![]() when our loves fail us or when our beauty fades and we grow old) we still have our friends. ![]() The poem’s final stanza entreats us to view friendship as more valuable to us than love, and to look after our friends and cherish them, so that when ‘winter’ comes (i.e. Love, like roses, is sweet in the spring and summer when it’s fresh but when it fades, in the autumn and winter months, friendship, like holly (which, as we know from its use at Christmas, does not wilt and wither in the winter), continues to bloom. When he goes to school at Hogwarts, Harry gains a group of friendsprimarily Ron and Hermione who demonstrate that the love at the heart of friendship can be just as important as that at the heart of familial ties. In the first stanza of ‘Love and Friendship’, Brontë reminds us that when we fall in love, in that first flush of excitement when we first meet someone and fall for them, we neglect our friends, but friendship, unlike love, will not desert us.īrontë develops this analogy in the poem’s middle stanza. ![]() Love is like the rose briar (reminding us of the old poets’ adage, ‘every rose has its thorn’: love has a dangerous as well as thrilling side) whereas friendship is like the holly tree. Many poems see love and friendship as a natural partnership, but in this poem, Emily Brontë sees them as related (she likens them both to flowering plants) but substantially different. ![]()
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