Comparing How do I Love Thee by Elizabeth Barrett Browning and A Brithday by Christina Rosetti

Comparing How do I Love Thee by Elizabeth Barrett Browning and A Brithday by Christina Rosetti

Much of the poetry written prior to the 19th Century was devoted to

the many types of love, both the sensations and feelings related to

this subject, and also the poet attempting to capture in writing how

the feeling of being in love has changed him or her. For these

reasons, it is important top analyse examples of this poetry in terms

of how the different poets have captured the sensations of being in

different types of love. Also, how the poets have conveyed to the

reader the different types of love one can experience. Finally, how

the poets convey to the reader a sense of how being in love has

changed them, for the better, or for worse.

The two poems I have chosen to compare for this essay are 'How do I

love thee?' by Elizabeth Barrett Browning and 'A Birthday' written by

Christina Rosetti.

Both of these poems describe love in different ways, the two poets use

many different ways to describe the sensation of love. They can use

the use of colours, object, or living thing to show the sensation. The

poets use objects to show their love, as love in an emotion it cannot

be seen or touched, so the poets try to turn this emotion into

something they can touch, see and feel.

In the poem 'How do I love thee?' by Elizabeth Barrett Browning, she

uses this methods of using objects to show her love, she uses the

objects that can be seen, touched and felt to measure her love, for

example in the first three lines she says 'How do I love thee?, Let me

count the ways, I love thee to the depth, breadth and height My soul

can reach'. These are meas...

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... views on their love for different things and also end with

positive views. Rather than describe how the poets' loves have

changes, both the poets quantify their love and show this sensation

through descriptive writing and similes.

As it can be seen from this analysis, much of the poetry written prior

to the 19th Century was devoted to many types of love, both the

sensations and feelings related to this subject, and also the poet

attempting to capture in writing how the feeling of being in love has

changed him or her both for better and for worse. In the case of the

poets discussed here, it is obvious that for those poets, love was

experienced as both a burden and an inspiration, as something to long

for, and as something to resist. Regardless it is obvious that for

these poets, love did serve to change them forever.