Sonnet 43 by Elizabeth Barrett Browning

Context

* Sonnets dedicated to husband Robert Browning
* Relationships broke social convention and liberated
* Victorian: antiquity and draws on religion
* Religious period in England
* Romantic era
* Exposed to religious texts in psych ward

Language

* ‘I love thee’
* Anaphora, syntactic repetition
* Active verb ‘love’ is at the front
* Shows how love is constant and perpetual

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* ‘my soul can reach, when feeling out of sight’
* Caesura
* Highlight the dichotomy between physical and spiritual

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* ‘Depth’, ‘grace’, ‘candlelight’, ‘right’
* Switches between concrete and abstract nouns
* Shows dichotomy between notional and real

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* ‘I love thee with the passion, put to use’
* Volta signal switch between present and past
* Gives the love temporal immortality

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* ‘lost Saints’, ‘God’, ‘faith’
* Religious semantic field

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* ‘thee’
* Archaic language

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* ‘With my lost Saints - I love thee…’
* Caesura
* Relationships are unpredictable and false regularity can be disturbed

Form

* From a women’s perspective

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* Petrarchan sonnet
* Reclaims to format as a woman

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* Iambic pentameter
* Stress falls on important words like ‘love;
* Create a sense of romantic equilibrium

Structure

* One stanza divided by the rhyme scheme
* Inextricably linked

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* Regular rhyme scheme
* Creates security and perfection