All You Need is the Fantasy of Love with Ernest Hemingway in A Farwell to Arms

            In the poem “Sweet and Low” Alfred Tennyson creates a lullaby meant to sooth a child to sleep but more so to sooth the concerns of the mother herself. Her love is away and you can feel the mother’s yearn for him to return again and soon. Ernest Hemingway, in “A Farewell to Arms”, has Henry use this technique many times, although he is the one away at war, to try to alleviate the loneliness and anxiety that comes with loving someone through a great geographical separation. Tennyson creates a metaphor to represent the distant of the father from family, the western winds are to blow him back home. Hemingway directly references to the metaphor and poem when Henry is away at war and is thinking of Catherine. His thoughts sound beggingly when he says to himself, “Blow blow ye western winds,” he wants her to be with him desperately and goes on to say for a second time, “Blow her again to me.”(197) It emphasize their love, for the mother and Henry alike, because wind blowing is something you can feel but not see, and that is exactly the situation they are stuck in at the time. In “Sweet and Low” Tennyson capitalizes on the repetition of the phrase, “Father will come to thee”, and “Father will come to his babe…” to reassure the mother and her child that he will come back.(12,13) The mother use the dying moon to reference to the time of day and display that the night will be over soon, and she desires that as the morning arises her love will also return. This is visible when she says, “Sleep and rest… Father will come…” (9,10) Henry displays this similar longing for Catherine when he compares her to basic survival needs, all he wants is to, “Eat and drink and sleep with Catherine.”(223) At this time in the novel Henry has escaped down the river and given up on fighting in the war efforts. He fantasizes being back together with Catherine that very night but realizes it is not possible so he goes on to dream by thinking, “But to-morrow night, and a good meal and sheets and never going away except together.”(233) When Henry goes as far as to say they will never go away except together he is again mixing his fantasy and reality worlds. Catherine is alluded as perfect in his head, like a fantasy, since the time apart and made him miss her so deeply. Henry and the mother are in similar positions with distance separating them form their loves. Each longs to be with their significant other, they each fantasize that in just one day, tomorrow, they will be together again though in reality it’s a method of self-reassurance to just get through the day. The separation has caused love to display an ironic connotation and has become a feeling of pain and distance that is fills their every thoughts. This draws the connection to a major theme of the book, Henry’s focus on Catherine throughout the novel, rather than the war. He personally battles with fitting into the male social standards such helping with the war efforts but really just the want to be with his love takes over, as shown when he runs away from the war and straight back to Catherine.