How is love portrayed in ‘Heart and Mind’ by Edith Sitwell?
In the poem, ‘Heart and Mind’ by Edith Sitwell, love is portrayed in a variety of ways, in fact portraying a couple of different types of love. The poem has no rhyme scheme, hence is in free verse to demonstrate the irrevocable difference of our minds and heart when it comes to love. This is presented by the analogy where the lion is speaking to the lioness. The love we observe is an erotic love, also supporting the theory that the lion symbolizes men and their inability to love from the heart, their preference of lust being made clear. This is expressed by the metaphor “raging fire” which exhibits the passion and consuming power of lust in regards to eroticism men display.
Through the continuation to the next stanza, we now notice the change to heartfelt and pure love. From the quote “greater than all gold, more powerful…is the heart”, we observe how love created in the heart is more powerful than lust. Pure love from the heart warms us due to the personification “that fire consumes” us.
The next stanza also supports the heartfelt love as described by the analogy of Hercules and Samson. True love is “more powerful than all dust”, the dust refers to lust and how it is a fleeting feeling that is blown away easily. However, real love is constant and stays forever as it is as “strong as the pillars of the seas”. By using Greek mythology through Hercules and a bible reference to Samson, Sitwell portrays how even strong men were undone by the power of love. The last two lines: “the flames of the heart consumed me…the mind is but a foolish wind” illustrate captivating imagery. This signifies the power of untainted love and exposes that the mind is weaker than the heart. Since the mind is associated to the wind, Sitwell proves that lust from the mind is easily swayed and ever changing. By linking flames to the heart, Sitwell corroborates the theory that true love literally overpowers any other forms of love due to its strength and intensity. Moreover, this is a demonstration of Sitwell’s tendency to describe separate things as at the same time being one. Wind (the mind) can sometimes also fuel a fire (the heart) to be stronger portraying how the heart and mind can help each other and become one if they were to overcome the feud between them.
The last stanza explores how love from the heart and lust from the mind cannot simultaneously exist. With the analogy of the sun speaking to the moon, we understand how different the heart and mind are, furthermore how the love between a man and women is difficult because they are so different. The sun represents men and the moon a symbol of women, by using the two vital parts of the solar system, Sitwell depicts how one is dependent on another (as the moon is merely a reflection of the sun and rises when the sun sets) yet they are never present at the same time implying the heart and mind can never be one. However, both are of great importance and men and women may have different viewpoints when it comes to love but their opinions are equal which will continuously keep and pull them apart.
Sitwell uses powerful imagery, personification, analogies and many other literary devices to portray love and the different forms love comes in and from who. The battle between the heart and mind is a real struggle and Sitwell beautifully displays this concept quite successfully to reveal how in the end love is hopeless because of the inability of the mind and the heart to work together and act as one.