Question

Compare and contrast sonnet 55 by William Shakespeare with sonnet 43 by Elizabeth Barrett browning. Be sure to focus on each Works structure and each writers use of poetic elements as well as the language imagery and themes of both works. Include specific examples from the text of both poems to prove your points.

Answer 1

The sonnets are poetic´s compositions formed by fourteen verses,  hendecasyllabic, and consonant rhyme. Usually distributed in two quartets and two tercets.

Both concern about love and memory. They agree in the point in which love is considered a feeling which is permanent, never affected by time.

Shakespeare:

But you shall shine more bright in these contents

Than (....)time

Barret:

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.

The language in both is different. Shakespeare in his poem starts with an image:

Not marble, nor the gilded monuments

Of princes, shall outlive this powerful rhyme;

His language is rarefied. in the poem we can use the recourses from the romanticism, for example, the hyperbaton, a figure of speech which consists in the alteration of the order of a sentence.

The language from Barret is more accessible. She uses the parallelism and more colloquial language to express a similar théme.

I love thee freely, as men strive for right.

I love thee purely, as they turn from praise.

I love thee with the passion put to use

Another difference we can distinguish is that Shakespeare alludes to the Greco-Roman gods

Nor Mars his sword nor war's quick fire shall burn

The living record of your memory.

While Barret prefers to talk about God

Smiles, tears, of all my life; and, if God choose,

I shall but love thee better after death.