Describe how Plato, Sappho, and/or Catullus conceive of love (and/or friendship). You can choose to only discuss one of the three works or compare two or three of them. You can also choose to compare their views on love with The Odyssey, Oedipus Rex, or Lysistrata. You can also choose to focus more specifically on either the lover or the beloved if you like.

I think Sappho’s poetry is very sad and that her conception of love is sad as well. In Poem 16 she writes about how Helen left her husband, children, and parents for another man whom she loved or maybe desired. And then a lot of the text is missing unfortunately but I think what she meant to do in this poem is compare herself  to either Helen who had to give up this love. Because Sappho says: “Reminded me now of Anaktoria/ who is gone.” Or maybe she is comparing her “love” (the women who left her) to Helen since they both left the people they love.

The reason why I think her conception of love is sad is because she writes about how she got dumped by the women she loved and that she wants to die because of it. We see this in Poem 94: “I simply want to be dead./ Weeping she left me.”

I have decided to compare the 4 pieces by the poets Ibn Zaydun, Arnaut Daniel, Guido Guinizzelli, Jahan Khatun. Each piece speaks of love as a piece of nature which is a beauty. Love is perceived as being beautiful but not always and the pieces talk about having a dark side to love. The poems also each give power to a different person in a relationship. “From Al-Zahra this poem was very similar to Jahan Khatun’s piece. Love is beautiful, love is nature but love is evil. Love has brought power to ‘her’ over the man. The poem’s subject is her because of how Zaydun describes the person comes across as very feminism. “The Art Of Love” by Arnaut Daniel love again is evil and has given a woman complete control over a man. The speaker loves this woman to a massive degree he is starting to think loving her too much will cause him to lose her. Not loving him is equivalent to her murdering him. “Love Always Repairs To The Noble Heart” by Guido Guinizzelli is different than the previous poems because in this case love still nature but a natural power that makes a man noble giving him power. Love will “…turn his every thought to her command” taken from line 50 page 355. Love gives men full power over woman. Finally “Heart, In His Beauty’s Garden” by Jahan Khatun speaks of love causing hell. The absence of love or the heart breaks causes the speaker to see no flowers. On a rose the speaker only sees the thorns. This now become one of my favorite metaphors. Love is a rose, it has it beauty the flower and its evil the thorns. This is balanced when the flower is living and love is alive. When love dies the flower disappears and only the thorns remain; the rose is no longer beautiful. In this poem love seems to have the capability of taking power away from everyone

Ibn Zaydun’s from Al -Zahra describes beautiful memories of love and sufferings because of love. Ibn Zaytun defines two lovers as “Thieves of pleasure”, and describes how lovers suffer the separation. He describes the love to be tough as even” flowers” feel sympathy for the lover.  Arnaut Daniel in turn describes love as something that can polish and aureate. He describes the woman as a noble and the love as something that keeps heart worm. By describing outer beauty of woman he mentions that his love to her is so strong that he will not even accept a whole city for exchange to her. He describes love as strong and beautiful that makes him strong and passionate as well. The noble view of love can be noticed in Guido Guinizzelli’s poem, where he describes love as a nobility. He explains how nobility and love gets inside the heart. He compares haughty people to mud, who has nobility outside the heart  and  compares sun to nobility, which beats against the mud. Another Italian poet Guido Cavancanti  focuses on negative aspects of love, describing the cynical view of love.

In both works that i read on courtly love. Both Petrarch and Louis Labe, share similarities in there work. They both are extremely infatuated with the person they are writing about. Louis labe takes the time to describe every flesh of beauty on the man of her dreams, to explain why exactly she is in so much pain. Moreover Petrarch, takes the same approach in describing the correlation between romanticism and love. Both poets make it seem as if there ex partners were the reason they lived, and the reason they will die.

Courtly love by definition is the glorification of illicit marital activity. Its the idea that there is something romantic with forbidden love and that being that it’s not allowed makes all the more interesting. In my view it is absolutely wrong and is glorifying a horrible act as if it just okay. I think that courtly love bay not be the sole reason for spouses cheating, but it definitely does play a big role. It has made its way from fiction into the real world which in the long run can be dangerous to society.

Montaigne makes reference to the extent of which our imagination plagues us. He describes how various people he’s encountered, all facing a kind of bodily alignment, was at the mercy of their imagination. In reality, they were not truly sick but their physical conditions were a direct reflection of their mental states. I think Montaigne’s discussion of the relationship between mind and body is thought provoking. It begs the thought of the true capabilities of our minds. If completely tapped into, how much of our physical world can we alter with our thoughts. It sounds like the plot of the movie, Lucy, but realistically i think that the connection between mind and body is a realm humans have yet to completely understand.

When I read Montaigne’s essays, I had the general impression that Montaigne was trying to shows to the readers that he was a less skeptical man who took pleasure to ruin the certainty. On the other hand, Montaigne was an epicurean’s person meaning he was first seeking the pleasure of sense. He gave us some formula that contained his thought. He was one of the spontaneous writers of his generation.The way he wrote was capricious and unexpected. His thought was based on pictures and thought that he could see everything he could imagine that why people compared him as a poet.

The courtly love tradition is based on a man’s chivalry and admiration towards a woman. This kind of love isn’t about a physical sexual relationship or even intended to become a serious relationship. Courtly emerged  during the 12th to 14th century because marriages of this time were based on increasing wealth or status and courtly love was not something that happened inside a marriage.  Petrarch’s is an example of this admiration of beauty that is so emphasized in courtly love. “then blonde hair was veiled. and loving glances gathered to themselves.” Petrarch talks about how he’s admiring this woman with blonde hair from a far and only is exchanging glances with her makes this a perfect example of the admiration and noble kind of love  result  by code of conduct.

In Michel de Montaigne’s collection of essays, perception, or our point of view of things, rule our existence. In the first piece “Of the Power of the Imagination”, Montaigne’s main point is that “strong imagination creates the event”(345). In his experience, if people’s belief or imagination in an action or event was strong enough, said thought coursing through one’s imagination would become true. Basically, a placebo would take effect. The placebo effect is something that i learned about very young and always interested me. The way Montaigne beautifully describes the power of imagination or a placebo, in a less scientific and medicinal way, really engaged me.

In another essay, “Of Cannibals”, perception takes place through cultural relativism. He argues that the Europeans incorrectly refer to the newly discovered Brazilian people as barbaric in nature. From the standpoint of the Europeans, he understands why they would say that, as anything different from their norm can be considered barbaric and prehistoric. However, he argues against this when he recalls a visit from 3 Brazilians and how they considered certain European traditions odd. He also argues that European are actually more barbaric because they are farther away from humankind’s “natural” state. If anything is wild it is that that is furthest away from nature and that would be the Europeans. He understands that it all depends on who’s viewpoint you are looking from, in    another word, perception.

I enjoyed the Commedia, even though I am an atheist.  I feel as though for the modern day reader, the religious context of the writing does not play as big of part.  When Dante wrote this work, religion was extremely important in everyday life.  But today, religion is almost an after thought to most people.  I looked at this Commedia as a piece of fictional writing, instead of the word of a god.  Which I believe most people would do when reading this work today.  Over time, Dante’s writing has lost the importance of being a secular piece and become a piece for everyone to appreciate.  I believe you don’t need to agree with the writers views to enjoy their work.