Sonnets from the Portuguese- Elizabeth Barrett Browning, 1845-46

La Pia de' Tolomei, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, 1860.

How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.
I love thee to the depth and breadth and height
My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight
For the ends of being and ideal grace.
I love thee to the level of every day's
Most quiet need, by sun and candle-light.
I love thee freely, as men strive for right.
I love thee purely, as they turn from praise.
I love thee with the passion put to use
In my old griefs, and with my childhood's faith.
I love thee with a love I seemed to lose
With my lost saints. I love thee with the breath,
Smiles, tears, of all my life; and, if God choose,
I shall but love thee better after death.


The particular rhythm that the words establish in the first line is a simplistic iambic pentameter constructed entirely of monosyllables: “How do I love thee? Let me count the ways”. This establishes from the beginning a false sense of security that the poem will be simple in it’s reading, and creates a fantastic contrast between a simple question which warrants a complex answer.

Browning describes her love for her husband-to-be as indescribable and immeasurable: “I love thee to the depth and breadth and height my soul can reach...” which embodies a sense of indeterminate quantity, much like the phrase ‘how long is a piece of string?’ So deep is her love for him, she says, that it rises to the spiritual level, indicated by the words ‘Being’ and ‘Grace’, significant because of their capitalisation.

In the next lines, her love for him is equalled to the level of a basic need to survive “by sun and candle-light”; day and night indicating that this does not stop even when she is sleeping. The octave wraps up by listing some of the ways she loves him: freely; without coercion and as intensely as men who fight for freedom, purely; without expectation of personal gain.

The spiritual level is revisited in lines 9-12, likening her love to the intensity of sacrifice for which Jesus suffered on the cross, and she reinforces her true love by rejecting her childish love of saints and projecting her betrothed as her new God to be worshiped.

“I love thee with the breath, smiles, tears of all my life!” This line echoes the traditional lines of a wedding vow, invoking love through the good times and the bad, and is a reminder that this sonnet is not wasted on unrequited love, but they are indeed betrothed. Browning loves her betrothed with a love that is never ending, again like the wedding vows ‘for as long as we both shall live’, and eternally “...if God choose, I shall but love thee better after death”.

Browning’s use of repetition of the phrase ‘I shall love thee’ through 8 lines of the sonnet reinforces the theme and emits her feelings of love as unmistakable. It is not mere affection that Browning is feeling, she has likened her love to a spiritual level while at the same time openly turning her back on her traditional faith, placing it instead on subjectivity.

The Lamb, William Blake, 1789.

Firstly, what is poetry?
Poetry is many things to many people, and the same poem can have different meaning to different people. After researching what poetry is, I found that I agreed with this definition the most:

“Poetry is an imaginative awareness of experience expressed through meaning, sound, and rhythmic language choices so as to evoke an emotional response. Poetry has been known to employ meter and rhyme, but this is by no means necessary. Poetry is an ancient form that has gone through numerous and drastic reinvention over time. The very nature of poetry as an authentic and individual mode of expression makes it nearly impossible to define”, (Flanagan, 2011). 

Read William Blake’s ‘The lamb’, and see if you can construct an analysis. What are the key points of your analysis? 

Little Lamb Prince, Melissa Nucara, 2011.

Little lamb, who made thee?
Does thou know who made thee,
Gave thee life, and bid thee feed
By the stream and o’er the mead;
Gave thee clothing of delight,
Softest clothing, woolly, bright;
Gave thee such a tender voice,
Making all the vales rejoice?
Little lamb, who made thee?
Does thou know who made thee?

Little lamb, I’ll tell thee;
Little lamb, I’ll tell thee:
He is callèd by thy name,
For He calls Himself a Lamb.
He is meek, and He is mild,
He became a little child.
I a child, and thou a lamb,
We are callèd by His name.
Little lamb, God bless thee!
Little lamb, God bless thee!

After researching who William Blake was, it was clear that he was a religious man. This comes across strongly in this poem, as I don’t believe he is actually talking to a lamb, but using the lamb as a metaphor for man. He is reiterating his own faith to the lamb by reminding him of the gifts that God has given him; life, food, soft clothing, a tender voice.

Repetition of questions may indicate a questioning of the lamb’s faith.
Author rejoices and delights in his own faith, spreading the word.
2 stanzas of 10 lines each, 5 rhymed couplets with a musical quality.
Rhyme Scheme: AABBCCDDAA, AAEFGGFEAA
Direct references to Jesus being called the Lamb of God. A lamb is the child of a sheep, we are children of God. The author is rejoicing in all of God’s creatures.

Reference:

Flanagan, M. (2011). Poetry, About.com Guide, viewed 10 July 2011, http://contemporarylit.about.com/cs/literaryterms/g/poetry.htm

‘To Wordsworth’, Percy Bysshe Shelley.

William Wordsworth, by Benjamin Robert Haydon, oil on canvas,1842.

Poet of Nature, thou hast wept to know
That things depart which never may return:
Childhood and youth, friendship and love’s first glow,
Have fled like sweet dreams, leaving thee to mourn.
These common woes I feel. One loss is mine
Which thou too feel’st, yet I alone deplore.
Thou wert as a lone star, whose light did shine
On some frail bark in winter’s midnight roar:
Thou hast like to a rock-built refuge stood
Above the blind and battling multitude:
In honoured poverty thy voice did weave
Songs consecrate to truth and liberty,—
Deserting these, thou leavest me to grieve,
Thus having been, that thou shouldst cease to be.
Is Shelley praising or criticising Wordsworth?
Written by Shelley as a sad retort to learning that Wordsworth, known for his poetry written for the average person and using everyday language, had been officially appointed as Britain's poet laureate: a poisition that Shelley saw as compromised all that he had previously championed. A poet laureate is an official appointment by a government to compose poems for state occasions and other government events, which was to Shelley, who say Wordsworth as the "Poet of Nature", an unforgivable and hypocritical desertion from everything he had previously stood for: "In honoured poverty thy voice did weave Songs consecrate to truth and liberty".

Shelly describes his feelings towards this news using phrases "wept to know", "leaving thee to mourn", "thou leavest me to grieve", leaving the reader in no doubth that he is truly upset by Wordsworth's appointment.

He opens the poem by stating that Wordsworth has mourned the loss of "Childhood and youth, friendship and love's first glow", and he compares his feelings of loss to this. Wordsworth's pure poetry was like a "...lone star, whose light did shine... in winter's midnight...", and as "a rock-built refuge" that "stood above the blind and battling multitude" that is society.

Shelley concludes the poem by stating that Wordsworth, having bee the 'Poet of Nature' and deserting all he stood for, should cease to be a poet at all.

Lines, William Wordsworth, 1798.

Tinturn Abbey with Elegant Figures,Samuel Colman, 1830.

This blank verse is a conversational poem about Wordsworth’s visits, five years apart, to the banks of the Wye, a few miles above Tintern Abbey. The abbey, in ruins, is the metaphor for the current state of his chaotic life; separation from his family, and the chaotic world he lives in; on the brink of war. The speaker admits to having reminisced about the place many times in the past five years, perhaps suggesting that he is not so much thinking of the abbey as a building, but as a more peaceful time in his life remembered and related to his last visit of the place. The Wye had remained much the same, while the outside world had changed so much, allowing the poet opportunity for contrast.

Although never overt, the poem is riddled with religion, most of it pantheistic; the sacredness of nature. Wordsworth describes the scenery of the Wye as lofty, soft, wild and impressive, seclusion, quiet and silent, and states that when “...the fever of the world, Have hung upon the beatings of my heart...” that he often turns to the revived “picture of the mind” of the Wye and the feelings it invoked as a pillar of strength, as might a religious believer turn to the church and prayer in a time of need. He sees the divine as “a motion and a spirit...”, that “...rolls through all things”, and he perceives nature as “The anchor of my purist thoughts, the nurse, the guide, the guardian of my heart, and soul Of all my moral being”.