What Cavaliers were getting at...

In class we have been reading sonnet after sonnet after poem after poem. I used to dislike poetry because it was always about the same thing, love, and it never really made sense. I always wondered why these guys were sitting down at their desks spending forever just to write a poem about a girl that they don’t have or maybe about a girl that they simply imagine. Also, poetry has such deep meaning that it’s difficult to truly get out all of what the author is feeling from a set of 14 or so lines. Whenever I read a poem about a man willing to do anything for a girl I wonder why didn’t you do it? Why didn’t these men go out there and pick the millions of flowers that they said they would in the poem? I wonder if John Donne actually can spot the flea that mixed his blood with his lover’s. The thing I am getting at here is that action is necessary to a relationship. Words are nothing to a woman. I think in the 17^th century men did not get that and thus we get Cavalier poetry. To women, words are nice and sometimes romantic. But the difference between a guy writing a poem about commitment to a girl and a guy showing a girl his commitment is huge. Personally, I think I’d be a little creeped out if a guy wrote hundereds of sonnets or poems for me. However, if a guy showed me every day that he cared, I would not think that it was so creepy. This is where these poet guys went wrong in my opinion. Cavalier poetry is rather vulgar in my opinion. It is what comes of men that can’t get women through words with meaning. The Cavalier poets are like the players of the literary world. They use their knowledge to hinder women and to outsmart them. In response to outsmarting the women, these poets get one good night or maybe two if the woman has especially low standards. I personally wonder what kind of women lived in the day where a Cavalier poet could use a flea to get a woman into bed. It is sad for the female gender really. The only thing that I think I respect the Cavalier poets for is their use of time. They live in the moment and don’t look back. Now that college is coming up I think a lot about how life progresses. If you want to look at it through a Cavalier lens, you are born, grow up, have fun, grow up some more, get a job, get serious, then retire, then try to have some more fun, then you die. There is only one section of life where you can truly have limitless fun and that part of life is where Cavalier poets focused. While I don’t agree with their concept of what living life to the fullest contains, I agree with the idea that while you are young, get excited and live the way you want because you are only young once. And that lasts for only a short while.