Love is one of the most prolific topics in all of literature. From the perverse to the overly romantic, poets and authors around the world continue to choose love as a vehicle to convey their innermost 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 maid; However, beneath the surface of this seemingly perverse story lies a poem full of explanations about 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 Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an Original Essay As if foreseeing potential misinterpretations of the poem, Robert Herrick dissociates both himself and the speaker in the first two lines: “I dreamed this mortal part of me / turned to lives” (1-2). The word “dreamed ” in this sense could refer to a real dream or a more poetic sense of desire, but in both interpretations, the word shows something that does not exist in typical aspects of reality literary, giving a connotation of mortality, implacability, or otherworldliness, each describing a mentality in which the "part" - either a phallus or a representation of a missing section, especially as applied to romantic relationships, is used inappropriately or all unwanted. “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 3-8, the “vine” quickly becomes transparent, losing its bucolic romanticism and gaining a sinister air of forced joy. 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 “crawl[...] in every direction”, describing an absence in a defined direction; they grow without insight, recklessly extending into places where they are unwanted, similar to the phallic "deadly part" in line 1. The vines "enchant" even innocent bystanders: the word "enchants," according to the Oxford English Dictionary, means both “charm” and “enslave” – demonstrating that a vine is not a chaste image of gardens and pastoral care, but something with malign intent. From the lines “And with rich bunches (hidden among / The leaves) hung her temples, / So much so that my Lucia seemed to me / Young Bacchus kidnapped from his tree” (11-13), it can be deduced that the malevolent intent with which the screw acts tries to modify the areas in which it gropes. In this situation, that area is the body of a young maid, 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 vile manipulation of her beauty. The vine adorns “rich clusters” on Lucia's head, replacing her beauty with the beauty of the vine. The speaker of the poem, therefore, has been metamorphosed into a vain organism outside the mortal world where love is mutual. Bacchus, interestingly enough, is the god of winemaking in Roman mythology. In line 14 this motif is used to show the reciprocity of events in the dream; creation destroys, or “kidnaps” in this sense, the creator. It is because of Lucia's beauty that the vine gropes and adorns her body, but the fact that Lucia appears to the speaker like "Bacchus kidnapped from [a] tree" (13) shows the reader that it is not the beauty ofLucia, the product of her beautiful existence, who faces manipulation. Instead, it is the vine—or, rather, the speaker who is metamorphosed into a vine—that is the victim in the poem. The pastoral beauty of the vine has been distorted, without provocation or control, into a sexual being with little appreciation for Lucia, a girl for whom the speaker is suggested to have had previous feelings of romantic interest. This abrupt change in tone exists not only on a thematic level, but also on a structural level; the poem is composed of perfect couplets, except for lines 9, 10, and 11. The additional rhyme imposes an extended macabre and appreciation for the poem's thematic upheaval. Just as in the dream the speaker no longer has control of himself, so too does the control of the poetic verse diminish. Lines 10 and 11 also feature the first use of parentheses, a poetic “aside” in which the speaker appears remorseful for his actions in the dream, foreshadowing the speaker's resignation in the final two lines of the poem. From lines 14 onwards, the dream image state of the poem intensifies, echoing the opening lines. The lines “My locks around his neck crawled, / And the arms and hands charmed” show that the speaker is not in control of his body. The speaker did not “charm [Lucia] with his hands,” but rather “his arms and hands charmed [Lucia]” (15). The imprecise subject of this line rivals the absence of typical romantic adjectives in line 7, where Lucia's features are simply listed: "Her belly, buttocks, and waist." The subject of the dream, as well as Lucia, are indecipherable not for a surreal effect, but solely to diminish the romantic meaning of the poem and make precise the true meaning of the poem: the lovers do not imprison their benefactors, nor manipulate their partners. The speaker of the poem, therefore, is an astonished figure whose mortal love for Lucia has been frayed in sexual conquest during a perverse dream. There is an air of anguish in the line “All the parts there taken prisoner” (17). Not only is the line offset by brackets, showing a prolonged pause and moral wear and tear from the events depicted, but the line also separates Lucia's features into an abstraction; “all [its] parts” (17) have been victims of the vine's lustful enterprise. In both the dream and post-dream reflections, the speaker recognizes the lascivious behavior of the vine (his doppelganger), then attempts to hide the “undiscovered” parts that encourage the aforementioned lustful behavior; but this concealment also results in a corruption of love for which the speaker makes amends in the last two lines of the poem. Lucia, in addition to being a notable female name, is Latin for "light," so when the speaker of the poem overshadows the unexplored parts of the maid, he is actually doing a disservice to her impending virtue. The vine hides its beauty from the world, fascinating it not to preserve its beauty, but rather as a cultivation of its (the vine's) corruption. It is not surprising, then, that this romantic avarice leads to “fleeting pleasures” (20), a more appropriate euphemism for the sexual conquest that is accumulating starting in line 3. Although the vine takes advantage of Lucia, there is an inkling of virtue in this act, as poetic language affirms the speaker's true thoughts regarding the events of the dream and diminishes the perverse aspects of the poem. In "The Vine", Robert Herrick establishes a series of raunchy images to show a vine taking advantage of a young waitress; however, these images remain secondary to the diction of the poem, which creates the true meaning and implications for both speaker and poet. In the line “That with imagination I woke up” (21), the speaker denies the lack of.