Exploring the Complex Nature of Love in Wroth's Poetry

I’ve already touched upon the personification of love as a baby, but let’s explore exactly why she’s chosen this disguise. First of all, there is the classic association between love and the winged baby, Cupid, who goes around firing his arrows and causing mischief by making people fall in love. That is certainly part of Wroth’s choice. However, there are other important connotations relating to babies that are essential to consider.

Our very nature teaches us to nurture the vulnerable; thus, the baby represents something that we care for and want to nurture. However, although we want to play the parental role, we acknowledge that it is a pretty thankless task – cleaning up all sorts of unmentionable stenches and bodily disasters. Thus, love being a baby gives us this idea of it being something that we long for and want to develop, but know how difficult it can be.

Heartbreak and the Nature of Love

Next, I’d like to discuss Wroth’s (or maybe her protagonist in the sonnet sequences, Pamphilia’s) clear indication that she has been left heartbroken. We see this as love ‘promiseth he breaketh’ and his ‘vows are nothing but false matter’, suggesting not only that he is inconsistent in his affections but linking to the idea of marriage (promises and vows are things we make at the altar) and reneging on commitments. These words have been chosen very deliberately and make me think that Wroth wants us to associate men’s love as being about short-term lust and them making all sorts of disingenuous promises in order to achieve their aims. This idea is furthered with her suggestion that we need to beware of love’s ‘flatter[y]’ lest it lead us to a position of comfort where we can expose ourselves emotionally to be hurt by love’s broken promises.

The Cruelty of Love

You might also want to go further into this and demonstrate how anti-love Wroth is in this poem. She paints love not just as being selfish and a liar, but also shows how cruel and vicious love can be as he ‘glor[ies] to deceive’ and ‘triumphs in your wailing’. Both of these suggest a real nastiness, with the emotion taking pleasure in our suffering. What this refers to is how miserable we feel after having our heart broken and the fact that this pain is caused by the very love that once made us really happy. Being heartbroken is not the same as conventional misery, as it is that sharp crash from happiness with another to sheer misery of loneliness; thus, the pain is sharp and vicious, as Wroth portrays here. Triumph and glory make me think of a football cup final, where one team is celebrating wildly while the other is feeling completely devastated. Thus, there is a bitterness to the reaction of the loser and a resentment towards love in its celebrations, which could be found by a heartbroken lover in anyone content in a relationship.

The Folly of Romantic Desires

You could link this to her description of our romantic desires (‘treasure’) to ‘Endless folly’? Folly means sheer idiocy/stupidity, and this is seen by Wroth as the desire of love. This shows just how crazy an emotion it is, making people do stupid, irrational things constantly and ultimately, for her, always leads to disaster.

Metaphors of Love

Finally, deal with the twin metaphors in the final stanza that compare love to a ‘feather’ and ‘wolves’. The feather is soft, comfortable, and desirable, but it is also weak and can blow away easily – thus love is seen as having these desirable qualities but lacking the constancy that Wroth desires. Wolves are often portrayed in literature as vicious, heartless, and ruthless beings. Wroth’s image here makes us picture love as being on the lookout for its prey and thus wanting to inflict its misery onto people, the emotion being like a trap.