from Tristan
Gottfried von Strassburg
pages 302-305
Summary: Gottfried von Strassburg's poem Tristan is about two young people who accidentally drink a love potion and enter love's unbreakable spell. Tristan and Isolde can then not be separated from one another and do whatever it takes for them to stay together.
Argument/Main Idea: People, especially those who are young and inexperienced in life, will do anything for love and cannot escape its powerful grasp. Tristan and Isolde are two young people stuck in an inseparable case of love.
Evidence:
"Love, the reconciler, had purged their hearts of enmity, and so joined them in affection that each was to the other as limpid as a mirror. They shared a single heart. her anguish was his pain: his pain, her anguish." (page 303) After, drinking the love potion, Tristan and Isolde are inseparable.
"These two seemed fairer than before-- as is Love's law, such is the way with affection." (page 304) Each time the two set eyes upon each other, they love the other more. That is the way that love works, getting stronger with every connection.
Response: I think that through writing about the relationship between Tristan and Isolde, Strassburg was expressing his own feelings towards love. Love is unbreakable and is the strongest connection that two beings can share between one another.
