write an essay on love conquers all

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. » Expansion of Ideas » Love Conquers All

Expansion of an Idea – “Love Conquers All” for Students / Teachers / Parents

Explore the timeless idea that “Love conquers all”. Here, we delve into the power of love to overcome obstacles, break down barriers, and transform lives.

In today’s world, we face many challenges, including political division, social inequality, and environmental degradation. However, we believe that love can be a powerful force for change, inspiring us to work together towards a more just and compassionate society.

Hence, it is the belief that love is a transformative force, capable of bringing people together and inspiring positive change in the world.

• Love Conquers All

The proverb “Love conquers all” implies that the power of love is greater than any obstacle, hardship or adversity that we may face in life. This phrase suggests that love is a powerful and transformative force that can overcome even the most challenging of circumstances.

The idea that love can conquer all has been a recurring theme throughout history, literature, and popular culture. From Shakespeare’s famous tragedy Romeo and Juliet to contemporary romantic comedies, stories often depict how love can transcend boundaries of social status, race, religion, and even death.

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The Great Gatsby

“love conquers all”: analyzing romance and relationships within the great gatsby libby giesbrecht college.

Love relationships consume a substantial portion of public attention, whether in regards to legitimate bonds, media exposure, or literary portrayal. In The Great Gatsby , a number of love relationships are introduced and explored, including the bonds between Myrtle and George Wilson, Daisy and Tom Buchanan, as well as Daisy and Jay Gatsby. Notably, however, few of these relationships seem to consist of any genuine substance, leaving the reader to question the truthfulness and the depth of affection within each couple. Relationships proposed in The Great Gatsby can be examined on the basis of passion, emotional intimacy, and commitment between partners in order to determine the convincingness (or lack thereof) of each pairing.

According to Merriam-Webster, passion can be defined as “strong romantic or sexual feelings” directed towards a cause or being. This type of feeling is overwhelmingly lacking in Myrtle and George Wilson’s relationship. George is a meek man, completely controlled by his wife, Myrtle. They have no children, and Myrtle is introduced in the narrative through her involvement with Tom Buchanan. Myrtle is cold towards and has little or no regard for her husband; the statement “She... walk[ed] through her husband...

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Home — Essay Samples — Literature — Novel — Love as a fundamental principle for humanity

Love as a Fundamental Principle for Humanity

• Categories: Novel

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Published: Jul 17, 2018

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Does Love Survive Loss?

Auden and larkin each wrote powerful lines about love—and then had grave doubts about them. why.

Photograph by Tom Oates.

“ Amor vincit omnia, ” Love conquers all. Or so Virgil wrote. But does it? Does love survive dissolution of the lovers? And if so, where exactly would it be, where does all that lost love survive?

I was prompted to revisit these ancient questions anew by a long footnote about a single line in the new Complete Poems edition of Philip Larkin’s poetry. The footnote refers to “An Arundel Tomb”—widely regarded as one of Larkin’s finest poems—and contains a provocative remark about that the poem’s celebrated, controversial, closing line, the one about the true nature of immortality:

“What will survive of us is love.”

The line is so uncharacteristic of Larkin, one of the most relentlessly downbeat poets in modern literature, that it’s almost shocking in its apparently uncomplicated affirmation. You can barely believe it. In that footnote I mentioned there are quotes from Larkin suggesting he could barely believe it either.

No offense to the Beatles, but on first reading, Larkin’s line sounds like “And in the end, the love you take/ Is equal to the love you make,” that saccharine reduction of love’s transcendence to algebra.

Thinking about the survival of love in the context of Larkin’s poem, I suddenly felt the parallel with another controversial line, this one from W.H. Auden. A quarter-century or so before Larkin, Auden originally wrote, in the closing line of the penultimate stanza of perhaps his most celebrated poem, “September 1, 1939” :

“We must love one another or die.”

These two lines—Larkin’s “What will survive of us is love” and Auden’s “We must love one another or die”—may be the most well-known lines of poetry about love written in the past century. But what’s remarkable about them both is that the poets who wrote them agonized over them, were conflicted and critical of their own lines. Both Larkin and Auden eventually tried to distance themselves from their original unmediated utterances.

Indeed that extended footnote in the new Larkin edition eventually led me to rethink it all—Larkin, Auden, love, love poetry—even footnotes. Footnotes? Sometimes with poetry you can know too much about what the poet thinks. After he publishes a poem, it’s not his or hers anymore, you know? Though that doesn’t stop some of the poets—or their loving anthologists—from trying to control how you construe the poems (or at least prevent egregious misconstruals) via scholarly footnotes. But do poets always know the truth of what they’ve wrought?

Auden rethought his line—“We must love one another or die”—almost immediately. Indeed he turned violently against it, tried to ban, or vanish it. Called the poem in which it appeared “trash.” Said he “loathed” it. And yet the line still persists in a limbo of literary erasures that don’t completely efface the original. And now we learn Larkin had doubts about his love-affirming line.

What is going on here? Where is the love for love, guys?

Larkin and Auden are perhaps the two pre-eminent English-language poets of the past century, successors to Eliot and Yeats. For Americans less familiar with Larkin, I’m not going to get into an argument here over the poets’ pre-eminence. Yes, there are American contenders, Lowell, Bishop, Hart Crane. Even Nabokov on the strength of “Pale Fire” alone . But Larkin and Auden are frequently paired as poets without peers. (I know it’s unseemly to talk in these horse-racy terms, but have you noticed the way Larkin appears to have overtaken Auden—and virtually all other moderns—in critical estimation of late?)

Here in America Larkin has previously been most well-known for his famous opening line “They fuck you up/ your mum and dad.” That line and Larkin’s doggerel-like verse about how “Sexual intercourse began in 1963 … / Between the end of the Chatterley ban/ and the Beatles first LP” have given many casual American non-readers of poetry the misleading impression that Larkin was a cheeky writer of light verse. But just one exposure to his “Aubade” or “The Whitsun Weddings,” “The High Window” or the poem with the controversial line about love— “An Arundel Tomb” —will knock you flat with the weightiness of the words, their fierce and sorrowful, yet somehow self-effacing intensity. They make you understand why “Larkinesque”—denoting a devastating yet somehow vibrant, self-revelatory, self-effacing melancholy—has become a kind of household word in households where poetry is still read.

Which is why that one line about love from “An Arundel Tomb” has always stood out, provoked questions. It seemed, in isolation, so un-Larkinesque. Was it an anomalous moment of uplifting affirmation, or was the line, taken out of context, being misread?

The context:

In a graveyard the speaker stumbles on the 14 th -century tomb of the Earl of Arundel and his wife. In the age-blurred, partially eroded tomb carving, the Earl is fully dressed in armor from head to toe. Except for one thing: The speaker notes that in the carving the Earl has removed the armed gauntlet from one hand. (Larkin got the hand wrong—on the real tomb, it was the right-handed gauntlet not the left. Thank you, footnote.)

The point is that the mailed glove is off so he can clasp, skin to skin, the hand of his wife, as if they were joined forever by love in their journey to death. Joined, the poet implies, until the ravages of time blur and erase them from recognition as they have already been erased from life. Joined even though the purported loving jointure may be mere stone-carver’s fantasy.

Here is how Larkin puts it in the poem:

“One sees with a sharp tender shock” the handholding gesture. “Sharp tender shock”!—one could write a book about that phrase.

The remaining five verses are devoted to the speaker’s vexed examination of the image and his sharp tender shocked reaction to it. The speaker reflects on the fact that the joined hands were probably the sculptor’s idea, suggesting a faithful love that may be merely “faithfulness in effigy”—an image rather than the lived reality of fidelity. So that finally “only an attitude remains” and “Time has transfigured them into Untruth. …”

And yet in the final lines he says of this attitude:

Their “stone fidelity” has come to prove:

“Our almost-instinct almost true: What will survive of us is love.”

I feel a sharp tender shock every time I read that line. It’s one that attained a certain wider degree of attention when Anthony Lane, the witty—and rarely sentimental— New Yorker film critic, cited it in a beautiful essay he wrote in the immediate aftermath of 9/11. He related Larkin’s line to the image of the two people who jumped to their death from the burning towers, hand in hand, like the figures on Larkin’s Arundel tomb.

All alone, extracted from the poem, the line has the feel of an unmediated affirmation uncharacteristic of Larkin (or Lane). Let’s face it, it sounds more like Oprah (not that there’s anything wrong with that). Of course, there’s more nuance and depth—and irony—to it when you consider it in context. But before we really dig into Larkin’s unexpected Hallmark moment—and the footnote that complicates our view of it— let me first say a little more about the eerily not-quite-parallel case of W.H. Auden’s famous line about love, because its tormented fate at the author’s own hands may foreshadow—maybe even have caused —what we now know are Larkin’s second thoughts about “what will survive of us is love.”

Auden’s line—and his second thoughts about it—invite questions about what we talk about when we talk about this kind of love. Not just mere perishable personal romantic love, but also the kind of numinous transfigured, impersonal universal love that embraces us all, survives like a holy ghost, survives like smoke from a High-Church censer ascending to heaven from the mortal bodies it inspirited.

Auden’s more famous line about love (and death) refers at first glance to the title date of his poem “September 1, 1939,” the date, of course, of the Nazi invasion of Poland that began the slaughter of the Second World War. It’s the poem that opens:

I sit in one of the dives On Fifty-second Street Uncertain and afraid As the clever hopes expire Of a low dishonest decade …

Later lines from this despairing poem that has given birth to half a dozen book titles such as “The Haunted Wood” and “The Psychopathic God” and several aphorisms that now sound like old saws: “Those to whom evil is done/ Do evil in return.” (This last was Auden’s explanation for Hitler, the “psychopathic god” himself.)

And yet it is a poem whose original version climaxed with the line, “We must love one another or die.”

A line that was also invoked after 9/11, as a consolatory uplift-inspiring sentiment that supposedly turned that tragedy into a “teachable moment.” A line that has even more fatally, gratingly become a greeting card sentiment when detached from its context. Auden, turned on the line ferociously, at first forbidding any republication of “September 1” that contained it—and the entire (penultimate) stanza it concludes.

Auden did allow the line a temporary return from banishment when he grudgingly agreed to include an altered version in a collected works edition. It was a monumental alteration, though. He changed the line from “We must love one another OR die” To “We must love one another AND die.” (Some wit suggested Auden should have changed it to “We must love one another AND/OR die.”)

The result of Auden’s emendation is an entirely different poem.

Version One opens up a romantic vision of hope: If only we could love one other we would not die—at least we would not kill ourselves in wars like the one that had just started when the line was written. And Version One suggests, perhaps, something more: That war or no war, the love in our lives will endow us with a kind of immortality denied those who haven’t loved in such a totalizing way.

Version Two—“We must love one another AND die”—is utterly altered: Immortality of any kind—even the precarious “survival” Larkin will later suggest—is not offered by love. Which does not denigrate, even may elevate love. Love for its own sake, love that can perish and die, love not for some promise of immortality. This is tragic, romantic, existentialist, French cinema love, perishable with our death or the death of our love, but nonetheless, even more valued, despite (or because) of its transience. We must love one another even though we will die, and it will not make a difference—it won’t amount to more than the “hill of beans” in Casablanca to the world of war and peace. Its burning existence and extinction in the moment is all that counts.

You won’t have to worry about opening a greeting card and seeing “We must love one another and die.” Not a Hallmark moment.

But this change still didn’t satisfy Auden, who seems to have genuinely feared for his reputation as a complex and serious poet if “We must love one another or die”—in any version—continued to be his most quoted legacy. And so he kept attacking it whenever he spoke or wrote of it, banning the stanza from publication. (The stanza in which the line occurs is admittedly not his best, concerning itself as it does with the poet speaking truth to power in a self-congratulatory way.)

But there I go, adopting Auden’s retroactive self-loathing of the line, and I’m not sure it was such a crime against poetry. Must we ban from our minds a burst of emotional earnestness from a poet whose frequent acerbic ironies makes it all the more salient? Has self-consciously highbrow culture made such a fetish of complexity, ambiguity, and obscurity as a measure of worth that we condemn or condescend to more simple, heartfelt exclamations? Don’t we feel a “sharp tender shock” at the original line? Is it always more mature and serious for a poet to be riddled by doubt and conflict, rather than to give way to transcendence? Perhaps we should pay attention to these near-ecstatic, almost vatic, outbursts, even if the poets in question are self-conscious about them. One can almost hear them: Oh my god did I write that? Could it be that Larkin was aware of Auden’s discomfort, and that was what led to his own second thoughts?

Even if we do appreciate these earnest, one-line sermons, what do they amount to? Are they inherently vapid, akin to the Beatles’ equation? (For poetic compression, Lennon and McCartney had nothing on Bob Marley, for whom two words were enough: “One love.” Or Bono, for that matter, who used just one word: “One.”) That such lines leave themselves open to mockery is our fault, not theirs. Simplicity is not the same as simplemindedness and can aspire to the sublime.

Larkin grappled with all of these issues, as the annotation to “Arundel” by Archie Burnett, the editor of the new Complete Poems edition, makes clear. *

According to Burnett, Larkin wrote on one manuscript, in the midst of his drafts and revisions: “love isn’t stronger than death just because two statues hold hands for six hundred years.”

And then he adds in a separate letter that yes, it “is rather a romantic poem; there’s even less reservation in [it]. I don’t like it much, partly because of this …”

What’s curious here is that the poem doesn’t really say that “love is stronger than death.” Larkin says, “What survives of us is love.” Something entirely different from love conquering all.

Surviving something does not make you stronger than it, or make you its conquerer. Larkin wasn’t entirely skeptical of the poem though. Here he is, quoted later on in the footnote, that same year. “I was very moved by [the clasped hands on the tomb]—that ‘sharp tender shock’—Of course it was years ago. … I think what survives of us is love. …”

What survives of Larkin in regard to this poem is Larkinesque discomfort at the intrusion of sentiment—or what others might construe a sentimentality he was always at pains to disclaim. What survives of Larkin is his tormented ambiguity, so Larkinesque.

What survives of us is the idea that the love that can inspire that “sharp tender shock.” The capacity , the “almost-instinct,” the something that’s there, inherent in living beings, ready to be ignited—the recurrent ability to love—that he’s talking about. I think it’s no accident that these powerfully eloquent sentiments were virtually torn out of the souls and stanzas of these two poets. And no accident that in some ways they became embarrassed by how nakedly they reveal themselves in those lines. And how they had to do everything they could to cover up that nakedness, like the first couple, expelled from the garden. Make themselves and their poems more “mature” and “sophisticated” for a culture that makes a fetish of complication and ambiguity above earnestness as signs of “seriousness.” Larkin put the barbed wire of irony around the ecstatic utterance, Auden altered or erased his.

For shame. (As in “because of shame.”) Which is a shame. Can’t we have both, the complex poems and the consolatory one-line reductions?

And then there’s the unanswered question that’s been troubling me personally and is perhaps the reason I’ve been a bit obsessed with these lines. What happens to the love between two people when it’s over? Seriously, where does it go, all that feeling, all those memories—do they dissolve into the air or do they survive somewhere, in some way—perhaps in a parallel universe?

I think our two poets believed, but were too shy to say it outright:

Amor vincit omnia.

Correction, May 29, 2012: This piece originally misstated the name of the editor of Larkin’s Complete Poems. It is Archie Burnett. ( Return .)

“Omnia Vincit Amor”

Students unveil iconography in london’s virtual classroom.

Students in Professor Donatella Sparti’s  “Masterpieces of Art” explore the making of masterpieces and the development of genres in European Art, learning how to ‘read’ works of art. Theories discussed in class are tested during weekly visits to the National Gallery and other museums — or, during Spring 2020, close-up digital viewing of classic works.

In their final iconography essay, students are asked to analyse four pieces of art that make use of the same symbolism. Their task is to understand and explain how representations evolved over time. Through the assignment, students like Jordana showcase their historical knowledge, artistic understanding, and interpretive skills to assess and challenge the existing literature on masterpieces.

“Omnia Vincit Amor”: The Phrase That Sparked Inspiration

an interpretive critique by Jordana Levy

The phrase, “Omnia Vincit Amor” is undoubtedly one of the most important concepts to carry through life, from the Ancient Roman times to modern day. The idea of “Omnia Vincit Amor”, or love conquers all, was first introduced by the poet Virgil in his tenth Eclogue, which was published sometime around 37 B.C. (Kingsley-Smith 8). Therefore, according to author Jane Kinglsey-Smith, Virgil, “…coins a phrase that would inspire numerous Renaissance emblems, paintings, and poems” (8). The influence that this phrase had on the art that followed is something worthy of an in-depth analysis. Specifically, it is important to recognize the way Cupid has been used as an attribute of the allegory of love conquering all. Not only is Cupid used as a key attribute to identify the theme of love conquering all in the following paintings, but he has also been used as an allegory to represent the theme of love. This is a similarity that has appeared in all of the paintings that will be discussed in this essay, which span the years from 1540 to 1809. Therefore, Cupid functions as an essential figure in paintings across decades, representing the allegory of love conquering all, showcasing the similarities in the representation of this allegory over time.

The third work that I am going to examine, in following with the allegorical depiction of love conquering all, is Allegory on the Power of Love (‘Omnia Vincit Amor’) by Alessandro Turchi. This painting was made between 1620-1630, and is oil on canvas. It is currently located in the Mauritshuis in the Netherlands. Turchi is best known for being a Veronese painter who traveled to Rome to continue his art, “…embarking on a highly successful career that was to last for several decades and bring him prestigious commissions and international renown” (Scaglietti Kelescian and Marinelli 638). Cupid is clearly present in this work, as he is at the center and is seen with both a bow and an arrow. This painting is slightly stylistically different than the other two paintings that were previously examined because, in this work, Cupid is aiming his arrow at the viewer. My interpretation of the position of Cupid’s arrow is that he is intending to shoot at the viewer, so he or she can fall in love, too. Therefore, although in the painting Cupid is still used as a personification of love and is depicted conquering all, by aiming at the viewer, it introduces the notion that anyone in love can conquer all. Cupid is pictured multiple times throughout this work, and in each depiction he is seen drawing his bow and arrow to get ready to shoot. I believe that this is an extension of my prior interpretation. Not only is Cupid shooting an arrow at the viewer so he or she would fall in love and conquer all, he is also shooting at various characters across the painting. He is using love as a tool to overcome the seemingly tumultuous situation depicted in Turchi’s work. Again, Cupid is used as a personification of love and serves as an attribute to help decipher the theme of “omnia vincit amor”, or love conquers all.

The iconography of Cupid personifying love and serving as an attribute, in the allegory of love conquering all, is one that defies time. This fact is clear, as it remained true from the first work I observed from the 1600s, all the way through the final work from the 1800s. I chose to study this allegory as I was fascinated by the impact that Virgil’s words had on Renaissance art. Additionally, I believe that the theme of love conquering all is still prevalent today, thereby transcending time. I enjoyed analyzing these works because all of the elements that the paintings were comprised of were easily identifiable and relatable, even though they were made decades ago. Additionally, I found the various interpretations of the same phrase, “Omnia vincit amor” to be incredibly interesting. Although the same character, Cupid, was always depicted for the purpose of representing love in the idea of love conquering all, the ways different artists from different time periods represented “all” was fascinating. Overall, the way the same iconography was represented similarly over the span of decades was astounding to witness.The iconography of Cupid personifying love and serving as an attribute, in the allegory of love conquering all, is one that defies time. This fact is clear, as it remained true from the first work I observed from the 1600s, all the way through the final work from the 1800s. I chose to study this allegory as I was fascinated by the impact that Virgil’s words had on Renaissance art. Additionally, I believe that the theme of love conquering all is still prevalent today, thereby transcending time. I enjoyed analyzing these works because all of the elements that the paintings were comprised of were easily identifiable and relatable, even though they were made decades ago. Additionally, I found the various interpretations of the same phrase, “Omnia vincit amor” to be incredibly interesting. Although the same character, Cupid, was always depicted for the purpose of representing love in the idea of love conquering all, the ways different artists from different time periods represented “all” was fascinating. Overall, the way the same iconography was represented similarly over the span of decades was astounding to witness.

Bibliography

• Aikema, Bernard. 2000. Review of  Alessandro Turchi detto l’Orbetto 1578-1649  edited by Daniela Scaglietti Kelescian.  The Burlington Magazine , 142(1171): 638–640.
• Department of European Paintings, The Metropolitan Museum of Art. 2003. “Titian (ca. 1485/90–1576).” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History . New York.  https://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/tita/hd_tita.htm
• Gregori, Mina, et al. 1985.  The Age of Caravaggio . Metropolitan Museum of Art.
• Jones, Jonathan. 2014.  The Loves of the Artists: Art and Passion in the Renaissance . Simon & Schuster.
• Kingsley-Smith, Jane. 2013. Cupid in Early Modern Literature and Culture.  Cambridge University Press.
• The National Gallery. nd. “Michelangelo Merisi Da Caravaggio.”  https://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/artists/michelangelo-merisi-da-caravaggio
• Posèq, Avigdor W. G. 1993. “Caravaggio’s ‘Amor Vincitore’ And The Supremacy Of Painting.” Notes in the History of Art , 12(4).
• Whistler, Catherine. 2009. “Titian’s ‘Triumph of Love’.” The Burlington Magazine , 151(1277): 536–542
• Whistler, Catherine. 2012. “Uncovering Beauty: Titian’s ‘Triumph of Love’ in the Vendramin Collection.” Renaissance Studies , 26(2): 218–242,.

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“Love” Conquers All

NEW OXFORD NOTEBOOK

The centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world

— W.B. Yeats

When the U.S. Supreme Court handed down its Obergefell ruling in 2015, legalizing same-sex marriage nationwide, cries of “Love wins!” echoed across the fruited plains. That particular victory chant put marriage traditionalists in a peculiar spot. You see, in our polarized society, whoever is against “love” is automatically for hate and is, ergo , a hater, a bigot.

Love, as understood today, is ebullient and expansive. Who can define it? Or, more importantly, who can contain it? Popular poet Maya Angelou put the contemporary feeling into prose, writing, “Love recognizes no barriers. It jumps hurdles, leaps fences, penetrates walls to arrive at its destination full of hope.” Forget suffering and sacrifice; love, in our times, is at once an irrepressible force and an irrecusable proposition.

So, who or what can stop the Love Train, now that the Supreme Court has sent it barreling down the track? If same-sex marriage is its new point of departure, what is its terminus?

Three years ago, I penned a New Oxford Note titled “From the Fringes: A Marital Blitz” (April 2017). In light of the Obergefell ruling, I wrote, “If we can expand the meaning of marriage to include not only one man and one woman, but two men or two women, why can’t we expand it even further to include, say, one man and two women, or two men and one woman, or two men and two women, or more? The combinations are limited only by our ability to count!”

I was talking, of course, about polygamy, or “plural marriage,” the practice of having more than one spouse at a time. It was, I wrote, “another social taboo just waiting to be toppled.”

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