Love can be expressed in many different forms. Some
kinds are familial, romantic, friendship or even self-love. It’s about the act
of caring and giving to someone else or having their best interest at heart.
While loving someone is the best experience, losing that love can take a toll.
The two poems that display the effects of losing love or how to deal with
losing love are “First Love” by Jennifer Franklin and “The Long Deployment” by
Jehanne Dubrow. The song that best relates to these two poems is “My Heart Will
Go On” by Celine Dion.
The poem “First Love” by Jennifer Franklin, is about a
woman who has lost her first love and the way she copes with that is by finding
traits of her first love in other men she dates. She addresses this poem to her
first love as if she is talking to him. Jennifer states, “I pass through life
finding you over and over again” (5-7). She is saying that as she gets older
and dates different men she still finds traits or things she loved about her
first love in them. She is unable to let her first love go and it seems that it
does become a problem in her relationships. She says “And every surrogate?
Afflicted by my kindness, they leave me with my music” (9-13). This goes to
show that her not being able to let go of her first love affects the
relationships that she has now in that she is so focused on guys that exemplify
her first loves characteristics that the men she dates don’t like it and they
leave her.
The poem “The Long Deployment” by Jehanne Dubrow, is
about a woman whose husband is in the military. Every deployment that he went
on when she went to bed she would smell the sheets and his pillow to remember
his smell. She states, “For weeks, I breathe his body in the sheet and pillow.
I lift the blanket to my face. There’s bitter incense paired with something
sweet, like sandalwood left sitting in the heat or cardamom rubbed on a piece
of lace” (1-5). She takes in the scents of her husband every time she misses
him. It isn’t realized until towards the end of the poem that the whole time
her husband had actually been dead. Jehanne says, “I breathe his body in the
sheet until he starts to fade, made incomplete, a bottle almost empty in its
case. There’s bitter incense paired with something sweet. And then he’s gone.
Not even the conceit of his remains, not the resinous base” (18-23). The only
way she remembers her husband who died during deployment is by smelling the
sheets when she goes to bed and when that smell disappears, it appears that she
is sad and disappointed.
The song that ties these two poems together is called
“My Heart Will Go On” by Celine Dion. This is an iconic song about love because
it was in the movie titanic which is about two people who are at the time in
different social classes and something like that wasn’t accepted. They meet on
the boat Titanic which at the end of the movie the boat sinks after hitting an
iceberg and Jack sacrifices himself to keep Rose from dying. The song is about
losing love but also that she will remember her love, that he will be in her
heart and she moves on. This is shown
when Celine sings “You are safe in my heart, And my heart will go on and on” (26-27)
The song can compare to the poem “The Long Deployment” in that while Jehanne remembers
her husband by smelling the bed sheets, in the song Celine remembers her significant
other in her dreams she says, “Every night in my dreams, I see you, I feel you”
(lines 1-3). She remembers her love by seeing him in her dreams. The song
compares to the poem “First Love” in that while Jennifer copes with the loss of
her first love by finding him in others, in the song, Celine keeps the love for
her significant other by keeping him in her heart and remembering him.
Love is a powerful emotion that can be experienced in
different forms. We express our love for others through different ways whether
its writing a poem or singing a song about your significant other. The poems “First
Love” and “The Long Deployment” can compare the song “My Heart Will Go On” by
Celine Dion in that they all deal with the loss of the man she loved. Losing a
loved one is hard thing to deal with and everyone has their ways of coping and
these two poems and song show the ways these women dealt with losing their
lover. While it is said, you can meet and fall in love with “the one” and there
will be no one else, it can also be believed that if you do lose the one there
is always someone else out there for you.
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