Elizabeth
Barret Browning
How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.
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 everyday's
Most quiet need, by sun and candle-light.
I love thee freely, as men strive for
Right;
I love thee purely, as they turn from
Praise.
I love thee with the passion put to use
In my old griefs,
and with my childhood's faith.
I love thee with a love I seemed to lose
With my lost saints,--I love thee with the
breath,
Smiles, tears, of all my life!--and, if God
choose,
I shall but love thee better after death.
Source:
http://www.online-literature.com/elizabeth-browning/sonnets-from-the-portuguese/43/
In this
paper I am going to analyze a poem written by Elizabeth Barret
Browning. It is the forty-third sonnet in her “Sonnets from the Portuguese”.
Elizabeth Barret Browning was one of the most
important writers, poetesses specifically, in the English Victorian Period.
The main
idea of this sonnet is how somebody, the point of view of the first person who
is talking, tells the love felt to THEE. At the beginning, with the first
reading, we do not know specifically who the one who is talking is, and the
people referred with the old personal pronoun “thee”. This personal pronoun
corresponds with THEY. Later, after reading the
biography of the authoress (http://en.wikipedia.org/), the
reader realises that the first person who is telling the story is a dog. It is
This
poem is a sonnet, but it is not clearly seen, because it has no spaces, all the
verses are consecutive, and the reader, if he or she is not an expert, should
read the poem slowly, paying attention on the rhyme and form.
The
verses in this poem have all of them ten syllables, so it makes the reading
easier, because it is very regular and the vocabulary used is simple.
The
rhyme is easy, too. This poem has the characteristic structure in sonnets,
which is ABBA-ABBA-CDC-DCD. Here we have a classical sonnet, regular and
symmetrical.
With
respect to the title of the poem, we have Roman Numbers as title, and this is
because this poem has no title. The title comprises the forty-four sonnets
written by the authoress, and the whole is named “Sonnets from the Portuguese”.
Every sonnet has been numbered from I to XLIV and the first verse of each poem,
so it means that all the poems have no title and the whole poem is important.
The poem is the title.
This
poem has an easy reading, because the verb tenses used are, above all, the
present simple tense. The authoress has used for eight times the verb LOVE, in
the expression “I love thee…” so, she used the
repetition of the verb, and that expression to make the reader pay attention to
the poem. At the end of the poem, the poet uses the first conditional: “…and,
if God chooses, I shall but love thee better after death”, this is the only
irregularity in the verb tenses.
This
poem, its reading, makes the reader feel as a confident. The reader feels
important, because he or she is being told feelings, love feelings. And being a
confident, a best friend, is because you are very important for the person who
trusts you. In that case, an animal, a dog, the human’s best friend, is the one
who trusts in the reader and says its feeling to its owners.
Reading
the poem one can see images like someone adoring other people. Somebody who
loves others and it is impossible to express with words, there are no words to
say or prove how much love you feel for the others, people who take care of you
since you were born.
I
enjoyed this poem because of the tenderness it reflects. It is easy to read and
understand. At first you do not know that it is the dog who
talks, and if you do not read a biography this is impossible to find. But the
poem is lovely.
Bibliography:
AOL. Hometown
Elizabeth
Barret Browning (1806-1861)
Wikipedia. The Free Encyclopedia