The Treatment of Love by Dacre and Byron

Paper Summary:

This paper examines how the use of the concept of love in both poems is similar in that both poems distinguish between spiritual and physical attraction while calling both 'love'. It also discusses how both poets seem to ultimately (though Dacre- explicitly and Byron - most probably unintentionally) agree that males are more inclined - by nature - to physical relations and women - to the transcendent kind of love. In other words, the separation of love and sex, commonly considered as late twentieth century obsession, originated in the Romantic era.

From the Paper:

"In contrast, Charlotte Dacre's poem is only sixteen-lines long, arranged in four quatrains rhymed in a much less flamboyant abab scheme. The poem seems to be a letter/note from the author to her aspirant but uses a slightly more ornate language than Byron's. Dacre drops no name and belittles no one. No one in particular, that is: the very choice of Spanish for the title - Il Trionfo del Amor - is a very subtle way of telling all her male contemporary colleagues and readers alike, that she, too, is well learned and well read... Likewise, when she makes a direct reference to broader erudition, it is put in parenthesis and bites at the learned males and their perception of learned women. Indeed, "(So charms the witchery)", for being put in parenthesis and for insinuating she is familiar with witchery, could be read as teasing the contemporary (male) perception that "women's writing is an affront to God-given, 'natural' gender roles" (Gilroy, in Bygrave, p.183)."

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