Love provides the underlying impetus and thematic content in many works of literature, especially poetry. In its various forms and expressions, love is the driving force of life, the magnetism uniting mother to child, lover to lover, friend to friend. However, love is not always portrayed as a liberating, life-giving force in works of poetry and poets especially disagree on the role romantic love plays in the human experience. Millay and Shakespeare use the sonnet, a form of poetry reserved almost exclusively for the theme of love, to convey starkly different opinions about love's power and its impact on human beings. Written by a male poet, Shakespeare's Sonnet 18 also reveals specifically how romance has affected men. On the other hand, Edna Millay, Anne Sexton and Kate Chopin both write about romantic love from a female point of view and their respective works share several core thematic elements in common. For Millay as well as for Chopin and Sexton, love is an oppressive, even fatal force; whereas for Shakespeare love means the opposite: eternal life.
             Sexton describes "that old pantomime of love" in her free-verse poem "The Farmer's Wife." The titular narrator laments the sad routine into which she and her husband have slipped. Both grow old and the narrator notices with shame their lackluster sex life and their inability to communicate openly. The farmer's wife knows but "will not say" that "there must be more to living," (line 11). Moreover, "she has been his habit," referring to the oppressive routine that characterizes their marriage (line 7). Distanced from each other in spirit, the narrator feels "alone" and ultimately she claims that her husband would be better off dead.
             Similarly, Kate Chopin describes the oppressive and fatal force of live in her short story "The Story of an Hour." Protagonist Louise believes her husband died in ...