Audrey's Blog: How Do I Love Thee? (Sonnet XVIII)

Tuesday, January 3, 2012

How Do I Love Thee? (Sonnet XVIII)

How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.

I love thee to the depth and breadth and height
My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight
For the ends of Being and ideal Grace.
I love thee to the level of every day's
Most quiet need, by sun and candlelight.
I love thee freely, as men strive for Right;
I love thee purely, as they turn from Praise.
I love with a passion put to use
In my old griefs, and with my childhood's faith.
I love thee with a love I seemed to lose
With my lost saints, I love thee with the breath,
Smiles, tears, of all my life! and, if God choose,
I shall but love thee better after death.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------I choose this as one of my poems because I really, really liked it. After reading the biography of Elizabeth, she seemed to be a woman who did not show her feelings to many people; almost cold and insincere on the outside but warm and loving on the inside. I feel as though this poem does a superb job showing Elizabeth's inner strength and beauty. It is a happy poem, discussing love and how much love exceeds any tangible object. And, even though the poem ends with a line about death, it is a hopeful line saying that even after death their love will survive, but not only will it survive, it will grow in strength.
*Iambic Pentameter:
*lyric: A type of poem characterized by brevity, compression, and the expression of feeling.
*sonnet: A fourteen-line poem in iambic pentameter. The Shakespearean or English sonnet is arranged as three quatrains and a final couplet, rhyming abab cdcd efef gg. The Petrarchan or Italian sonnet divides into two parts: an eight-line octave and a six-line sestet, rhyming abba abba cde cde or abba abba cd cd cd.

No comments:

Post a Comment

Literary Devices in Poetry

*alliteration: The repetition of consonant sounds, especially at the beginning of words. Example: "Fetched fresh, as I suppose, off some sweet wood." Hopkins, "In the Valley of the Elwy."
*assonance: The repetition of similar vowel sounds in a sentence or a line of poetry or prose, as in "I rose and told him of my woe." Whitman's "When I Heard the Learn'd Astronomer" contains assonantal "I's" in the following lines: "How soon unaccountable I became tired and sick, / Till rising and gliding out I wander'd off by myself."
*climax: The turning point of the action in the plot of a play or story. The climax represents the point of greatest tension in the work. The climax of John Updike's "A&P," for example, occurs when Sammy quits his job as a cashier.
*connotation: The associations called up by a word that goes beyond its dictionary meaning. Poets, especially, tend to use words rich in connotation. Dylan Thomas's "Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night" includes intensely connotative language, as in these lines: "Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright / Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay, / Rage, rage against the dying of the light."
*figurative language: A form of language use in which writers and speakers convey something other than the literal meaning of their words. Examples include hyperbole or exaggeration, litotes or understatement, simile and metaphor, which employ comparison, and synecdoche and metonymy, in which a part of a thing stands for the whole.
*hyperbole: A figure of speech involving exaggeration. John Donne uses hyperbole in his poem: "Song: Go and Catch a Falling Star."
*iambic pentameter:
*lyric: A type of poem characterized by brevity, compression, and the expression of feeling.
*metaphor: A comparison between essentially unlike things without an explicitly comparative word such as like or as. An example is "My love is a red, red rose,"
*personification: The endowment of inanimate objects or abstract concepts with animate or living qualities. An example: "The yellow leaves flaunted their color gaily in the breeze." Wordsworth's "I wandered lonely as a cloud" includes personification.
*petrarchan sonnet: divides into two parts: an eight-line octave and a six-line sestet, rhyming abba abba cde cde or abba abba cd cd cd.
*simile: A figure of speech involving a comparison between unlike things using like, as, or as though. An example: "My love is like a red, red rose."
*sonnet: A fourteen-line poem in iambic pentameter. The Shakespearean or English sonnet is arranged as three quatrains and a final couplet, rhyming abab cdcd efef gg. The Petrarchan or Italian sonnet divides into two parts: an eight-line octave and a six-line sestet, rhyming abba abba cde cde or abba abba cd cd cd.
*symbol: An object or action in a literary work that means more than itself, that stands for something beyond itself. The glass unicorn in The Glass Menagerie, the rocking horse in "The Rocking-Horse Winner," the road in Frost's "The Road Not Taken"--all are symbols in this sense.
*tone: The implied attitude of a writer toward the subject and characters of a work, as, for example, Flannery O'Connor's ironic tone in her "Good Country People." See Irony.