Both Christina Rossetti and Elizabeth Barrett Browning wrote poems about 4 different attitudes towards love. Elizabeth Barrett Browning wrote the poems A Mans Requirements and A False Step.

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Sarah Bulbrooke

Love comes in many different forms.  When the word love is mentioned, people think of different things.  They might think of love as what they have for their partner or their favourite cuddly toy.  Both Christina Rossetti and Elizabeth Barrett Browning wrote poems about 4 different attitudes towards love.  Elizabeth Barrett Browning wrote the poems A Mans Requirements and A False Step. A Mans Requirements is a poem that is biased towards men and A False Step is a poem that is biased towards women and about missed opportunities.  Christina Rossetti wrote the poems L.E.L. and A Birthday.  L.E.L. is a poem about self-pity for not being loved and A Birthday is a poem about religious and delirious love.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning wrote the poem A Mans Requirements although she is not the speaker a man is.  The man tells the women he is speaking to, to love him with everything she is.  We can see this by the line ‘love me with thine open youth’.  He also tells her to love him so much so that the neighbours can see how great he looks with a pretty girl on his arm.  ‘Love me with thine heart, that all neighbours then see beating’.  Basically this man is given the women a list of requirements that she has to fulfil, but only for six months.  ‘I will love thee – half a year – as a man is able’.  The rhyme scheme ABAB helps to emphasise the words.  The mood of this poem is very cynical, as he has to make women love him by making a list.  It is witty at the end when he says he can only love her for six months, as this is very typical of a man.

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Elizabeth Barrett Browning also wrote the poem A False Step who is the speaker of this poem.  It seems that Elizabeth Barrett Browning is talking to someone in particular.  The person she is talking to has broken a heart, but she is telling them not to worry, as there is a world full of people as pretty as they are.  ‘There’s a world full of man and women as fair as thou art’.  She also says that it is not her fault, as he shouldn’t have put his heart out there.  ‘And why should a heart have been there ...

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