Love at First Sight Essay

Love at first fortune is a common trope in Western literature, in which a person, character, or speaker feels romantic attraction for a stranger on the first sight of them. Described by poets and critics from the Greek world on, it has live on one of the most powerful tropes in Western fiction.In the classical world, the phenomenon of love at first sight was understood within the context of a more general conception of passionate love, a kind of madness or, as the Greeks put it, theia mania (madness from the gods).1 This love passion was described through with(predicate) an elaborate metaphoric and mythological psychological schema involving loves arrows or love darts, the source of which was often given as the mythological physical attraction or Cupid,2 sometimes by other mythological deities (such as Rumor3). At times, the source of the arrows was said to be the image of the beautiful love object itself. If these arrows arrived at the lovers eyes, they would then travel to and pierce his or her heart, overwhelming them with desire and longing (love sickness). The image of the arrows wound was sometimes utilize to create oxymorons and rhetorical antithesis.Love at first sight was explained as a sudden and immediate beguiling of the lover through the action of these processes, and is illustrated in numerous Greek and Roman works. In Ovids Metamorphoses, Narcissus becomes immediately spellbound and charmed by his aver (unbeknownst to him) image. In Achilles Tatiuss Leucippe and Clitophon, the lover Clitophon thus describes his own experience of the phenomenon As soon as I had seen her, I was lost. For Beautys wound is sharper than any weapons, and it runs through the eyes deal to the soul. It is through the eye that loves wound passes, and I now became a prey to a host of emotions4Love at first sight was not, however, the only mode of entering into passionate love in classical texts at times the passion could occur after the initial meeting or could prece de the first glimpse.Another classical interpretation of the phenomenon of love at first sight is found in Platos Symposium in Aristophanes description of the insulation of primitive double-creatures into modern men and women and their subsequent search for their missing half when a lover is fortunate enough to meet his other half, they are both so lift up with affection, with friendship, and with love, that they cannot bear to let each other out of sight for a single instant.5