Christina Rossetti was the first Pre-Raphaelite poet. Her brother, Dante Gabriele Rossetti was a Pre-Raphaelite painter. Her father, Gabriele Rossetti was an Italian poet and a political asylum seeker from Naples and her mother, Frances Palidori was the sister of Lord Byron’s friend and physician, John Williams Palidori. She was brought up in an artistic environment.
Whilst A women to her lover is demanding to be treated with equality, Remember is very submissive “You tell me of your plans”. A women to her lover talks about her lover treating her with equality but Remember talks about her death and her dying.
How do I love thee? By Elizabeth Barrett Browning is about her lover, assuming that this was written for Robert Browning. She is almost treating him like a God. “For ends of Being and ideal Grace”. She talks mostly about God. Elizabeth Barrett Browning was born 6th March 1806 in Durham, England. Her father, Edward Moulton-Barrett, made most of his considerable fortune from Jamaican sugar plantations, and in 1809 he bought Hope End, a 500-acre estate near the Malvern Hills. Elizabeth lived a privileged childhood, riding her pony around the grounds, visiting other families in the neighbourhood, and arranging family theatrical productions with her eleven brothers and sisters. Although frail, she apparently had no health problems until 1821, when Dr. Coker prescribed opium for a nervous disorder. Her mother died when she was twenty two. It is still unclear what sort of affliction Elizabeth Barrett Browning had, although medical and literary scholars have enjoyed speculating. Whatever it was, the opium which was repeatedly prescribed probably made it worse; and Browning almost certainly lengthened her life by taking her south and by his considerate attention. She died in his arms on 29th June 1861. No female poet was held in higher esteem among cultured readers in both the United States and England than Elizabeth Barrett Browning during the nineteenth century. Barrett's poetry had an immense impact on the works of Emily Dickinson who admired her as woman of achievement.
How Do I Love Thee? Expresses the poet’s intense love for her husband-to-be, Robert Browning. So intense is her love for him, she says, that it rises to the spiritual level (Lines 3 and 4). She loves him freely, without intimidation; she loves him purely, without expectation of personal gain. She even loves him with an intensity of the suffering (passion: Line 9) resembling that of Christ on the cross, and she loves him in the way that she loved saints as a child. Moreover, she expects to continue to love him after death. The dominant figure of speech in the poem is , the use of I love thee in eight lines and I shall but love thee in the final line. This repetition builds rhythm while reinforcing the theme. Browning also uses .
Villegiature by Edith Nesbit gives the impression that her husband has lost interest in her, telling us that he “bores me” and she dreams of a romantic love, and that she can indulge herself with whilst she is away from home. Edith Nesbit, the daughter of John Collis Nesbit, a schoolmaster, was born on 19th August 1858. Nesbit ran successful schools in , and but died when Edith was only six years old. Despite money problems, Edith's mother managed to educate her daughter in France.
At the age of nineteen, Edith Nesbit met , a young writer with radical political opinions. In 1879 discovered she was pregnant and the baby was born two months after they were married on 22nd April 1880.
When we two parted By Lord Byron is about him parting from his lover. Byron is very harsh in this poem “Long, long shall I rue thee”. This proves the point that the women are living in a protected life and Byron is living in the real world. Is Byron seeing the real world and reacting to it? And are these women living in a utopia?
George Gordon Noel Byron was born 22nd January 1788 in London and died 19th April 1824 in Missolonghi, Greece. He was among the most famous of the English 'Romantic' poets; his contemporaries included Percy Shelley and . He was also a comedian whose poetry and personality captured the imagination of Europe.
I have attempted to compare A women to her lover by Christina Walsh, How do I love thee? By Elizabeth Barrett Browning, When we two parted by Lord Byron, Remember by Christina Rossetti, and Villegiature by Edith Nesbit.