Poetic Devices in Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s “Sonnet 43”By Jester
The legend of Elizabeth Barrett Browning revolves around two main aspects of her life: the passion and precision of her writing, and her romantic years spent with Robert Browning during which she wrote much of her best-known love poetry. Her “Sonnets from the Portuguese” epitomize Browning’s romantic poetry, and provide insight into her poetic style that expresses intense emotion through a seemingly casual command of poetic techniques. Browning’s “Sonnet 43” emanates raw emotion and clarity of expression through the simple use of repetition, metaphor when describing the profundity of the speaker’s love, and the metrical scheme and its relation to the manner in which the speaker addresses her lover.
The sonnet as a form of poetry prescribes certain restrictions upon the poet that make repetition an attractive means of fulfilling the metric demands as well as conveying the desired message. In “Sonnet 43”, Browning repeats the phrase “I love thee” at the beginning of several lines as an easy way to adhere to the unstressed-stressed pattern dictated by iambic meter (line 5). The repetition is extended in the last two lines of the opening octave with the lines, “I love thee freely, as men strive for Right; / I love thee purely, as they turn from Praise” (ls. 7-8). The word “freely” serves dual purposes: the first is to describe the speaker’s love as something given willfully and without reservations, and the second to connect the concept of freedom with the idea of what is right. In the more than sixty years since the French Revolution and at the time of a similar revolution in Italy, many writers of Browning’s time considered freedom as a fundamental aspect of life. It was seen as both a right, like those to life and happiness, and essential in the achievement of a morally desirable goal. Her inclusion of the word “freely” is meant to embody both of these meanings and add depth to an otherwise simple expression. Browning employs the word “purely” in a similar manner. She uses the word to express both the flawless quality of her affection, and how it is akin to the piety shown by people who value spiritual rewards above worldly praises. Again, Browning uses the word “purely” to state that the speaker’s love encloses the dual interpretations. The layers of repetition in these lines, including reusing a particular phrase and the juxtaposition of parallel themes, allow Browning to adhere to the restrictions of the sonnet form as well as create a complex meaning out of simple lines.
By likening the extent and quality of the speaker’s love to religious symbols and ideas, Browning creates the impression that the speaker adores her lover with a sort of spiritual dedication many reserve instead for a religious faith. The speaker claims that her affection fills the “depth and breadth and height / My soul can reach,” a statement that implies at least two important aspects of her love: that it is eternal as the Christian faith dictates the soul to be, and that it has realistic limitations (ls. 2-3). The former aspect begins the extended metaphor of the speaker’s love as a form of religious devotion, and the latter derives its limits from the speaker’s admittance that her love is not boundless but can be contained within a certain depth, breadth, and height. Although comparing an idea as abstract as love to a quantifiable object detracts slightly from the romantic tone of the poem, an overall positive effect is achieved in that love now appears more tangible and reachable.
The delight the speaker feels in adoring her beloved is contrasted by the next line in which she admits that her soul feels “out of sight / For the ends of Being and ideal Grace” (ls. 3-4). With this phrase, the speaker appears to momentarily forego the worship of holy beings that reside at the “ends of Being and ideal Grace”, or heaven, and instead delegate most of her heart’s devotion to her mortal lover (line 4). Despite the outward appearance that the speaker is blinded by passion for her lover, no indication is given that she will abandon her faith due to her secular distraction. She does not regard heaven as unattainable, only eclipsed or “out of sight” because of her lover’s significant presence in her life (line 3). Her only temporary detachment from her religion is confirmed when she confesses at the end of the poem, “I love thee with a love I seemed to lose / With my lost saints,” with the word “seemed” as the key word indicating the impermanence of the disconnection (ls. 11-12). At the end of the poem, Browning restores faith fully back into her speaker when she has her proclaim with certainty, “if God choose / I shall but love thee better after death” (ls. 13-14). Her proclamation implies a firm belief in an afterlife determined by a deity who holds the power to grant delight or despair to the deceased, a decidedly Christian tenet.
Following the pattern of most sonnets, “Sonnet 43” is written in iambic pentameter that stays consistent throughout the poem. When read out loud, the poem adopts a musical quality caused by the rising and falling stresses. Iambic pentameter creates an especially effective lyrical sound as compared to other forms of meter because of the soft, unstressed opening syllable that rolls easily off the tongue, and the striking, stressed ending syllable that acts as a sort of punctuation for each line. Because the final stress emphasizes the word on which it falls, Browning chooses evocative words such as “Grace….Praise….faith….lose….[and] death” to engender an equally emotional response from the reader (ls. 4, 8, 10, 11, 14). One may imagine the sonnet as the type of impassioned ballad a lover may use to serenade his or her beloved, and Browning appropriately accents her lyrics to help ensure the desired response.
Romantic poetry at its finest stirs the feelings of its reader with the cadence of its sound and the imagery painted by its words. In her “Sonnet 43” from the “Sonnets of the Portuguese,” Elizabeth Barrett Browning pours onto her lines a richness of meaning created by layered repetition, a sense of selfless devotion with her religious metaphor, and a harmonious resonance caused by a steadily rising and falling meter. These attributes combined forge an uplifting and profound feeling within the heart of the reader.
© Jester |