Love has never lacked for those who try to tame it for “higher” purposes, or those who would argue that “the worst evils have been committed in the name of love”. They range far and wide throughout history, from Plato and the Neoplatonists, to the Rabbinic and Christian interpreters of the Song of Songs, from the clerics behind the savage Albigensian Crusade, to the seventeenth-century English Puritan author William Prynne, who never met a joy he failed to condemn. In the Name of Love : Romantic Ideology and Its Victims (Oxf (.)ġ Love has always had its critics. 1 Aharon Ben-Zeʼev and Ruhama Goussinsky.when our loves fail us or when our beauty fades and we grow old) we still have our friends. The poem’s final stanza entreats us to view friendship as more valuable to us than love, and to look after our friends and cherish them, so that when ‘winter’ comes (i.e. Love, like roses, is sweet in the spring and summer when it’s fresh but when it fades, in the autumn and winter months, friendship, like holly (which, as we know from its use at Christmas, does not wilt and wither in the winter), continues to bloom. In the first stanza of ‘Love and Friendship’, Brontë reminds us that when we fall in love, in that first flush of excitement when we first meet someone and fall for them, we neglect our friends, but friendship, unlike love, will not desert us.īrontë develops this analogy in the poem’s middle stanza. Love is like the rose briar (reminding us of the old poets’ adage, ‘every rose has its thorn’: love has a dangerous as well as thrilling side) whereas friendship is like the holly tree. Many poems see love and friendship as a natural partnership, but in this poem, Emily Brontë sees them as related (she likens them both to flowering plants) but substantially different.
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