Question

Answer the following question in about 100-120 words:

“The Sermon at Benaras” and “For Anne Gregory”, deal with the themes of ‘love’ and ‘life’. Discuss.

Answer 1

Both poems probe love and life but from different angles. Yeats’s “For Anne Gregory” satirises romantic love’s surface‑values: the young woman worries that men love her “yellow hair” not herself, and the poem questions whether human love can be unconditional, ending with a wry appeal to divine love. In contrast, “The Sermon at Benares” (the Buddha’s tale of Kisa Gotami) treats life’s reality,loss, death, and impermanence,and shows compassionate, communal response as the antidote to grief, teaching acceptance and continuity amid suffering. Together they ask readers to look beyond appearances and to find deeper, more enduring forms of love and meaning in life.