The Fountain of Love Literary Elements

by

The Fountain of Love Literary Elements

Genre

Love Vision Poem

Setting and Context

Set in the context of medieval romance

Narrator and Point of View

The narrator is the poet.

Tone and Mood

Sad, disheartening, buoyant, heartbroken

Protagonist and Antagonist

The central character is the narrator.

Major Conflict

The major conflict is that the Lover is bereaved because the love of his life was taken away from him encouragingly.

Climax

The climax is when the Lover and the narrator gets to the Fountain of Love and fall asleep. While sleeping, the God called Morpheus comes into the Lover's dreams to answer his endless questions. God reunites the Lover and his love shortly, but he wakes up to realize that it was just a dream.

Foreshadowing

The Lover’s reality about life is foreshadowed by the arrival of a Greek god Morpheus in his dreams.

Understatement

The power of dreams is understated. Through dreaming, the Lover accepts the reality that he will permanently reunite with the love of his life when he dies.

Allusions

The story alludes to fantasy and the suffering of losing a loved one.

Imagery

The imagery of loneliness is dominant in the book because it illustrates the suffering the Lover is going through in his life due to losing his beloved in a fateful manner.

Paradox

The main paradox is that the Lover reunites with his beloved but only wakes up and finds a dream.

Parallelism

There is parallelism between reality and dreams.

Metonymy and Synecdoche

N/A

Personification

The dead are incarnated when the late beloved reunites with her Lover in the dream.

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Study Guide for The Fountain of Love

The Fountain of Love study guide contains a biography of Guillaume de Machaut, literature essays, quiz questions, major themes, characters, and a full summary and analysis.

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Essays for The Fountain of Love

The Fountain of Love essays are academic essays for citation. These papers were written primarily by students and provide critical analysis of The Fountain of Love by Guillaume de Machaut.