Assignment: Week 7: Discussion Love and Freedom

Introduction: I chose this assignment because it allowed me to explore and analyze how various authors convey love and freedom, and how these feelings impact people. By writing about Sappho and Langston Hughes, it enabled me to analyze and conclude how tone, word choice, and imagery convey these feelings. Moreover, this assignment illustrates my progress as a reading and writing student because it taught me to link certain literary tools with broader concepts about longing and hope and link these concepts about two very different literary works.

Work:

Two poems that interested me are Sappho’s love poem and Langston Hughes’s “Let America Be America Again.” Both poems illustrate how love and freedom can be subjective and emotional. Sappho addresses the emotion of love as desire, while Hughes addresses freedom as something people yearn for but may not have.

In Sappho’s poem, she states, “He seems to me equal to gods, that man / who sits across from you and listens closely” (Sappho, lines 1–2). The tone is admiring and longing. Her diction conveys the manner in which love can be painless but also hurtful. She desires to be close to the one she loves, but meanwhile, she is helpless. This shows how love can make one feel exposed but strong.

In Hughes’s poem, he states, “Let America be America again. / Let it be the dream it used to be” (Hughes, lines 1–2). There is a hopeful, yet frustrated, tone here. Through this, Hughes portrays how freedom is something that many people still strive for. The vision of a “dream” shows that freedom is not whole for all people, but it is something to reach for.

Collectively, these works show how love and freedom can ennoble human beings but also remind them of their limits. Sappho’s love is personal and emotional, and Hughes’s freedom is collective and political. Reading them both struck me with how these themes express themselves in such disparate ways but are joined together by human longing and hope.