Endless Love: Taking Love to a Higher Step
“ENDLESS LOVE: Taking love to a higher step” Love, as we know it, is one of the most perplexed things in this world. Considering the fact that it has a variety of meanings that go accordingly to one’s perspective. It is something that one can never see and touch, for it is only felt. It is so complicated that it gives one a feeling of happiness along with sadness at the same time; it stirs up every possible emotion. However, they say that we can never know the true meaning of love until we ourselves engage to it, and experience its setbacks. In Richard Silken’s “Scheherazade”, the speaker suggests that love can triumph over the uncertainties and challenges that the future might bring, and that memories shared with one another can extend even beyond the limitations of time. To begin with, the dramatic situation of the poem revolves on a persona (the speaker in the poem), who engages a conversation with his beloved, and at the same time, recalls various moments of love that the both of them spent together. In addition, we, the readers, can assume that the speaker’s way of addressing his beloved in the first part of the poem is nostalgic. (He remembers how “they pull their bodies out of the lake and dress them in warm clothes again.”, which suggests that it already happened in the past, (basing it from the word “again”). However, the difference now is that it only recurred in a dream (specifically the beloved’s), which is probably the reason why the speaker still wanted the beloved to “tell” him “how it was” (the dream), so that he can experience, or relive the feeling once more. Given with these details, we can move on to the metaphysical side of the poem, in which the thematic tension arises from the capability of memory and love to go beyond the limitations of time. The speaker tells his beloved that the memories and the love that they shared together is “not like a tree where roots have to end up somewhere” (5). In a sense that no matter how long the roots