How do Browning and Villay use language to express strong emotion about Love? Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s “Sonnet 43” and Edna St Vincent Millay’s “Sonnet 29” show that love is a life-changing force in a person’s life, and how they are affected differently by Cupid’s arrow. Browning has a sensuous experience of love whereas it has impacted Millay adversely. This essay explores how the twopoets use the sonnet form, imagery and tone to express their contrasting feelings of love. The sonnet form plays a vital part in explaining Browning's attitude to love for her husband, Robert Browning. She uses the Petrarchan sonnet because she wants to deal with same theme, mood, tone and idea of love throughout the first two quatrains and she invariably
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She uses the visual imagery "from field to thicket" to show that everything is perishable in nature. Nothing is permanent and similarly love is also transient. The relationship may stick but love is ephemeral. The kinesthetic image "ebbing tide goes out to the sea" shows how everything meets with its end in this world thereby suggesting that as soon as a man's desire is fulfilled his love undergoes a dramatic change. Everything is subject to change in this world; even the moon is not constant, it is also reduced into phases. Using the violent imagery,"the wide blossom which the wind assails" she shows how everything comes under the sway of time. Similar to the wind destroying the beautiful flowers, time also destroys the element of love. The writer uses another violent image, "strewing fresh wreckage" to show that love is evanescent in nature as it blooms and withers like a flower with the passage of time. With regard to a man's love she doesn't even have the consolation that it can be cyclical in nature. The forces of nature are cyclical but man's love is momentary. The tone is conducive in the development of her idea of dejection in love. She uses a sad,dejected, mournful and melancholy tone to contemplate her failure in love. There is a dramatic change in the tone in the couplet as she changes from "pity me not" to "pity me". She uses a resigned tone to show that she has accepted the end of her
She uses the visual imagery "from field to thicket" to show that everything is perishable in nature. Nothing is permanent and similarly love is also transient. The relationship may stick but love is ephemeral. The kinesthetic image "ebbing tide goes out to the sea" shows how everything meets with its end in this world thereby suggesting that as soon as a man's desire is fulfilled his love undergoes a dramatic change. Everything is subject to change in this world; even the moon is not constant, it is also reduced into phases. Using the violent imagery,"the wide blossom which the wind assails" she shows how everything comes under the sway of time. Similar to the wind destroying the beautiful flowers, time also destroys the element of love. The writer uses another violent image, "strewing fresh wreckage" to show that love is evanescent in nature as it blooms and withers like a flower with the passage of time. With regard to a man's love she doesn't even have the consolation that it can be cyclical in nature. The forces of nature are cyclical but man's love is momentary. The tone is conducive in the development of her idea of dejection in love. She uses a sad,dejected, mournful and melancholy tone to contemplate her failure in love. There is a dramatic change in the tone in the couplet as she changes from "pity me not" to "pity me". She uses a resigned tone to show that she has accepted the end of her