He also talks about going away for a while, but then promises that he’ll come back, ‘though it were ten thousand mile.’ This suggests that Burns is saying that he is an honest and faithful man, and that he will always stand by his lady’s side, come what may. The ‘folky’ dialect and the sing-song ballad-form add certain genuineness to Burns’ declaration to his ‘Red, Red Rose’ and give the poem a romantic, overall, feeling. Of course, from Burns’ background, we know that he was far from the faithful and constant man that he paints himself out to be in his poem, being a rather promiscuous man in his life.
Lord Byron writes about how he wishes to reform himself, and how he wishes to stop his ‘roving’ that he does ‘so late into the night.’ “So We’ll Go No More A-Roving,” is also written in the ballad form, although the tone is more filled with guilt and is not as ‘sweet’ as Burns’ avouchment of his love. Byron uses imagery like ‘the sword outwears its sheath,’ and ‘the soul wears out the breast,’ to express Byron’s heavy and guilt-laden feelings. The constant and consistent iambic rhythm of the ballad form being used by Byron, adds a background of thumping sort of heavy rhythm, to emphasize the heavy feelings, even though the syllables of the lines themselves are quick-paced, which show the passion and energy in Byron’s composition, despite the subject matter. The very subject matter of the poem is evidence to Byron’s ‘roving’ lifestyle, and in that sense, is related to Burns’ poem.
Both poems show that their respective authors had the desire to experience love as a pure and faithful feeling, a mutual respect between the two people who loved each other, but we know in truth that neither of these men were particularly satisfied with a single partner, and were well-known for their ‘roving’ attitudes. This shows that the Romantic poets were mostly passionate idealists, and treated love as a thing to express their feelings and themselves, or more importantly, their ideals. Both men also treat love as being a very emotional and physical relationship, by their use of imagery and subject matter.
The Victorian poet, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, wrote a sonnet, “Sonnets from the Portuguese XLII,” and her treatment of the theme and subject of love in her poems differs from that of the men’s in the Romantic era. In her sonnet, Browning talks about the heights to which she loved a certain person, as Robert Burns did in his poem, but her description of her love is almost in a different context altogether. Browning uses abstract images to describe her love, such as ‘I love thee freely, as men strive for Right’ and ‘I love thee purely, as they turn from Praise’. These images are oxymoronic as well as insights into the kind of things that may have been happening in Browning’s day, which is the increase in religious vigour and the subsequent loss of it for some people. She uses religious vocabulary such as faith, God, saints and grace, and these words, coupled with the abstract, also religiously-inclined oxymoronic images, give Browning’s view, feelings on and treatment of the subject of love a more ‘chaste’ or more faithful and honest feeling and tone. Also, there is genuine grief in one of her lines,
I love thee with a love I seemed to lose
With my lost saints,
These lines are a representation of Browning’s feelings of loss when both her mother and sister passed away, so her lines are more heartfelt and ‘real’. Also, the very fact that she is a woman composing these passionate lines adds credibility to her communicated emotion, although I don’t mean to sound sexist by saying so. Browning treats love as something passionate, but also something that is to be respected and revered.
The contrast between the different treatments and attitudes of and about love between the sexes and between the major periods in English literature is interesting, and many different viewpoints may be gained by studying these great authors.