A CROSS-CULTURAL STUDY ON DIFFERENT LOVE VIEWS IN CHINESE AND WESTERN MOURNING CULTURES

Abstract

Mourning poetry is a particular type of love poetry that combines the two major themes of love and death. The Chinese poet Li Shangyin and the English poet Milton both made remarkable contributions to the different funerary cultures of China and the West. Li Shangyin （813--858） and Milton （ 1608--1674）, though not in the same time and space, both shared similar experiences and both experienced the loss of their wives. However, due to the differences in culture, religion and history between China and the West, their works also fully reflect different ideas of mourning. Based on the theory of variation in the field of comparative literature, this paper tries to compare and contrast Li Shangyin's mourning poems and Milton's on His Deceased Wife to analyze the collision of their different views on love in different times and space, so as to explore further the differences between Chinese and Western ideas of mourning.