempests' that is, life's storms and troubles and remain unshaken
• Sonnet 116


  • There is a break, or caesura, after the exclamatory 'O no!' to emphasise its dramatic importance
  • The next three lines are smoother and refer to the comment about the 'ever-fixed mark'
  • The extended seafaring metaphor, with the lexical field of sailing-related words; 'tempests', 'star'(by which ships were steered) and 'bark' (a type of boat)
  • Tempests sound like temptresses, which could suggest that a temptress's (or tempter's) seductive look cannot tear two lovers apart
• Romantic love


  • Gatsby & Daisy's love (passionate)
  • Tom & Daisy's love (marriage of mutual social advantage, dominated by Tom's controlling nature and Daisy's desire to live comfortably and act on her immediate desires)
  • Tom & Myrtle's love (conditional, Myrtle only marries Wilson because she thought "he knew something about breeding", later discovers he cannot provide for her the way she wants and illusion shatters, Tom lusts after Myrtle and uses her to gain a sense of power, is violent to Myrtle)
• Gatsby: 'There must have been moments even that afternoon that Daisy tumbled short of his dreams - not through her own fault, but because of the colossal vitality of his illusion. It had gone beyond her, beyond everything. He had thrown himself into it with a creative passion.'
• Tom: 'Once in a while I go off on a spree and make a fool of myself, but I always come back, and in my heart I love her all the time.'
• Sonnet 116


  • "Love's not Time's fool" means that love is not dependent on time, when it's true, it lasts forever
  • This phrase was borrowed and adapted by Carol Ann Duffy to create the opposite meaning in her sonnet Hour, when she writes that 'Love's time's beggar'
• She Walks in Beauty

  • The woman is more beautiful than the sun, daylight is "gaudy" (excessively showy) compared to the tender light that radiates from "her aspect and her eyes"
  • The words "tender" and "light" combine the senses of touch and sight into one image, it's as if the light is caressing the woman's face
• Sexual desire


  • Gatsby: Tom openly has affairs with other woman and as a result hurts Daisy while expecting her to wait for him as if his desired where innate an uncontrollable when really he is in control but as a result of the corrupt society of the 1920s, his privilege, his marriage to Daisy, and the influence that the patriarchy has on his life he can afford to be reckless
  • Daisy: "And I hope she'll be a fool—that's the best thing a girl can be in this world, a beautiful little fool." Sex is a desire that men are expected to have, and a desire that women are expected to deal with
  • To His Coy Mistress: The sexual desire presented here is forbidden but also as a constant battle against time, the whole poem uses apostrophe, this instils the self serving tone of the poem, it isn't about the woman he wants to sleep with but the fulfilling of his own desires
  • The Scrutiny: The use of Minirallists gives a sense of authority and purpose to the speaker's actions and connotes that he's noble for pursuing sexual intercourse with many people and taking woman's virginity though empty promises
• Loss and death


  • Gatsby: Gatsby describes the end of this and Daisy's relationship to Nick, she is active, she is careless, mirrors chapter 5 when Daisy and Gatsby met at 4 o'clock at Nick's
  • Gatsby: "For Daisy was young and her artificial world was redolent of orchids... summing up the sadness and suggestiveness of life"
• Tedious


  Prolonged, innate and undying commitment the speaker has for obtaining his sexual desires
• Minerallist


  Gives a sense of authority and purpose to the speaker's actions and connotes that he's noble for pursuing sexual intercourse with many people and taking woman's virginity though empty promises
• Gatsby describes the end of this and Daisy's relationship to Nick


  She is active, she is careless, mirrors chapter 5 when Daisy and Gatsby met at 4 o'clock at Nick's
• Motif of flowers


  • Links to the rose and how Daisy is a flower and yet she is 'artificial' and rotten
  • Puts Daisy on a pedestal
  • Gatsby separated her from reality, ironically she is unattainable
  • Even for the young aristocrats, decay and death loom, the flowers are full of sadness
• Graves and tombstones


  • Could literally belong to unloved people who have died, failing to thrive because of their stunted emotional lives
  • Or the tombstones could represent the range of emotions and physical drives that have been suppressed and destroyed by the Church's teaching
• Repetition of "remember"


  • As if the narrator fears that her beloved will not heed her request
  • Underlines the vast boundary between life and death, writing "gone away" and later "gone far away"
  • The "silent land" is a symbol of death, emphasising her loneliness
  • The struggle to accept death is a common theme in Pre-Raphaelite philosophy
• Jealousy plays a huge part in the Great Gatsby. Not only is it a theme, but it is what the whole story is based upon
• Jealousy


  A jealous resentment against a rival, a person enjoying success or advantage, or against another's success or advantage itself
• Different types of jealousy exist such as jealousy with money, jealousy with other people's spouses, and jealousy of being wealthy
• Jealousy is heated up in the affairs that the characters have
• Unaware of his wife's past relationship with Jay Gatsby, Tom breaks off when he finds out about Daisy and Gatsby's affair as well
• Jealousy with money and wealth is also another big theme in the Great Gatsby
• Most of the people are not content with what they have even if it's already a luxurious life because they just want more and more
• Nick is also another good example for jealousy. At first, he meets Gatsby and envies Gatsby's mansion and luxurious life. Then later on, he accepts it and becomes very close to Gatsby
• "Noli me tangere"


  • Latin for 'Touch me not' which is a religious reference as Jesus said it to Mary Magdalene after he rose from the dead
  • Could suggest a new beginning for her which Wyatt desperately wants
  • More likely to suggest that she wants him to realise that she is not for him and he should respect her marriage to the King
• Use of "their"


  Suggests there are multiple people or something else involved in their sexual desires
• Dowson's use of his desires in a semantic field

  Presents this feeling of passion between himself and another lover, in an affair, or a prostitute to the reader
• Dowson personally believes that he and his love interest could reach great heights in a relationship however later in the stanza 'finished' and 'expire' juxtapose this idea as he comes to a conclusion by the end of the poem that she does not want him
• The only marriages we see are marked by adultery, deception, and dissatisfaction
• Sonnet 116 ("Let me not to the marriage of true minds")


  • "Marriage of true minds" refers to the spiritual union of two souls rather than the legal union of physical bodies
  • It's more of an emotional connection of two willing individuals and less of a legal bond
  • Shakespeare is criticising marriage services that are merely a union of convenience, common in his time when financial considerations were often of prime importance to prosperous families and not based on true love