It seems that Goethe is trying to decipher what love really is, whether it is a harmonious natural peace that overwhelms or a dangerous emotion laced with greed and lust . It uses different forms of love to try to resolve the question of what love is. The most important are loving-kindness, passionate love, and divine love. Goethe uses flowery prose and imagery to discuss the different forms of love and lust. Apart from divining the nature of love, the poems shed light on certain social issues, such as religion, lust, the poems talk about gender roles and the power of each person. holds. Some other themes present in the selected readings are maturation, the question of human life and its meaning and of course the meaning of love and whether it can exist through the darkness. For a reader of “Rose in the Heather,” it does not take much of a stretch of the imagination to see in this poem a scenario of contracting a hurtful, sexually transmitted disease between the sexes. Alongside the illness, another action is visible through the following quote: “And the careless boy broke the rose, the rosebud in the heather. With her thorns, she dared to oppose. All his ahs and ohs were useless, he had to grant his pleasure. situations, Goethe speaks of rape; the power play between man and woman is at the forefront. Taking pleasure from the rose signifies man's power over women in the physical world. The breaking of the rose symbolizes the power of man over the feminine sphere. The term defloration has been around since the 1300s and the very literal images of defloration support the flower representing the female and the picker the male. Roses are ancient symbols of love and beauty, symbols of femininity and the feminine sphere. They represent...... middle of paper...... "No one can love the husk, thus dried and torn / However fine it may be when hidden by a core." This love goes beyond the physical and approaches divine love, an ideal type of love that can be recognized despite the lack of a body. In the assigned poems, Goethe does not reach a conclusion about what love is, he does, however, show that the poetic and physical forms of love are linked in that of the divine. As he ends this segment with "Proemion", saying that with man's love comes fear. This final passage shows the mixture of lighter and darker emotions that are intertwined in the previous poems. These emotions as well as the lighter and darker themes of the poems show a journey that represents aging, maturity; physically and emotionally, and discuss deeper social themes of different spheres, gender roles and power within each.