Sonnet 43 is a poem, which has a completely different sentiment from A Married State. This poem celebrates marriage and love. We can assume that Elizabeth Barrett Browning enjoyed a happy marriage unlike Romeo and Juliet, this poem celebrates a love that is not full of drama and intensity, but rather a love that is steady and enduring.
At the beginning of the poem it is almost as if the poet has been asked a question about how much she loves her husband or her lover, including a rhetorical question. She replies with ‘How do I love the? Let me count the ways’. This illustrates that she loves him in too many ways to count. There is absolutely no ‘reason’ for love, so rather than using the word ‘why’ it enforces this statement. But, in the contrary, by her saying ‘Let me count the ways’, this totally contradicts the whole idea of love having no ‘reason’. In the entire rest of the poem she is describing how much she loves.
She then goes onto use a metaphor when describing her soul as a container. As she says ‘I love thee to the depth and breadth and height my soul can reach’. As the soul is immeasurable it seems as though she’s saying her love for him is endless, she uses everyday measurements for something that can not be measured. To show that her love is not reckless or short lived, she says that she loves him ‘to the level of every day’s most quiet need’. By exclaiming this, she is trying to insinuate that she loves every single bit of him, almost saying he is perfect and there is nothing about him to change. Elizabeth Barrett Browning also never uses personal ‘markers’ such as he, she, him or her. All sonnets have 14 lines in which the last two lines prior to the end have a much larger and ‘deeper’ meaning than the rest of the ...
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... intense contrast in views of love in each of the different ones. This signifies that the authors, and the people who are reading, all have different views and ideas on what love means to them. Romeo and Juliet was an ‘infatuation’, the idea of love at first sight implies that there is no time for the development of their love, so the feelings and extent of their willingness to be together may not be as strong as Elizabeth Barrett Browning and her ‘lover’. In hindsight, there is also a big difference between Sonnet 43 and A Married State, whereas Katherine Phillips totally disregards the feelings of love and practically states that love is useless and there is no reason for anyone to be involved with it.
As a conclusion, we see that every person has a different view on the idea of love; there is a mature love, a total disregard for love and also an obsessive love.
The first six lines of the poem highlight the incompetence of love when compared to the basic supplies for life. Love is not all: it is not meat nor drink Nor slumber nor a roof against the rain; Nor yet a floating spar to men that sink And rise and sink and rise and sink again Love can not fill the thickened lung with breath, Nor clean the blood, nor set the fractured bone; It is quite obvious that the narrator highlights everything that requires living in line 1 through 6. Line 1 depicts the deficiency of love as a thing that is not able to provide food as compared to “meat” (1): love cannot hydrate a man as signified by “drink” (1): love cannot refresh a man as signified by “slumber” (2): it does not offer shelter as signified by “a roof against the rain” (2): love cannot give a preserving “floating spar” to a man who is in peril (3): nor will love give air to a “thickened lung” (5): love cannot “set the fractured bone” (6). The narrator describes love as a worthless element in the first 6 lines, but line 7 and line 8 express a tremendous level of violence that people are willing to commit because of the lack of love: “ Yet many a man is making friends with death / Even as I speak, for lack of love alone” (7-8). Line 7 and line 8 is an evidence to prove that no matter what the poet says about love, people are willing to die for it because it is important.
Moreover, there are different types of love, and in this case, both authors describe the love of their characters as something unconditional and genuine. Sometimes it does not have any explanation of what people feel when they are in love. Indeed, both poems portray the same idea of an endless love. Also, both poets describe how their characters are fighting distance and proving that their love is pure and sincere. As a result, both attempt to prove that love is the most powerful thing in the entire world, and their goal is to show that
Browning’s “Sonnet 43” vividly depicts the human dependency of love. She uses irony to emphasize that love overpowers everything. Browning starts the poem with “How do I love thee” (Browning). Ironically, she answers the very question she presents the reader by describing her love and the extent to which she loves (Kelly 244). The ironic question proposes a challenge to the reader. Browning insinuates how love overpowers so that one may overcome the challenge. People must find the path of love in life to become successful and complete. Also, the diction in “Sonnet 43” supports the idea that love is an all-encompassing force. The line, “if God choose, I shall love thee better after death” means that love is so powerful that even after someone passes away lov...
...uty which is impossible for any woman or man to match. Campion's poem reflects this impossible ideal that society inflicts on us. This woman in There is a Garden in Her Face could never really live up to the image that the speaker has created of her. The image is false, and so is his love because he is only focusing on her outward appearance. The speaker in Shakespeare's sonnet clearly is not in love with his mistress' looks. Everything about her is contrary to society's standards, but he understands the absurdity of these standards and rejects them. There is more to his mistress than meets the eye, and that is why he truly loves her.
The word choice in Sonnet 43 and Sonnet 116 can be compared as well as contrasted, based on the way the words are used, and also the types of words the authors both Browning, as well as Shakespeare have chosen. In Sonnet 43, Browning uses words similar to the words Shakespeare chose. For example in line two "I love Thee to the depth and breadth and height" the words "Thee" and "breadth" are not common words used in everyday English. "Thee" used here seems to mean 'you', and "breadth" to mean 'width'. This would make the line translate to "I love you to the depth and width and height." The words Browning chooses to use help express exactly how deep and long the love is. In sonnet 116 by William Shakespeare the word choice, as in Browning's Sonnet 43, also uses words that are not common to everyday conversations in the English language. For example Shakespeare uses "impediments" and "tempests" in place of the common words "obstructions" and "disturbances" or "flaws" his choice or words for his sonnet help to show the serious tone, and show that his lesson on love is important.
While Elizabeth Barrett Browning's "Sonnet 43" from Sonnets from the Portuguese is an Italian sonnet like the others in this collection that makes up the book, it does not follow the "traditional" pattern of stating a question in the first 8 lines and answering it in the last 6 lines. Instead, Browning presents her question in the first line and answers in all following lines, which is something not normally done. By using repetition of "I love thee" she emphasizes how deeply she loves Mr. Browning. When Browning answers "how do I love thee?" ", she uses metaphors like, "the level of every day's most quiet need".
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
Sonnets are concerned with the idea of love, which makes it an appropriate device to use. This passage can be contrasted to love. that Romeo once felt for Rosaline, however Romeo in the first instance. was unwilling and unable to act upon his shallow feelings towards the object of his affection, while at his very first meeting with Juliet. he was able to make contact with her rather than view from afar.
...Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Browning are represented by the traditional love poems “Meeting at Night”, “Parting at Morning”, and “How Do I Love Thee?”, which is one of the most often quoted poems in the English language” (Kirszner and Mandell 904). “In one of pair of poems- ‘Meeting at Night’ and ‘Parting at Morning’- he is concerned with the lengths to which lovers will go be together and the necessity for parting” (Odden 167). Robert and Elizabeth Browning are great examples of what love is, and some of their poems have the theme ‘love.’
In “Sonnet 43,” Browning wrote a deeply committed poem describing her love for her husband, fellow poet Robert Browning. Here, she writes in a Petrarchan sonnet, traditionally about an unattainable love following the styles of Francesco Petrarca. This may be partly true in Browning’s case; at the time she wrote Sonnets from the Portuguese, Browning was in courtship with Robert and the love had not yet been consummated into marriage. But nevertheless, the sonnet serves as an excellent ...
Love is arguably the most powerful emotion possessed by mankind; it is the impalpable bond that allows individuals to connect and understand one another. Pure love is directly related to divinity. Without love, happiness and prosperity become unreachable goals. An individual that possesses all the desired superficial objects in the world stands alone without the presence of love. For centuries love has been marveled by all that dare encounter it. Countless books and poems have been transcribed to explain the phenomenon of love, but love surpasses all intellectual explanations and discussions. Love is not a definition, but rather a thought, an idea. This idea, the idea of love, burns inside us all. Instinctually, every soul on Earth is
William Shakespeare's sonnets deal with two very distinct individuals: the blond young man and the mysterious dark-haired woman. The young man is the focus of the earlier numbered sonnets while the latter ones deal primarily with the dark-haired woman. The character of the young man and a seductive mistress are brought together under passionate circumstances in Shakespeare's "Sonnet 42." The sexual prowess of the mistress entangles both Shakespeare and the young man in her web of flesh. This triangular sonnet brings out Shakespeare's affection for both individuals. His narcissistic ideal of delusional love for the young man is shown through diction and imagery, metrical variation and voice, contained in three quatrains and one couplet.
The love that a person has for someone is not the same for other people. They can look at their love through nature or just by their beauty. Shakespeare has the ability to explain his love for someone by using nature as a reference. Looking at two of Shakespeare’s sonnets 18 and 130 explore the differences and similarities between one another. In Sonnet 18 and 130, both show Shakespeare’s knowledge in developing his love and respect.
John Donne and William Shakespeare shared similar ideas to depict the theme of love in “Sonnet 18” and “The Good-Morrow”. Both Donne and Shakespeare used the concept of eternal love in their poems, but with slightly different perspectives. John Donne establishes the idea of eternal love by saying that his lover’s bodily fluids mixed with his create the perfect match. In other words, through coitus, they become a whole perfect person free from death. “Love so alike that none can slacken, none can die.”
He compares her voice to music as he, “loves to hear her speak, yet well [he] know / [t]hat music hath a far more pleasing sound” (Shakespeare 9-10), as no voice would be as pleasant as music, further ridiculing the conventional love poem. The tone of the speaker changes in the final quatrain, as he loves the way she speaks but, her sound is not as pleasant as music. The speaker’s appreciation of his mistress is made apparent, as his comparisons are not as harsh in the third quatrains when compared to the first two quatrains. The flaws he depicts almost begins to idealize his mistress. Work our way through the sonnet he begins to half-heartedly glamourizes her beauty and we come to know, to him her flaws are what makes her beautiful and his love for his mistress beings to reveal its self. From the way the speaker speaks in the final rhyming couplet we see the speaker acknowledging her true beauty as all her flaws are not enough to put him off, as he lists all her imperfections but does not complain, rather he seems to admire them as his “love as rare” (Shakespeare 13) as any “belied” (Shakespeare 13) false