Sonnet 43 Literature Review Examples

Through “Sonnet 43”, Elizabeth Barrett Browning introduces a love declaration that transcends through time and space, the world of living and the one beyond life. Love is the central theme of the sonnet, and an in loved person is the main character. The peom is written in the first person, so there can be interpreted that the author is the one that declares her love for somebody. She does not describe the person to whom she addresses the love poem, but she does describe her love for that person, by employing an enumeration, which represents the main part of the poem.
The sonnet starts with a question “How do I love thee”, which may be a repetition of the question that the person to whom the declaration is dedicated to might have addressed to the author. Either way, the fact that the sonnet starts with a question announces a response. The response is built under the form of an enumeration of how the author loves: “Let me count the ways” – this anticipates that there is not just a single way in which she loves the person to whom she dedicates the sonnet.
The sonnet is built on a 14 verses structure, having an embraced rhyme, wherein the first verse rhymes with the forth and the second with the third, following the ABBA rhyming scheme. In these 14 verses, the author captures a passionate love, describing it through symbols and figurative language.
As such, Browning declares to the person she loves that he represents the full content of her life, being the focus, the most important aspect in her life: “I love thee to the depth and breadth and height”. The enumeration of all these dimensions is meant to measure her love for him. As babies express their live for somebody showing the length of their love through their hands (“I live you this much”, stretching out their arms as much as possible), so does the author transcribes her love for the person she loves.
The personification “my soul can reach, when feeling out of sight” implies her suffering, her sorrow, when she does not see him, when he is not around. It also suggests that she follows him, for reaching the “Ideal Grace”. In the third verse, the words “Being” and “Ideal Grace” are capitalized, and this marks their importance. Hence, the poet is only alive when she reaches for her man. Her purpose is to be with him and only then she is alive and happy (“Being” and “Ideal Grace”).
The love she has for the man she loves is a natural need that lasts throughout the day, everyday: “I love thee to the level of everyday’s”. The love she has for the man she loves is “freely”, “purely”, passionate. “The passion, put to use”, is the single textual indication that the love declaration is a romantic one, although the sonnet indicates this through the use of symbolism, metaphors and other figures of style, as well as through its rhythm.
Indeed, the love the poet has for the man she loves is passionate and intense, as the following verses describe it: “in my old griefs, ../ and with my childhood’s faith () With my lost Saints, - I love thee with the breath,/Smiles, tears, all my life”. These verses indicate a tormented love, which travels from agony to ecstasy, comprising the poet’s entire being.
In the end, the sonnet indicates the continuity of love, and in the same time the belief in a divine force who will sustain this continuity: “if God choose,/I shall but love thee better after death”. This allegory death - love indicates the author’s conception that there is life after death and moreover, that there is love after life, which she hopes to be even more intense.