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Elizabeth B Browning - How Do I Love Thee
Elizabeth B Browning - How Do I Love Thee
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"How do I Love Thee" by Elizabeth Barrett Browning is considered to be one of the greatest love poems of the 19th century. The theme of the poem depicts Browning's devoted love for her future husband. Throughout the poem, Browning pours her heart out to the audience. Each line increases with intensity and from one line to the next expressing her deepest feelings. The author wants the reader to know that love can be a very powerful, strong, and irrepressible emotion that can even outlast death. In the poem "How do I love thee" Browning incorporates figurative language throughout the poem. Some examples of figurative language used in the poem are metaphors, similes, and diction to express her deep passion and intense love for her significant …show more content…
A Simile compares one thing to another thing using "like" or "as". Lines 7-8 show similes being used. Browning states, "I love thee freely, as men strive for right." "I love thee purely, as they turn from praise." These two lines seem to be pretty straight forward when she says "I love thee feely" and "I love the purely". This is Browning loving her significant other without force but with recognition of her love. The complication may come when referring to the second half of both lines when she describes "loving thee feely" as "men strive for right" and "loving thee purely" as " they turn from praise". Thinking of line 7 if it is switched around to say "men strive right" in a "free" way could mean that it is a choice that man can choose or choose not to do right. This means that people try to do the right thing because they feel like they have to do but this says something entirely different. Maybe Browning feels that she has to love her significant other. Line 8 suggest the word "purely" which could mean that Browning's love is "pure". The second half of line 8 says "they turn from praise" could mean that she is not looking for praise for writing the poem. Browning seems to love no matter the thought of recognition or
In the song “Somebody I Used To Know” is about a guy who is heartbroken that his former lover is gone and out of his life. The lyrics “Make out like it never happened and that we are nothing” (metaphor) means that Gotye is still trying to get with Kimba and she denies everything they did together. If you really read through the lyrics you can connect on how he feels and how Kimba feels. One more lyric that really hit me was “Have your friends collect your records and then change your number”(figurative language) those lyrics mean that she wants nothing to do with Gotye but, he is trying to get her love back but she changed her number .
Elizabeth Barrett Browning follows ideal love by breaking the social conventions of the Victorian age, which is when she wrote the “Sonnets from the Portuguese”. The Victorian age produced a conservative society, where marriage was based on class, age and wealth and women were seen as objects of desire governed by social etiquette. These social conventions are shown to be holding her back, this is conveyed through the quote “Drew me back by the hair”. Social conventions symbolically are portrayed as preventing her from expressing her love emphasising the negative effect that society has on an individual. The result of her not being able to express her love is demonstrated in the allusion “I thought one of how Theocritus had sung of the sweet
Love is the ubiquitous force that drives all people in life. If people did not want, give, or receive love, they would never experience life because it is the force that completes a person. Although it often seems absent, people constantly strive for this ever-present force as a means of acceptance. Elizabeth Barrett Browning is an influential poet who describes the necessity of love in her book of poems Sonnets from the Portuguese. In her poems, she writes about love based on her relationship with her husband – a relationship shared by a pure, passionate love. Browning centers her life and happiness around her husband and her love for him. This life and pure happiness is dependent on their love, and she expresses this outpouring and reliance of her love through her poetry. She uses imaginative literary devices to strengthen her argument for the necessity of love in one’s life. The necessity of love is a major theme in Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s “Sonnet 43” and “Sonnet 29.”
Love and Hate are powerful emotions that influence and control how we interact with people. To express this influence and control and the emotions associated with love and hate, for instance, joy, admiration, anger, despair, jealousy, and disgust, author's craft their writing with literary elements such as as structure, figurative language, imagery, diction, symbolism, and tone. Poems in which these can be seen present are “My Papa’s Waltz” by Theodore Roethke, “My Last Duchess” by Robert Browning, and “Sonnet 130” by William Shakespeare. Within “My Papa’s Waltz” a mighty love is seen between the father and son. To express this Roethke uses figurative language, symbolism and diction. Within “My Last Duchess” there is little love, but an ample hate towards the duchess from the Duch. To express this the
Elizabeth Barrett Browning 's "Sonnet XLIII" speaks of her love for her husband, Richard Browning, with rich and deeply insightful comparisons to many different intangible forms. These forms—from the soul to the afterlife—intensify the extent of her love, and because of this, upon first reading the sonnet, it is easy to be impressed and utterly overwhelmed by the descriptors of her love. However, when looking past this first reading, the sonnet is in fact quite ungraspable for readers, such as myself, who have not experienced what Browning has for her husband. As a result, the visual imagery, although descriptive, is difficult to visualize, because
When people think of divinity or of someone being divine, more often than not they will think of their God in whatever religion they choose to believe in. It is very rare that someone human is considered divine or is said to have divine ability, however, in Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s poem, “How Do I Love Thee?” she challenges the idea that a person, in particular their love, can be divine. People view love as a divine characteristic because it is something both God and humans express. Although God’s love is insurmountable because it is pure and everlasting, Browning suggests that her love for her partner is on the same level as that of God.
The exciting line, ‘I am here’, emphasises her importance and leaves us questioning what she is about to do next. Browning is mocking society’s expectations of the patriarchal and classist structures of lower-class women, suggesting that women can also only ever bring pain to other females because they cannot match against men and their intelligence. Her intended victim is both, but her jealousy is directed at another woman. ‘Let death be felt’, is the penultimate line that truly shows her power in this poem. Surprisingly for a female, she has no remorse or guilt about what she is doing, almost as if she has gained male qualities.
Browning's amazing command of words and their effects makes this poem infinitely more pleasurable to the reader. Through simple, brief imagery, he is able to depict the lovers' passion, the speaker's impatience in reaching his love, and the stealth and secrecy of their meeting. He accomplishes this feat within twelve lines of specific rhyme scheme and beautiful language, never forsaking aesthetic quality for his higher purposes.
1. “We decided that everyone likes to hear compliments that are descriptive. I am sure it is the same way when you read. It is better to read a book with vivid descriptions than just facts. When writers are trying to describe something to the reader they often use figurative language. Similes, metaphors, and personification are all types of figurative language. By using figurative languages like similes, metaphors, and personification the writer gives you, the reader, the ability to see, hear, smell, or imagine what you are reading. It brings the words to life and allows the reader to feel as though they are in the book, experiencing everything right along with the character(s).”
By using references of her grief or her losses, Browning creates a more realistic view of her love suggesting that her love is sincere as it comes from a grieved person, which differs to the positive and idealistic feelings portray in the first octave. The poet then talks about her fondness of her love, revealing that her she lives for her love “ I love thee with the breath, / smiles, tears, of all my life;” (line 12-13), the asyndetic listings of the verbs ‘breath’, ‘smiles’ and ‘tears’, implying that her love can stem from different emotions she feels such as happiness and sadness, suggesting to her beloved that her love comes from good and sad points of her life.
The strongest metaphors that she produces are in lines 12 and 13: "I love thee with the breath, smiles, tears, of all my life!" This metaphor really puts her feelings on the table if the others haven’t already. Emily Barrett Browning has proved herself to be a fantastic poet through these incorporated elements. By referencing her feelings of intense grief, incredible bitterness, and also her portrayal of loss of innocence, Barrett Browning, who is the speaker of the poem, explains her intense love.
To conclude, Emily Bronte uses Imagery, Metaphor, and Symbolism In her poem " Love and Friendship", to show that friendship will always be here regardless of whether love is present or not, for the fact that friendships will always be created even in areas where love does not exist, letting her readers know that love should not be the only thing they live for, they should instead focus their attention on creating long lasting
Love is the ubiquitous force that drives all people in life. If people did not want, give, or receive love, they would never experience life because it is the force that completes a person. People rely on this seemingly absent force although it is ever-present. Elizabeth Barrett Browning is an influential poet who describes the necessity of love in her poems from her book Sonnets from the Portuguese. She writes about love based on her relationship with her husband. Her life is dependent on him, and she expresses this same reliance of love in her poetry. She uses literary devices to strengthen her argument for the necessity of love. The necessity of love is a major theme in Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s “Sonnet 14,” “Sonnet 43,” and “Sonnet 29.”
In the poem "How do I Love Thee", Elizabeth Barret Browning expresses her everlasting nature of love and its power to overcome all, including death. In the introduction of the poem Line 1 starts off and captures the reader’s attention. It asks the simple question, "How do I Love Thee?" Throughout the rest of the poem repetition occurs. Repetition of how she would love thee is a constant reminder in her poem. However, the reader will quickly realize it is not the quantity of love, but its quality of love; this is what gives the poem its power. For example she says, “I love thee with the breath, smiles, tears, of all my life; and, if God choose, I shall but love thee better after death.” She is expressing how and what she would love with, and after death her love only grows stronger. Metaphors that the poet use spreads throughout the poem expressing the poets love for her significant other.
In conclusion, Browning uses many different techniques of conveying the complexities of human passion, and does this effectively from many points of view on love. However, it does seem that Browning usually has a slightly subdued, possibly even warped view of love and romance ? and this could be because his own love life was publicly perceived to be ultimately perfect but retrospectively it appears his marriage with Elizabeth Browning was full of doubt and possessiveness, as seen in ? Any Wife To Any Husband? which most critics believe to be based on the troubled relationship between the Browning?s.