I love thee freely, as men strive for right;
I love thee purely, as they turn from Praise. (L7, 8)
Here Elizabeth Browning highlights the moral and virtuous aspects of love. She is making reference to man’s freewill and his capacity to do both good and evil and that the most righteous and worthy of all human endeavours is to choose freely to strive for what is good and right. She then equates this highest of all acts in God’s sight, with the use of her own freewill to choose to love her husband.
She then highlights the purity and sinless quality of love by likening it to those who have finished praying and praising their Lord. This evokes the image of people praying and asking for forgiveness and having being granted it, turning to go, sinless and pure as the day they were born. She is saying that her love is of such a pure and immaculate nature. She even declares that this love will continue after the physical body has passed away.
Smiles, tears, of all my life! - and if God choose,
I shall but love thee better after death (L13, 14)
Signifying that this love is not limited to physical desires, but transcends the human body and reaches a much higher and nobler level. She also equates her love for her husband with those things she needs to live, ‘to the level of every day’s Most quiet need’. In other words she loves him as much as her own life and this love is as essential to her as the food and drink that sustains her and the very air she breaths.
Christina Rossetti’s ‘A Birthday’ shares the positive and uplifting aspects of love that is found in Elizabeth Browning’s ‘How Do I Love Thee’ but it goes much further in celebrating the joy and jubilation that love brings. She declares,
My heart is like a singing bird
Whose nest is in a watered shoot;
My heart is like an apple-tree
Whose boughs are bent with thickest fruit (L1-4)
She uses images of nature and summer time to depict love as life giving, fresh and fertile. The over laden branches highlight the extreme happiness and fulfilling nature of love. Then she declares that her heart is even ‘gladder than all these’. In fact love in this poem is almost too idealised and has a fairy tale make-believe quality to it when she says,
Raise me a dais of silk and down:
Hang it with vair and purple dyes:
Carve it in doves and pomegranates.
And peacocks with a hundred eyes:
Work it in gold and silver grapes.
In leaves and silver fleurs-de-lys; (L9-14)
She depicts love as a luxurious objects, rare fruits, exuberant and boastful peacocks and rare and expensive metals in intricate designs. This reflects a rather pompous and inflated depiction of love. It is almost too perfect. A blissful ideal that is unblemished by the shortcomings and failings of the real world. Yet it is unclear exactly who or what is the object of her love. She may be referring to her lover, but she offers no description of him, but instead glorifies love itself. There is a possibility that she is describing her love for God. This may be one interpretation of the title, in that she sees her faith in God as causing her to be re-born as though it was her Birthday. This image is repeated in the last lines.
Because the birthday of my life
Is come, my love is come to me. (L15, 16)
This may be a reference to the idea of baptism where one is born again in Christ. But it could equally be depicting the love she feels for her lover makes her feel reborn. Whichever is the case she is clearly highlighting the feeling of elation that that love brings. Unlike John Clare’s poem ‘First Love’ and Elizabeth Browning’s ‘How Do I Love Thee’ the object of her love is not mentioned apart from to say ‘my love is come to me’ in the last line. This leaves a sense of ambiguity about love. It may be that it is neither her lover nor God she loves in this poem, but simply the idea of love itself! She highlights the feeling of love in a series of similes that seem to be rather too ostentatious and pretentious and results in a feeling that it is insincere. The love she depicts is neither real nor is it directed at anyone in particular. While on the surface this poem seems to be celebrating the joyous aspects of love it leaves one with a rather empty feeling that love is glitter and show but little substance.
In stark contrast to this overly jubilant and joyful description of love is her sonnet ‘Remember’. The poem has a simple repetitive style that reflects the melancholy mood as it explores a more somber aspect of love and deals with death, a favourite theme of Rossetti’s poetry. Like Elizabeth Browning’s ‘How Do I Love Thee’ she depicts love in a spiritual way that transcends death and lives on in the memory of the lover. But unlike Elizabeth Browning’s, Rossetti seems less sure about the greatness and power of love and is almost pleading with her lover to remember her as she says,
Remember me when I am gone away,
Gone far away into the silent land (L1, 2)
Remember me when no more day by day
You tell me of our future that you planned:
Only remember me; you understand (L5-7)
It is a love that is fearful of being forgotten. A selfish love that is sad and mournful. It could also be argued that she is not truly in love and reveals her feelings about her present state when she describes her lover as no longer being able to tell her of the future they plan together. This implies that both she and her lover have not yet reached or achieved what they want, or that she or her lover is dissatisfied with their love and that there is need for future plans, for change, for a new direction. Another clue that her depiction of love is not happy, but insecure, is that she is not thinking of her lover’s feelings but directs her thoughts, at what must be a very difficult time for her lover, inward, to herself. She seems to think of her lover’s feelings only as an after thought, when she says,
Yet if you should forget me for a while
And afterwards remember, do not grieve: (L9-10)
She goes on to say that it is better not to remember her if he is going to be sad every time he thinks about her. Yet even that seems insincere, since she has just spent the first half of the poem pleading with him to remember her!
Better by far you should forget and smile
Than that you should remember and be sad (L13, 14)
Rossetti never actually mentions love nor death explicitly but uses euphemisms instead. For example she says ‘Gone far away into the silent land’ meaning death and ‘hold me by the hand’ to indicate their love. This gives the impression of love as something rather enigmatic and unknown. There is a sense of her apprehension about whether love is strong enough to survive death. This indicates that she does not think highly of love. It appears to be a love of duty and obligation rather than the love expressed freely Elizabeth Browning when she says, “I love thee freely”
John Keats uses the medieval imagery of courtly love to depict love as seductive and dangerous in his ballad ‘La Belle Dame Sans Merci’. It views love from a 19th century male perspective and portrays love as something beautiful and alluring but also deceptive and harmful. It does share some similarities with John Clare’s depiction of love. Firstly because it depicts an obsessive, unrequited love, despite the fact he says,
She look’d at me as she did love (L19)
This is only his presumption and later we discover she deceives him ‘And there she lulled me asleep’ and he wakes up alone ‘And I awoke and found me here, On the cold hill’s side.’ Secondly because love leaves him with a feeling of physical ill-being as Keats says in his opening lines ‘O, what can ail thee, knight in arms, Alone and palely loitering?’ and ‘So haggard and so woe-begone’ as well as the description of the ‘pale kings and princes too.’ With their ‘starved lips’.
Keats’ and John Clare’s depiction of love as unrequited and harmful contrasts starkly with the more joyful and feminine depictions of love given by Christina Rossetti in ‘A Birthday’ where love is to be celebrated and Elizabeth Browning’s ‘How Do I love thee’ where love is so magnificent it fills the ‘depth and breadth’ of the soul. However there are some similarities in the fairy tale setting of Keats’ poem and the rather fairy tale imagery Rossetti creates in ‘A Birthday’ through her use of luxuriant language. But while Rossetti uses this imagery to idealize love, Keats has used it to highlight the perils and capriciousness of love.
Keats has also cleverly used the traditional depiction of courtly love between the ‘Knight’ and his ‘lady’ to actually turn this medieval stereotype of male superiority and female innocence on its head and to criticize the archetypal medieval romantic love. It is the knight who is the weak and vulnerable one and it is his fantasizing and obsessive behaviour that has led to his own downfall.
‘She look’d at me as she did love,
And made sweet moan.’ (L.19-20)
Just as in ‘First Love’ by John Clare it is only the lover’s own imagination that sees her look as an expression of love and it is the knight himself who chooses to interpret her “sweet moan” as sexual and romantic interest. Even though he has no reason whatsoever to believe that the fairy is interested. This is stressed further when he says:
‘And sure in language strange she said –
‘I love thee true!’’ (L. 27-28)
By saying ‘And sure in language strange’ he even admits she did not actually utter these words in the usual way, but in a ‘strange’ way. This is a confession that it is really only his own perception of her behaviour that has led him to believe she is expressing love towards him.
The poem begins with the knight believing he is in charge, in keeping with the conservative attitudes towards love as he sweeps her off her feet, ‘I set her on my pacing steed,’ and she serves him food ‘She found me roots of relish sweet’. But like the faery herself, Keats’ poem lulls you into believing one thing only to turn things around. We then see in stanza eight the knight is no longer taking the lead, but is being led.
She took me to her elfin grot,
And there she wept and sigh’d full sore (L. 29-30)
He has not taken her away to a magnificent castle, but she has taken him to her humble cave. The knight is now the passive character and he says ‘And there she lulled me asleep,’. Suddenly the female character gets the upper hand in a poem set in the middle ages and written at the beginning of the 19th century. The stereotypical knight on horseback who should win over every lady that he desires has been shown to be weak and obsessively led by his own fantasies. While it is the female character who comes out on top. This could portray the changing character of love in the 19th century. The woman in this poem is strong, but she is also very mysterious and frightening. This may reflect male apprehension of love at the time. At a time that the industrial revolution was beginning and people were moving to the towns to work, society was going through great changes and romantic ideas of love were challenged by the reality of changing roles, expectations and relationship between men and women. Their ideas and attitudes towards love were torn between a romantic vision of the past and the changing realities. Keats reflects this confusion and portrays love as an ideal that has been somehow corrupted and become something that weakens a man and causes him to lose control of his own being.
This aspect is echoed in John Clare’s ‘First Love’ where he describes how love effects his control over his body ‘My legs refused to walk away’ and says ‘life and all seemed turned to clay’. The similarity between the poems portrayal of love continues in the mysterious and enigmatic description of the object of love. For John Clare love is something he did not seek but was struck suddenly by. The woman herself seems only to be part of a momentary vision. She has little substance and only her face is mentioned ‘Her face it bloomed like a sweet flower’ after that she plays little part in the poem as the poet seems obsessed by the effect this sudden vision had on his being.
Likewise the knight in Keats’ poem also seems to come across his love by chance as he rides through the meadows saying ‘I met a lady in the meads’. Although he offers a more detailed description than John Clare ‘Her hair was long, her foot was light, And her eyes were wild.’ She is not portrayed as a real person, but belongs to a fantasy world ‘a faery’s child’ and she lives in an ‘elfin grot’. Keats is depicting a romantic vision of love. But unlike Clare he suggests that this woman has some malicious intent. The very title ‘La Belle Dame Sans Merci’ – The Beautiful Woman without Pity - proclaims loudly a warning that the love of a beautiful woman is deceptive and dangerous. His vision conveys the message that love is not the romantic ideal that it seems at first but brings down the noble and ruins the mighty warrior.
I saw pale kings and princes too,
Pale warriors, death-pale were they all’ (L37, 38)
I saw their starved lips in the gloam,
With horrid warning gaped wide,’ (L41, 42)
Yet this vision too is in the mind of the knight and we don’t know how real it is. There is the feeling that it is the knight himself who has changed – not the lady. For he was the one obsessed by his passion and yet after sleeping he may be feeling regretful for falling for the charms of this lady and fearful about the consequences. This may say more about the male attitude to love. One of burning desire and lust yet unwilling to shoulder the responsibilities that love brings.
Love has always been and will always be the most powerful and important emotion to the human race, yet it is the emotion we least understand. All these poems reflect the romantic image of love that was common at the time, but they each depict different aspects. ‘First Love’ by John Clare highlight’s love as instant attraction and the overpowering effects it has on the physical body. It is an obsessive and unrequited love. It is the love of a youth whose sexual desires have been awoken for the first time and have shocked his system. In contrast to this ‘How do I Love thee’ by Elizabeth Barrett Browning highlights a more mature love of a woman for her husband, emphasising the magnificence, purity and deep spirituality of love that transcends the physical being. In ‘A Birthday’ by Christina Rossetti celebrates love as life giving, joyous and bringing about rebirth but in ‘Remember’ she stresses the melancholy and mournful aspects of love. John Keats in ‘La Belle Dame Sans Merci’ depicts love as seductive, beguiling and dangerous. These poems are still very valid today as descriptions of different aspects of love and contribute to our understanding of this difficult emotion.