Elizabeth Browning Poetry Analysis

Elizabeth Barrett Browning was known as one of the most prominent English poets in the Victorian era (1837-1901) and one of her books was popular in Britain but also in the United States. These book of sonnets that she has created was influenced by her Husband Robert Browning who called her “his Portuguese” which is why she named her book “Sonnets from the Portuguese” which consists of 44 sonnets and 60 other poems of hers. As she grew up in London during a time of slavery and her father’s mismanagement in 1826, I find that these occurrences affected her poetry and how she wrote them. Browning’s poetry just like many other poets’, have a certain common feature among them which can help verify the poet or find other poems in which they have

Browning likes to use Italian and also English model rhythm schemes; this gives a beat to the poem which the readers follow and makes it memorable. Using metaphors is a popular thing that Elizabeth uses in her poem, for example from (Sonnets from the Portuguese: Sonnet 22), “The angels would press on us and aspire/ To drop some golden orb of perfect song” (7/8). Using metaphors like these ones are used in Elizabeth’s poem to make the readers think more about the meaning of the poems and to see if they can find a hidden message by thinking deeper then what the words are saying but to what they think Elizabeth is saying in the poem. Another technique she uses is to help give her poems a smooth flow, and gives them an emotion setting by using the traditional iambic pentameter. As Browning uses these techniques to create a piece of art of words on a paper, in a readers eyes, the words can create an

I find that being a female poet does influence the themes of their poems; that female poets most likely write about love, and real love. Comparing to male poets who write about love, but more in a male dominant, females are the stereotypical lady-like way. As Elizabeth writes about mutual love and more about the emotional and spiritual connection between two spouses instead of the physical and mental being of one another. Between the Sonnet poems and “A Musical Instrument” the theme of love is taken in a positive and negative way; they show the true beauty and meaning over love but also argues the troubles and difficulties about love. Arguing the troubles about love is shown throughout “A musical Instrument” (The Broadview Anthology of Poetry), following the myth, because of the nymph not falling in love with Pan because of his looks; it describes that most ‘love’ is seen externally. As Love is popular in the Victorian era, death was also quite common. Though Browning did not talk so much about death in most of her poems excluding “A dead rose”, it was more of a mention of death and the ends of a few poems in her” Sonnets From the Portuguese”. For example in Sonnet 22 (Sonnets from the Portuguese) “A place to stand and love in for a day,/With darkness and the death-hour rounding it.” (13/14), the