Analysis of Katherine Philips’s : A Friend

Analysis of Katherine Philips’s

A Friend

Beyond this friendship, individualism and implication of lesbianism in Katherine Philips’s poem “A Friend” is the essence of man: man who typically gives off passionate, sexual love, man more ‘powerful’ than a woman, man who afar from his desires is what mainly contents her. Naturally and logically, he is the being who should rightfully unite, by God’s will, and is the ingredient of a wife’s purpose in giving birth to a many progeny.

Surprisingly, she also saw through the make up of the same sex. The wondrous, Platonic relationship a friend can offer. A friend that can manage to fulfill her friendship without any masculinity’s demands: no commitments, no body contacts, no sensual admirations, no same private organ unions. ‘Tis a companionship which alone is the reason of a deeper love’s discovery. A love that combines no malicious entries with sublimity of love’s thought.

Though it is, in their time, an era of a wife’s submission to her husband, she successfully gained and tracked how a wife then can submit herself to the same sex, in the being of a woman, without any restrictions of her duty as a wife. Probably because a wife saw in a friend the qualities of how a husband should caress his wife and not just letting her attend to his needs.

In relation to her viewpoints is the fact that the husband is what makes a wife’s entirety. As what is alleged in Philips’s poem, he is the secrecy of life who defines his own existence with the help of his other half, woman. Known as God’s creation, a companion that spares and makes up a bond, a man is readily involved in woman’s development. It is with him that lays the completion of a marriage that is believed to be a woman and a man’s mission as God’s highest creation, marriage that naturally gives happiness to persons in love. It is by marriage that opposite sex satisfies them, marriage blessed and pure.

Matrimony comply wife’s needs yet friendship appears. ‘Tis friendship that is likened to love is also the same mystery that uproots from all these affairs. Its no fake identity and cleansed definition is yet more pleasant from love that is composed of millions of foul play, discouragements, misconceptions, miscommunications. It is a more transparent relationship which separately shapes you from love that, in a way or not as much, (not mentioning others’ experiences), distorts your whole persona. Friendship defined in this poem doesn’t beshadow you and your growth and understanding as a being. In fact, with no chains and no restrictions to limit the whole ‘you’, you then live accordingly to how you should.

Friendship that which is said to be ‘next to angels’ love, if not the same’ may mean that it is friendship that is most likely to be preferred (if not in search of a man). Its feeling of friendship may be too strong like that of a lover’s, yet not seemingly leading to sex.

On another phase of what I have analyzed, this lesbianism, described in general, may be created because women want to prove that as men live as seeing only men themselves, women can also commit to the same roles as how men do. Women that time started to think perhaps that they should not be unnoticed because they themselves can fill the whole world. I have pondered that this friendship and matrimony, these gender issue, is not that plain. It is something that is fought upon its definition, its roles to change lives, ours and our forefathers (and ‘foremothers’)

This poem opens another case of a friend’s meaning, that through our naked understanding, it is not only individualism, friendship, companionship and matrimony which should be given attention to, but the strength of how women of these times and our time bravely accept men’s roles in wrong judgment.