How Do I Love Thee by Elizabeth Barret Browning is an iconic and powerful love poem. The work is part of Sonnets from the Portuguese, a collection of poems that Elizabeth Browning wrote for her husband, poet Robert Browning. It is a passionate declaration of love from one who is in love, which had resonated with many generations of readers because of the rawness and relatability of its feelings. Throughout the text, the speaker uses a diverse array of literary techniques to demonstrate a multidimensional love. First, passionate love is conveyed in the spatial metaphor of loving with “the depth and breadth and height my soul can reach.” Here, love is a substance that fills up and infatuates the speaker, creating a powerful drive that forces …show more content…
Then, the speaker moves on to describe a more tender and companionate love through a temporal metaphor. In comparing love to “every day's most quiet need, by sun and candle-light,” she portrays a long-term love that seems like second-nature. In contrast with the spatial love, this temporal love is rather muted, but sweet and caring. One would normally see passionate and companionate love as two separates phases, but with these imageries, the speaker insists that they can coexist, with herself as an evidence. The result is a description of love that is overarching and multidimensional in both its literal and figurative meanings. Then, the speaker appraises the transformative power of love. In a list format, she begins every sentence with the anaphora of “I love thee”. This use of repetition supports the tone of adoration and puts an emphasis on the …show more content…
Elizabeth Browning spent most of her adult life as an “invalid, ruled over by a tyrannical father who forbade any of his sons and daughters to marry.” She married Robert Browning in 1846 after a courtship that had to be kept secret (The British Library). Thus, the passion in the poem represents the exact kind that motivated Elizabeth Browning to abandon her family tradition to marry Robert Browning. Furthermore, the transformative power of the love described corresponds to the way Elizabeth Browning often credited her husband for saving her life. As the power couple of English poetry, the Brownings are remarkable for their ability to love with words. Among their collection of hundreds of letters and love poem, How Do I Love Thee happens to be the most iconic and descriptive portrayal of the love. More importantly, How Do I Love Thee is one of the most important love poems of English literature because of how its raw feelings resonate with generations of readers. Who wouldn’t remember being in love? Especially when it makes one feel like nothing else matters. With the inclusion of various dimensions and types of love, the poem has something in hand for everybody. From those who have just jumped into the fervency of a passionate love, to those who are enjoying a steady, companionate relationship, anyone could enjoy this
Since the beginning of human existence love has earned a meaning of pure bliss and wild passion between two people that cannot be broken. Through out time the meaning of love has had its slight shifts but for the most part, maintains a positive value. In the poem “Love Should Grow Up Like a Wild Iris in the Fields,” the author, Susan Griffin expresses that this long lost concept of love is often concealed by the madness of everyday life and reality. In the poem, Griffin uses many literary elements to help convey the importance of true love. The usage of imagery, symbolism, and other literary techniques really help communicate Griffins’ meaning
Robert Browning wrote the two poems, "My Last Duchess" and "Porphyria's Lover." Both poems convey an thoughtful, examination profound commentary about the concept of love.
“Love Poem” by John Frederick Nims is an excellent of example of an author using many types of literary terms to emphasize his theme of a love that is imperfect yet filled with acceptance. In, this poem Nims uses assonance, metaphor, and imagery to support his theme of “Imperfect, yet realistic love”.
Love is not always an easy adventure to take part in. As a result, thousands of poems and sonnets have been written about love bonds that are either praised and happily blessed or love bonds that undergo struggle and pain to cling on to their forbidden love. Gwendolyn Brooks sonnet "A Lovely Love," explores the emotions and thoughts between two lovers who are striving for their natural human right to love while delicately revealing society 's crime in vilifying a couples right to love. Gwendolyn Brooks uses several examples of imagery and metaphors to convey a dark and hopeless mood that emphasizes the hardships that the two lovers must endure to prevail their love that society has condemned.
A significantly powerful emotion, love, possessing the ability to transform a live to the greatest but also destroy. The concepts of idealised love have been expressed in texts throughout history, and each is relevant to their specific periods and specific value systems. This can be seen in both, Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s (EBB) poetry ‘Sonnets from the Portuguese’, 1845 and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel ‘The Great Gatsby’, 1925 which explore in depth the similar perspectives of ideal love, although the context that surrounds each text reshapes the composer’s viewpoint. Barrett Browning explores a romantic vision of love and enhances our perception of this interpersonal human emotion through a rebellion of the unbending principles of the Victorian
Through the use of poetic devices such as repetition or alliteration, the author originally describes what love is not capable of providing and defines love as unnecessary but by the end of the poem, the author reveals that love has some value.
Initially, Barrett Browning’s misunderstanding of love implies her innocence, apparent in the utilisation of direct speech in Sonnet I, “Not Death, but Love,”, emphasising her surprise. However, as the sonnets progress her views are altered and Sonnet XIV accentuates Barrett Browning’s yearning to be loved and urges Browning to reemphasise his love, “But love me for love’s sake, that evermore thou mayst love on, through love’s eternity,”. Imperative voice and diction indicates Barrett Browning’s preoccupation for an everlasting love that is not influenced by superficial circumstances. This notion is reiterated in Sonnet XXI, “Say thou dost love me, love me, love me,”. Imperative tone is utilised, urging Browning to repeatedly express his love for her. The idealised love that EBB envisions can surpass even Death, reflected in her Victorian
I will consider the way in which the two poets deal with the idea of love as timeless.I will also explore themes of authenticity and identity in their poems about love. In addition I will consider the extent to which their gender may have affected their view of love.
“Love, thick and dark as Alaga syrup, eased up into that cracked window. I could smell it – taste it – sweet, musty, with an edge of wintergreen in its base – everywhere in that house. It stuck, along with my tongue, to the frosted window panes. It coated my chest, along with the salve, and when the flannel came undone in my sleep, the clear, sharp curves of air outlined its presence in my throat” (Morrison 12). This passage is poetic in that it uses long descriptive passages about love.
She says that she loves him to the depth and breadth and height, which indicated that her love is long lasting. The image “by sun and candlelight” that Barrett Browning creates, is that her love may be ordinary like the sun, but its continuous since the light keeps shining day and night, which is why she uses the candlelight to represent the light she has for him is still on at night. Another image that Barrett Browning conveys is “I love thee freely, as men strive for Right, I love thee purely, as they turn from Praise”. This line shows that her love for him is of her own free choice and she compares it to the nationalists that fight for their countries, indicating that their love is as strong as a person’s love is to their country. Barrett Browning also says, “I love thee with the passion, put to use/In my old greifs… and with my childhood’s faith” here, the poet redirected her emotions from her past concerns onto her love. She states that her she loves him with her childhood’s faith, which could mean that she loves him with unquestioning confidence, just like a naïve child might.
The two Robert Browning poems, ‘Porphyria’s Lover’ and ‘My Last Duchess’ were written in the infamous Victorian Era whereas the two Shakespearean Sonnets were written in the Elizabethan Era. The styles of the poems differ in accordance to the difference of the time in which they were written. Pre-Romantic Era poems moved away from the idealistic concept of love towards a more realistic consideration of it, taking into account the social
Love makes people become selfish, but it is also makes the world greater. In this poem, the world that the speaker lives and loves is not limited in “my North, my South, my East and West / my working week and my Sunday rest” (9-10), it spreads to “My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song (11). The poem’s imagery dominates most of the third stanza giving readers an image of a peaceful world in which everything is in order. However, the last sentence of the stanza is the decisive element. This element not only destroys the inner world of the speaker, but it also sends out the message that love or life is mortal.
Consequently, this picturesque poetic device helped communicate the theme of lost love by helping the reader associate the personas’ thoughts and beliefs with their own.
The poem “How Do I Love Thee”, by Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and “What Lips My Lips Have Kissed”, by Edna Vincent Millay are both well-known poems that both have themes of love. (LIT, Kirszner & Mandell, Pg. 490). In both poems the poet helps the reader experience a lot of emotion with the use of certain words. There are speakers in both poems. In Mrs. Browning’s poem, the speaker is undefined, leaving open that the speaker could be a he or she. Millay’s poem which is written in first person, the speaker is more defined leading the reader to believe it is a she who is talking about love in the past tense. Both poems are sonnets written with fourteen lines, and written in Italian style. When comparing these poems we will be looking at the use of rhyme scheme and metaphors and how they were used to express emotions in these two sonnet poems.
Veering from the egocentric poems of the Romantic era, Victorian poets began to write poetry not only to express the feelings of an “I,” but also to inspire change in the collective “we.” Being from a historical period with a dramatic class divide, Victorian poets wrote with the intention of crafting beautiful lasting poetry as well as articulating a need for cultural reform in their now. One of the most renowned Victorian poets, Elizabeth Barrett Browning possessed the expert skill of integrating not only imagery and precise rhyme scheme into her poetry, but afflicting her readers with a sense of pity so paramount they had no choice but to make a change.