A Farewell to False Love

Category: Farewell, Love, Odyssey, Poetry

Last Updated: 19 Apr 2023

Pages: 2 Views: 1202

Trevor Robinson Kanshaw 1st 3/25/13 A Farewell to False Love essay “If only one could tell true love from false love as one can tell mushrooms from toadstools” In the poem A Farewell to False love, Sir Walter Raleigh uses loaded language to prove that false love is hard to notice until you’ve already gone through the relationship. Raleigh uses such quotes as: “A mortal foe and enemy to rest”, and “A gilded hook that holds a poisoned bait” to make us as the reader to feel that false love is bad.

Raleigh also uses this poem to make us be more cautious or realize false love from true love. Raleigh uses the quote, “ A siren song, fever of the mind” as a classic form of allusion in reference to The Odyssey, a classic Greek story. In The Odyssey, the sirens used their songs to lure in sailors only to kill them. Raleigh uses “a sirens song” to relate to a trap or some type of trick. When he uses fever of the mind he means that people are to infatuated with them to even notice false love.

The poem also includes the quote “ A substance like the shadow of the sun” which contains redundancy, whereas the sun has no shadow. A quote such as this one is confusing, yet deep in the sense that the sun cannot have a shadow; Compared to Raleigh’s feeling that he cannot find true love. The line being redundant also has its meaning. It means that false love is unneeded and should cancel itself out. Raleigh repeats the theme that false love is a lie, a deceiver, and untrue over and over through ought the poem. All the lines mean the same thing in different ways.

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