In ‘How Do I Love Thee’ the poem represents true love and moral love. The poet uses a rhetorical question and starts to answer it. The poem is a love sonnet. The starting line is a rhetorical question, and then the rest of the thirteen lines are the many answers to this question. The poem has got a short introduction to it. The poet tells the audience how she loves him at the present moment but also gives a good ending by moving onto their future (after death):
“If God choose, I shall love thee better after death”
This quote reveals and opens out more as we see the poet links love to a religious feeling and it is eternal. The quote is romantic, in a bitter sweet way as the poet has referred to dying which is the enemy of love:
“In my old griefs, and with my childhood faith”
This quote demonstrates through emotive language how she has found true love. She compares it with her past where she says that she has grieved, this new love is as unquestioning as her ‘childhood faith’.
The poet also uses persuasion to describe the different ways she loves. By repeating “I love thee...” several times and then explaining how, Browning creates a prayer-like effect and repetition is a
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powerful persuasive technique i.e. “I love thee freely…”, “I love thee purely” She also uses hyperbole effectively: “I love thee with the breath, smiles, tears of all my life!”
In the poem ‘Remember’, Rossetti describes the act of remembering, it is bitter sweet. The poet expresses her love but in a sad way as it suggests she is dying. She uses tactics like guilt and fear to show how she is feeling about this:
“When you can no more hold me by the hand, nor I half turn to go yet turning stay…”
This quote shows the emptiness of all their plans now she is going to die. The poet also uses emotional language throughout the poem but in an understated way:
“You tell me of our future that you planned”.
This quote expresses her pain at their future now being brutally cut short, a future apart (in the physical world, at least).
The poet does not use techniques like exaggeration and hyperbole as Barrett Browning does – she plainly and simply states the facts, without relying on a technique to strengthen her message.
It starts off with a sad and calm language:
“Remember me when I am gone away”
The language then moves into a deeper tone where we sense her understandable fear. The poem describes that if ‘thee’ forgets her for a while and remembers again, she does not want him to grieve:
“Yet if you should forget me for a while and remember again do not grieve”
This powerfully shows us how much the poet loves the person and does not want him to mourn forever. Then she expresses even more strongly how much she loves him.
“For it the darkness and corruption leave, a vestige of the thoughts that once I had, better by far you should forget and smile than that you should remember and be sad”
This quote is not just the romantic ending of the poem, it expresses the message to forget her and get on with his life rather than grieving and spoiling it. It has an emotional touch to the ending by using imagery of her illness – ‘the darkness and corruption’. It is ultimately unselfish.
This poem (‘Remember’) is different to ‘How Do I Love Thee’ as it talks about death by separation, which is sad, where ‘How Do I Love Thee’ has a happier beat and theme to it. The two poems are similar as they have the theme of love, and also both are Petrarchan love sonnets wherein they are divided by an octave and sestet. Rossetti starts off sadly but changes half way through whereas Barrett Browning’s tone remains constant.
In the poem ‘When we two parted’ the theme basically represents love and separation. Again this poem is about ‘love’ and describes what happens if you betray someone. It is telling us the story of a broken love affair and how the poet still feels about this separation years later:
“When we two parted / In silence and tears; / Half broken-hearted / To sever for years.”
This verse is mostly giving us a brief outline of what the poem is going to be about. You can see clearly in this quote that the poem is ‘love based’. This poet is expressing his grief hitting him hard after their separation:
“Sunk chill on my brow… a knell to mine ear.”
He feels he should have guessed sooner that his love was waning, “pale grew thy cheek and cold, colder thy kiss.”
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The poet uses emotional language throughout the poem, (similarly used for the other two poems)
“In silence and tears, half broken-hearted…”
You can clearly see the love in the language, although ‘half’ may suggest he did not fully let himself trust her – or it could be that she was his other half, hence he is now ‘heart broken’
He’s talking about a past love and the effect that a casual mention of her has on him after all that time. This is interesting because as time goes on, he still has a strong reaction to his lover:
“They name thee before me, /A knell to mine ear; / A shudder comes o’er me-”
Unlike the other two sonnets, this is regular in rhythm and tone throughout. In the first stanza, the poet describes their relationship and the pain it caused. In the fourth stanza, the poem ends with his sadness repeated. Byron’s poem is not like the other two, by which I mean that it is still a love poem but not a sonnet. Their relationship was extremely close but it is long over. The poet moves on to describe how his reaction was when he saw his ex-lover again. The relationship seems to be one sided but we can not be sure, that is what captivates us – is it ever fully over?:
“After long years, How shall I greet thee?”
I think he mentions this unchanging passion of his, as it is a sad emotional truth experienced by many people.
William Shakespeare’s romantic poem, ‘Sonnet 116’ (1590s-1600) is rather like the three studied, despite being written two hundred years earlier. He says that true love never changes no matter what happens in life, it is ‘an ever-fixed mark’. He shares Barret Browning’s theme of love:
“Love is not time’s fool” -
as you age you still love, and if you die you still love, it is ‘eternal’.
Christina Walsh’s ‘A Woman to Her Lover’ was written in 1900. She is an early feminist who does not trust men and outlines what she fears in a relationship-
“Wearing out my life…no servant will I be”
She is looking for equality –
“I shall be your comrade, friend, and mate…our co-equal love”
This is unusual for the time, and is different in tone from Barret Browning’s slavish love. However, she mentions religion also:
“Until we reach the very heart of God”.
Thus tying in with the other three who all have religious references.
Finally to conclude, in these three poems, the things that I find interesting are the similarity of the emotions -love is bitter sweet. All three poems use emotional language. Only one of the poems uses a rhetorical question, which was ‘How Do I Love Thee’ in which it used the same beginning as the title. The rhetorical device makes us imagine the lover’s feelings, as he hears this most intimate confession of the speaker’s love for him. We are brought closer to them both. Overall, I think that the poets’ feelings for love and marriage are strongly linked, in that true love never leaves us in life or in death. In ‘When we two parted’, the poet describes lovers separating (similar to ‘Remember’) but different in the type of separation, as there was betrayal. I believe the love is strong if unrequited as he still thinks about her years later but then we don’t know if she is secretly feeling the same way. The enigmatic love in this poem is presented as heart breaking and painful.
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In ‘How Do I love Thee’ I believe that love and marriage are strongly bonded as the narrator describes love in all its variety. I believe she is describing her lover in many different passionate ways reflecting her devotion – it is like a religion to her.
In ‘Remember’ the poet describes her feelings for her lover, (which is a sad form of love). The narrator is talking about separation caused by death where love is trapped in the middle. Yet it is
unusual in that, unlike Queen Victoria, Rossetti urges her lover to be happy and if that means forgetting, then so be it. Victoria never did. Both these female poets are also interesting in that love poetry was the province of men, especially the Petrarchan sonnet, named after Petrarch a Roman love poet. For women to be writing love poetry to men was really quite revolutionary at the time.
