When lovely woman stoops to folly, and finds too late that men betray, what charm can soothe her melancholy, what art can wash her guilt away?
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
I don't fully understand my wife's emotions - and I'm supposed to write an excellent female character and unravel the secret of women?
The old, subjective, stagnant, indolent and wretched life for woman has gone. She has as many resources as men, as many activities beckon her on. As large possibilities swell and inspire her heart.
The minds of men are at last aroused; reason looks out and justifies her own, and malice finds all her work is ruin.
The woman poet must be either a sexless, reclusive eccentric, with nothing to say specifically to women, or a brilliant, tragic, tortured suicide.
She gave up beauty in her tender youth, gave all her hope and joy and pleasant ways; she covered up her eyes lest they should gaze on vanity, and chose the bitter truth.
Whether you want to entertain or to provoke, to break hearts or reassure them, what you bring to your writing must consist of your longings and disappointments.
Beauty is ever to the lonely mind a shadow fleeting; she is never plain. She is a visitor who leaves behind the gift of grief, the souvenir of pain.
My sorrow, when she's here with me, thinks these dark days of autumn rain are beautiful as days can be; she loves the bare, the withered tree; she walks the sodden pasture lane.
With care, and skill, and cunning art, She parried Time's malicious dart, And kept the years at bay, Till passion entered in her heart and aged her in a day!
There is one type of ideal woman very seldom described in poetry - the old maid, the woman whom sorrow or misfortune prevents from fulfilling her natural destiny.