Sonnets from the Portuguese, Remember and My Last Duchess: love and relationships
Uploaded by Sophie_w on Oct 19, 2002
Discuss the portrayal of love and relationships in any three poems.
The poems that I have selected to portray the idea of love and relationships all incorporate contrasting thoughts to show the many different aspects of love and relationships. The poet achieves this in the use of language, structure and the form, which is chosen to present the ideas. Elizabeth Barrett Browings’ “Sonnets from the Portuguese” presents the idea of pure, unconditional and eternal love, whereas “Remember” by Christina Rossetti, conveys an alternate idea of bitterness that love and relationships can lead to. “My Last Duchess” by Robert Browning displays again a different side of love and relationships. The demonstration of obsession, possessiveness and materialistic views within the poem convey the different aspects of love and relationships.
“Sonnets from the Portuguese” uses the traditional form of the Italian petrachan sonnet to present the theme of love and relationships discussed within the poem. The poet, to develop the argument of the different stages of love, uses this traditional form of sonnet. This allows for a change in tone or mood as the sonnet is broken down into two sections, the octave and the sestet, containing eight and six lines respectively. This was a traditional way to present the expression of love in the Victorian era.
From the opening line, the poetic voice portrays the joy and delight felt by this kind of love and relationship. This is presented to the reader in the form of the rhetoric question, “How do I love thee?” The tone conveyed is one containing happiness showing this love to be as such. This sets the tone of the poem to portray love to be joyful. In the portrayal of love, the poetic voice conveys how it to be boundless as:
I love thee to the depth and breadth and height
My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight
The language of this abstract image portrays love to be inconfinable. This is emphasized by “when feeling out of sight” as the image of the love is portrayed as being further that can actually be seen which accentuates the boundless image of love. The poetic voices’ “soul” adds to the this image as a soul is not an object which can be contained within the body as it knows no bounds, and so the portrayal of love can be viewed as eternal. This image also depicts the magnitude of love as the language...