MY LITTE PORTGUESE

755 Words2 Pages

Elizabeth Browning was one of the most prominent English Poets of the Victorian Era. This was very ironic because during the Victorian Era men were considered the most dominant. Due to Elizabeth’s father unapproval of her love affair with Robert Browning the couple eloped in secret and got married. The name “my little Portuguese’’ was the name she adopted from her husband. The couple love affair was the gateway to one of Browning greatest work The Sonnet from the Portuguese. Sonnet from the Portuguese are a group of poems about love written in the diary of Elizabeth Browning. These poems were writing about her husband Robert Browning signifying their love. In these poem, she is portrayed as a transitioning character. Though the progressing of the poems her understanding of love grow and matured. Within this progression, Elizabeth Browning transition from being a skeptic about the definition of love to forming a definition of her own. In her first sonnet, “Sonnet I”, it seems like to me that she does not know what love is. She starts talking about what is happening in the past and suddenly changing her mood to being sad and “melancholy”. “I saw, in gradual vision through my tears The sweet, sad years, melancholy years Those of my life, who by turns had flung A shadow across me. Straightway I was ‘ware’ So weeping, how a mystic Shape did move.” (Lines 6-10) Elizabeth confuses me with her emotional roller coaster. At the last four lines of her poem, she becomes happy or pleased once again to find that what was at the end wasn’t “Death” at all, but love “Behind me, and drew me backward by the hair And a voice said in mastery, while I strove,- “Guess now who holds thee!” “Death,” I said, But, There, The silver an... ... middle of paper ... ...for a man no matter what and she knows for a clear fact that he will be there for her until the very end. “I love thee to the depth and breadth and height My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight For the ends of Being and Ideal Grace. I love thee to the level of every day’s Most quiet need, by sun and candlelight I love thee freely, as men strive for Right I love thee purely, as they turn from Praise” (Lines 2-8) Elizabeth Browning was a great and famous writer of her time. She put in what she has gone through with her emotions and how she felt of the issue and plugged it into her dairy that now people of our society read now. She was a great inspiration to many other writers and artist of her time period. In my opinion, I believe she describe her feeling so well and not a lot of great people have the gift to express herself like she did in her work.

Open Document