Elizabeth Browning And Anne Bradstreet Analysis

As Lord Byron, a British leader of the Romantic Movement, once stated, “There is no instinct like that of the heart.” Two women who would have taken Byron’s words to heart were Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Anne Bradstreet, both of whom professed great love for their husbands in their respective poems How Do I Love Thee? and To My Dear and Loving Husband. Although Anne Bradstreet illustrated her love to her husband with her pathological comparison of her love to material items, Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s love for her husband possessed greater enormity since she overcame the strict rules of her father, utilized powerful spiritual themes, and applied effective literary devices. Since Browning was forced to overcome the strict rules of her

When describing the ways in which she loved her husband, Browning declares, “I love thee freely, as men strive for right / I love thee purely, as they turn from praise.” By repeating “I love thee” multiple times through these lines, Browning was able to powerfully show how their love was liberating and wholesome with her use of the phrases “as men strive for right” and “as they turn from praise.” Also, Browning utilizes iambic pentameter throughout her poem including her line stating, “I shall but love thee better after death” As a result of the iambic pentameter, the words which stress is placed on include “love”, “better”, and “death”; consequently, Browning is able to portray her message that she would love her dear Robert in the afterlife with even more

However, others consider Anne Bradstreet’s poem, To My Dear and Loving Husband, as being a poem which better professed Bradstreet’s love for her husband with her use of rhetorical appeals. For example, Bradstreet explains how she values her “love more than whole mines of gold, / [o]r all the riches that the East doth hold.” With her use of the previous quote, Bradstreet pathologically appealed to her audience by explaining how she prioritized her love more than material items such as gold. However, in Bradstreet’s attempts to demonstrate how little she valued material love, she refers to the love she receives from her husband as “recompense” and speaks of how there is “no way [she can] repay” him; due to this, Bradstreet contradicts her original point of her love being unmaterialistic. However, Browning is able to demonstrate the lack of materialism in her relationship with Robert Browning with her abstract references such as “[m]y soul can reach” and “[f]or the ends of being and ideal grace.” Ergo, the argument for Browning loving her husband more than Bradstreet was solidified by the more cogent mystical themes of Browning’s