Love is one of the most prolific subjects in all of literature. From the perverse to the overly romantic, poets and authors around the world continue to view love as a vehicle to convey their most intimate thoughts, feelings, and perspectives. “The Vine,” written by Robert Herrick in the 1600s, is ostensibly about a man who dreams that part of him is a vine that gropes and subdues a young girl; However, beneath the surface of this seemingly perverse affair lies a poem rich in explanation of the nature of love: a concept based on mutual interest and not, as most readers will conclude, on slavery. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”? Get an original essay As if predicting possible debauched readings of the poem, Robert Herrick dissociates himself and the speaker in the first two lines: “I dreamed that this mortal a part of mine/ Was transformed into a vine” (1-2). The word "dreamed" in this sense could refer to an actual dream or a more poetic feeling of desire, but in both interpretations the word emphasizes something that does not exist in typical aspects of reality. The use of the word "mortal" reinforces this notion of literary dissonance, giving a connotation of death, relentlessness or otherness, each describing a state of mind in which the "part" – both a phallus and a representation of a missing section, especially as applied to romantic affairs – is misused or altogether undesirable. “Metamorphosed,” typically a transitive verb, is used in this passage as “having undergone an abrupt change,” solidifying the distance between the speaker (whether Herrick or not) as the events of the dream unfold. In lines 3 to 8, the “vine” quickly becomes transparent, losing its bucolic romanticism and taking on a sinister air of forced rapture. A vine is a perfect metaphor for the speaker's lustful involvement: it grows blindly, gropes its victims, and attempts to alter the environment in which it lives. The vines "creep [...] in all directions", representing an absence in a defined direction; they grow without insight, mindlessly spreading to places where they are unwanted, similar to the phallic "mortal part" of line 1. The vines also "captivate" innocent passers-by – the word "captivate", according to the Oxford English Dictionary, means both “captivate” and “enslave” — showing that a vine is not a chaste image of gardens and pastoralism, but something with malicious intent. From the verses “And with rich clusters (hidden among / The leaves) I hung his temples, / So that my Lucy seemed to me / The young Bacchus delighted by his tree” (11-13), we can deduce that the malicious intention with which the vines act try to modify the areas where they are groping. In this situation, that area is the body of a young servant girl, who is imprisoned (and altered) by the vine. In addition to the vine's invasion of personal space, the vine in the poem mistreats Lucia with its base manipulation of her beauty. The vine adorns “rich clusters” on Lucy’s head, replacing her beauty with that of the vine. The speaker of the poem has therefore metamorphosed into a vain organism outside the mortal world where love is reciprocal. Interestingly, Bacchus is the god of winemaking in Roman mythology. In line 14, this motif is used to show the reciprocity of the dream events; creation destroys, or “delights” in this sense, the creator. It is because of Lucy's beauty that the vine gropes andadorns her body, but the fact that Lucie appears to the speaker as "Bacchus delighted by [a] tree" (13) shows the reader that it is not Lucie's beauty, the product of her beautiful existence, which makes in the face of manipulation. Rather, it is the vine - or rather the speaker transformed into a vine - who is the victim of the poem. The pastoral beauty of the Vine has been distorted, without provocation or control, into a sexual being who has little appreciation for Lucia, a girl for whom it is suggested that the speaker once had feelings of romantic interest. This abrupt shift in tone exists not only thematically, but also structurally; the poem consists of perfect couplets, except for lines 9, 10, and 11. The additional rhyme forces an extended macabre and appreciation of the thematic upheaval of the poem. Just as the speaker does not control himself in the dream, his control over the poetic line also diminishes. Lines 10 and 11 also feature the first use of parentheses, a poetic "aside" in which the speaker appears remorseful over the actions of the dream, foreshadowing the speaker's resignation in the poem's final two lines . From lines 14 onwards, the dreamlike state of the poem is intensified, echoing the opening lines. The lines “My curls around his neck crawled,/and my arms and hands were captivated” show that the speaker does not have control of his body. The speaker did not “captivate [Lucia] with her hands,” but rather “her arms and hands captivated [Lucia]” (15). The imprecise subject of this line rivals the absence of romantic adjectives typical of line 7, where Lucia's features are simply listed: "Her stomach, her buttocks and her waist." The subject of the dream, as well as Lucia, are indecipherable not for surrealist effect, but only to attenuate the romantic notions of the poem and clarify the true meaning of the poem: lovers do not imprison their benefactors, nor manipulate their partners. The speaker of the poem is therefore a surprised character whose mortal love for Lucia was transformed into sexual conquest during a perverse dream. There is an air of anguish in the line “All the parts there were made on a prisoner” (17). Not only is the line offset by parentheses, showing a prolonged pause and moral attrition for the events depicted, but the line also separates Lucia's features into an abstraction; “all [its] parts” (17) were victims of the vigorous enterprise of the vineyard. Both in the dream and in the reflections that follow the dream, the speaker recognizes the lascivious behavior of the vine (his doppelganger), and therefore attempts to conceal the "unnoticed" parts that encourage the aforementioned vigorous behavior; but this dissimulation also leads to a corruption of love for which the speaker makes up for in the last two lines of the poem. Lucia, in addition to being a remarkable girl's name, means "light" in Latin. So when the speaker of the poem shades the unnoticed parts of the servant, he is actually doing a disservice to her looming virtue. The vine hides its beauty from the world, captivating it not for the preservation of its beauty, but rather for the cultivation of its own (the vine's) corruption. It is therefore not surprising that this romantic avarice leads to "ephemeral pleasures" (20), a more appropriate euphemism for the sexual conquest that has been building since line 3. Although the vine benefits from Lucia, there is a hint of virtue in this act, as the poetic language affirms the speaker's true thoughts about the events of the dream and mitigates the perverse aspects of the poem. In "The Vine", Robert Herrick establishes a series of vulgar images to show a Vine taking advantage of a young girl; however, these images remain secondary to the diction of the poem, which creates the.