Sonnet 43 Flashcards
Who wrote Sonnet 43?
Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Give a summary of the poem.
- Persona expresses her intense love for her lover, counting all the different ways in which she can love him
- She loves him so deeply, she sees their love as spiritual and sacred
- Her love is so great that she believes she will even love him after death
What are the themes present in Sonnet 43?
- Love
- Power of love
- Traditionality
- Religion
- Relationships
- Healing
Describe the structure of the poem
- shifts from present tense to past tense and finishes with future tense
- Poem is 1 stanza: poet conveys the 2 parts of the poem are linked
- Browning often uses assonance
- caesura and enjambment often used
- ‘I love thee’ is syntactically repeated, but oddly inconsistent
What is the impact of the changes in tense?
→ her hubby is her present, past and future
→ gives poem temporal immorality, like her love
What is the effect of the poem only being one stanza?
→ suggests that the idea of love joining people together
→ alludes to the belief that couples become a single unit
Regular repetitive rhyme scheme
→ establishes security and perfection
What is the impact of the assonance?
Striking because the poem is about perfect love, which is being conveyed imperfectly
Why does Barrett-Browning repeat the ‘I love thee’, and what is the irony of it being inconsistent?
- ‘I love thee’ is syntactically repeated
→ it attempts to answer the initial question
→ repetition shows how love is reinforced and reiterated, connoting that love is constant and perpetual
→ this repetition could suggest that through her husband, elizabeth expresses love not only for him, but also her deceased family members, almost as if the poem is grieving
→ the intensity of her love could come from her familial losses - The anaphora, is however, inconsistent
→ questions validity of relationship
→ could argue that poem is trying to be humorous
What is the impact of the enjambment and caesura?
- enjambment: is reflective of the magnitude of her love and its expansive nature
- The caesura implies her passion and ecstasy
Describe the form of Sonnet 43
- Iambic pentameter used to reflect a heart beat (perhaps the speaker’s heartbeat whenever her husband is around)
- petrarchan sonnet
→ volta: ‘I love thee with passion put to use’
→ usually associated with men, Barrett-Browning reclaiming it as a woman
→ typically associated with love: her love is conforming - Octave: introduces poem’s main theme: her intense and almost divine love
- Sestet: develops this theme by showing she loves him with the emotions of a lifetime: from childhood to the afterlife
Describe the language of Sonnet 43 and its impact on the poem
- The persona shows the strength of her love through hyperbole and spatial references to imply the scale of her feelings
- Throughout the poem, religious imagery is applied to demonstrate that her love is spiritual and unconditional like her love of god. It is beyond the physical
- The anaphora ‘i love thee’ coneys the intensely personal and direct nature of her feelings - utter conviction about how she feels
What is some context surrounding the poet?
- She wrote it as a part of a series of sonnets to her lover Robert Browning
- Elizabeth’s father disinherited her after they married
- They were published as if they were translations of foreign sonnets written by poets from Portugal so that her feelings were protected
Complete the quote
‘How do I love thee? …
…Let me count the ways’
Analyse the quote
‘How do I love thee? Let me count the ways’
→ rhetorical question, her aim is to explain
→ personal poem clearly
→ caesura creates pause as if the speaker is pausing for thought, and relishing the contemplation of her love
→ celebration of love
→ suggests an intimate conversation between lovers
Complete the quote
‘Depth and breadth and height’
…my soul can reach
