The Wife of Bath Prologue and Tale

I enjoy reading The Wife of Bath Prologue and Tale because it brings out one's inner thoughts and feelings. The narrator speaks her mind openly about marriages, sex, control, and physical attractions between male and female. At the beginning of the prologue, the narrator uses Abraham, Solomon, and Jacob from The Old Testament to prove her point about marrying more than once. She also makes a statement similar to the tale itself; that is a women wants to be the one in control in the marriage
The Wife of Bath Prologue is about a female who has been through five different marriages. She talks of her husbands openly and how she controls each of them. She describes the first three husbands as old, rich, and kind (weak-willed). It seems to me that she wed them for their fortune. Her other two husbands are much younger, but are not as kind to her as the first three husbands. They treated her terribly, yet she loves them anyway. Her fifth husband is much more harder to get for the reasons that he dislikes women and are physically abusive towards them.
The tale on the other hand is a little bit different from the prologue. I did not expect the tale to be about a knight who is given a one year limit to search for an answer to a question. His question by the queen is of all the things in life, what would a women want the most? I thought this question would be difficult to answer. There are so many different opinions from each person. How is the knight be able to answer this question? However, he has helped from an older, ugly looking lady. She saids that women likes to be the one in control the most. This answer surprises me. Relationship nowadays is about two individuals agreeing with each other instead of who is being in control. However, the answer fits perfectly with the prologue.

Kokinshu

The Kokinshu is a collection of Japanese elite poems. Most of their poems are fascinating to me because the poems consist of only 5 lines. I have tried to make poems similar to theirs in high school, but it seems much more difficult than it looks. Even though I have the syllables right, I did not get to express what I want to say. In those 5 lines there are so much emotions stress into the poem. I can see throughout the collection that there are two main themes; seasonal poems and love poems. In the first poem of Ki no Tsurayuki, the poem is about the changing seasons.

"When snow comes in spring--
fair season of layered haze
and burgeoning buds--
flowers fall in villages
where flowers have yet to bloom"

It is basically about the transition of falling snow to plum bossoms. The snow represents the winter season while the bloom represents spring. Japanese write mostly about beautiful things in life. Their poems do not stress anything about bloodshed, being poor, or political life. From reading these poems, I get a totally different perspectives from one's feelings. Japanese poems are totally different than those of the Chinese poems.