There is a bold statement of rejection: “I drop it at thy feet,” which is paralleled in the variations that Browning introduces in poetic form. The rhyme scheme created by the pairing of “speech” and “each” remains in place with the continued phonetic presence in the words “teach” and “reach.”īrowning’s reply to her lover in the second quatrain of the poem is not one of loverly acquiescence but of refusal and resistance.

Previously, the feeling of prolonged suffering and disability was developed through the use of enjambment now, the problems faced by the speaker are carried over in the second quatrain (or, the second half of the octave in the Italian sonnet) in the form of rhyme.

Her suitor demands of Browning that she find “words enough” to “fashion into speech” a declaration of love by which she can illuminate their relationship, to which she replies in the second quatrain that she cannot. Browning’s use of enjambment here creates the lingering effect of prolongment and technical difficulty, indicative of the very arduous task that it describes: that of having to “hold the torch out, while the winds are rough.” Conventional tropes of love poetry are thus twisted for use in a different context: it’s not love itself that is being compared to fire or stormy weather, but the exacting articulation of it. The first quatrain of Sonnet 13 consists of a single question, enjambed across four lines. Browning’s exercise in poetic variation and virtuosity, then, can be viewed as an apt reflection both of the paradox and the power that arises from the intertwining of these differing identities. Following the turn that occurs in its final sestet, Sonnet 13 ultimately concludes on a note of possibility and empowering self-introspection: while the sonnet revolves around the complicated relationship between Browning and her future husband, it is the poet herself who emerges in the final lines of the poem, self-conscious of her roles as sonneteer, invalid, and woman in love. Although laden with allusions to suffering not as an archetypal symptom of Petrarchan romance but as something that disables the rites of courtship and delays the admission of love, the poem does not present a wholly hopeless and futile situation for the two lovers.

The poem’s variations in syntactic structure, rhyme scheme, and diction all contribute to developing the theme of detachment and impossibility that pervades the first two quatrains. In Sonnet 13 of Sonnets from the Portuguese, Elizabeth Barrett Browning skillfully manipulates the sonnet form to construct what is essentially a love poem, albeit an unusual one that paradoxically eschews the rote sentimentality associated with these works and emphasizes separation rather than blissful union.

Sonnet of elizabeth browning