Compare the threepoems A Birthday by Christina Rossetti, How Do I Love Thee? byElizabeth Barrett Browning and First Love by John Clare.  Explain howthe poets present differing experiences of love and which poem you prefer,commenting on the language..

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June 04        Emily Tiernan

Compare the three poems A Birthday by Christina Rossetti, How Do I Love Thee? by Elizabeth Barrett Browning and First Love by John Clare.  Explain how the poets present differing experiences of love and which poem you prefer, commenting on the language and style of each.

This essay is going to compare the three love poems, which show three types of love.  A Birthday presents love as being a special occasion.  It also shows love as being a happy occasion by using many positive words.  How Do I Love Thee? is a more religious poem and to me it presents itself as being a poem that sees love as being very holy and created by God.  This makes it very precious and pure and should not be destroyed.  First Love is in comparison a very sad and pessimistic look at love. The poem looks at love as being something that destroys a person from within. However the beginning of the poem is much alike to A Birthday.  

The poem First Love begins by being very vibrant. The title suggests the love as being overwhelming, passionate and painful.  When the reader then looks at the first line the love seems very forceful, sudden and violent, which again makes it seem as though it is an innocent love.  The next line is much more soothing after the force of the previous line as the poet has used sibilance, “so sudden ... so sweet”.  The poet goes on to use many similes, which relate different images together, “ bloomed like a sweet flower”.  This suggests that the poet can see her inner beauty.  The love develops into something completely different when the author describes his face as “deadly pale”. The love now seems threatening and resembles a disease, which is a very different outlook to before where love was natural and perfect.  The poet later describes love as making a person physically incapable,  “legs refused to walk”. This again creates the image of love as being threatening.  At the end of the stanza the poet says,  “ turned to clay” the clay represents death, cold and unworthy of thought.  This ends the stanza on a very negative tone and this is comparative to the beginning of How Do I Love Thee?

How Do I Love Thee? is a poem that begins with a rhetorical question.  This suggests that throughout the poem the question will be answered and explored.  The question is repeated in the first line of the poem reinforcing the idea that the question shall be answered throughout the poem.  The first line ends very slowly and gently; this is because of the long “e” vowel sounds,  “let me”. The poet goes on to explain how she feels that love has no physical boundaries and that nothing can measure her love, “depth...breadth...height”.  The poet also believes that she cannot see love but only feel it, “feeling out of sight”.  Barrett Browning feels that love goes on for eternity to the limits of existence and time, this is seen when the poet says, “For the ends of Being”.  When the poet uses the phrase “ideal grace”, she is portraying God’s perfection and she is trying to explain how her love will go on into an afterlife.  The beginning of How Do I Love Thee? appears very calm and very convincing which is alike to the poem A Birthday.

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The poem A Birthday has a title, which is very positive and creates an atmosphere of joy, excitement and celebration.  This is a very clever title for a love poem as many of the emotions felt for a birthday are felt when a person is in love.  The first line of this poem contains a symbol of the human love, “heart”.  The simile relates the singing bird to a heart because birds sing because they are free and this is how the poet feels their heart is when in love.  The first line also contains an example of assonance and ...

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