Essay on Love - Romeo and Juliet

Essay on Love

Love has in incredible, indescribable power over humanity. No one can explain the reason it makes people act the way it does; at times leading those under its spell to take risks. The power of love can be both healing and destructive and in Romeo and Juliet’s case, eventually ends the feud between their families yet their overly passionate feelings also lead to their deaths.

Love’s power, being a balance between a healing and destructive force, makes people act in strange ways. It can cause its victims to become confused with their emotions by creating thoughts of sorrow one moment and happy emotions the next. It brings impatient feelings along with relaxed ones and can lead a person to be misguided. In experiencing unrequited love, Romeo is sad and miserable, yet he enjoys his misery because he adores this woman. He explains his conflicting emotions poetically with these lines:

“O brawling love! O loving hate! O anything of nothing first create. O heavy lightness, serious vanity, misshapen chaos of well-seeming forms, feather of lead, bright smoke, cold fire, sick health, still-walking sleep, that is not what it is! This love feel I, that feel no love in this.”(174 p.10)

Romeo is glad to find Rosaline, a Capulet whom he believes to be perfect, irresistible but is sad because she feels nothing for him in return. Yet love is unpredictable, which can be destructive. Only days later, Romeo forgets his thoughts for Rosaline as quickly as he had first felt them the moment he lays his eyes on a second beauty. “Did my heart love ‘till now? Foreswear it, sight! For I ne’er saw true beauty ‘till this night” (51 p.27). This swift change in love’s emotion can also be detected by Friar Lawrence’s shocked response: “Holy Saint Francis, what a change is here! Is Rosaline, whom thou didst love so dear, so soon forsaken?”(61 p.42) Had Romeo never laid eyes on Juliet, his love sickness for Rosaline would never have healed. Because of their encounter, the mere thought of Rosaline vanished from his mind. Once this power is felt, one cannot return to their loveless life. When Juliet is asked her disposition to be married, she replies: “It is an honour that I dream not