DESPERATE LOVERS VERSUS TYRANT BELOVEDS: THE MASTER-SLAVE ANALOGY IN THE POEMS OF JOHN KEATS AND FELICIA HEMANS

Although love of nature as a source of inspiration is one of the primary themes in Romantic period, romantic love, which conveys the passion, pleasure, or the pain of love, often appears as a common theme in Romantic poetry. Romantic poetry becomes as a fertile space where some of the poets explore romantic love as a powerful, intense, and irresistible emotion that gives pain and melancholy rather than pleasure and happiness. I argue that the uneasy relationship between the lovers and beloveds in Romantic poetry, particularly in poems of John Keats and Felicia Hemans parallels with a long-lasting theme, the pain of love, depicted through the sultan-servant or master-slave analogy in Ottoman Divan poetry. Discussing the function of master-slave analogy in Ottoman Divan poetry and theorizing love within philosophical and scientific contexts with the ideas of Ficino and Hegel, this paper examines how Keats and Hemans employ this analogy in their poems and explore the pain of love to demonstrate the power dynamics between the lovers and beloveds.