I was wary about the poems I had chosen to contrast because I thought it might be difficult to find differences in their interpretations of love, but I'm sticking to my original choices. The two poems I've chosen are "Measure" by Zareh Khrakhouni and "My Ugly Love" by Pablo Neruda. "Measure" focuses on the depths of love and the extraordinary things one can compare one's love to: "Taller than tall, we chose mountain altitudes / to scan and grade. / We chose stars and galaxies to outdistance / in love." On the other hand, Neruda's "My Ugly Love" focuses on the speaker's love interest and how she is beautiful while still having ugly traits, but the speaker loves her anyway. The speaker mentions physical attributes that are beautiful and ugly but ends the poem speaking of something that is not a physical attribute: "My love: I love you for your clarity, your dark." Khrakhouni's poem seems to center on an idealistic love, where everything seems perfect and the love consumes the affected. The lines "Finally you said your love was as deep / as the light in my eyes when / I looked at you and knew / I was defeated." convey this intense love, where the speaker says he was "defeated" by the other's love for him. Neruda's, on the other hand, sheds a much more realistic light on love, where the speaker notes the subject's flaws but puts a spin on those flaws to turn them into something beautiful, and also accepts the flaws and loves them despite them being flaws. The love is still there, it just seems more realistic.
Have I mentioned my love for love? I'm a hopeless romantic so both of these poems are wonderful to me. I'm not sure what view I have on love considering I'm both an idealist and a realist, it just depends on when I'm asked about things. I'm going back and forth between which one is closer to my view, but in this moment in time I'd say Khrakhouni's poem is closer.
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