It seems that Goethe is trying to decipher what love truly is, whether it is a harmonious natural peace that overwhelms or a dangerous emotion touched by greed and lust. He uses different forms of love to try to resolve the question of what love is. The most important ones are caring love, passionate love and divine love. Goethe uses flowery prose and imagery to discuss the different forms of love and lust. Apart from divining the nature of love, the poems bring to light some social issues, such as religion, lust, the poems talk about gender roles and the power of one. holds. Some other themes present in the selected readings concern maturation, the question of human life and its meaning, and of course the meaning of love and whether it can exist through the darkness. For a reader of "Rose in the Heather" it does not take much of a leap of imagination to see in this poem a scenario for the contraction of a wound disease, sexually transmitted between the sexes. Along with illness, another action is seen through the following quote “And the reckless boy broke the rose, Rosebud in the heather. With his thorns he dared to resist. In vain all his ahs and ohs, He had to grant him the pleasure. " situations, Goethe talks about rape; the power play between men and women is in the foreground. Deriving pleasure from the rose signifies man's power over women in the physical world. The breaking of the rose symbolizes the power of man over the female sphere. The term defloration has been around since the 1300s and the very literal images of defloration support the flower representing the female and the harvester the male. Roses are ancient symbols of love and beauty, symbols of femininity and the feminine sphere. They represent...... the center of the paper...... "No one can love the peel, so dry and torn/However fine it may hide a stone." This love transcends the physical and approaches the realm of the divine, an ideal love that can be recognized despite the lack of the body. In the assigned poems Goethe does not reach a conclusion on what love is, but he shows that the poetic and physical forms of love are connected in that of the divine. Concluding this segment with the saying “Prœmion”, that man's love is accompanied by fear. This final passage shows the mixture of the lighter and darker emotions that are intertwined in the previous poems. These emotions along with the lighter and darker themes within the poems show a journey that represents aging, maturity; physically and emotionally and discuss deeper social issues of separate spheres, gender roles and power within each.