No one is immune to the call of love. How one chooses to respond to its beckoning is as individual as the fingerprints we are born with. Each poet has a unique approach to love and this is reflected well in the poetry of Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Christine Rossetti. Browning and Rossetti convey different thoughts on love and relationships in their poems "How Do I Love Thee? Let Me Count The Ways" and "Promises Like Pie-Crust" using contrasting images, tones, and themes. .
Images play an important role in both poems to convey the unseen emotion of love. Browning's prose opens with an ethereal image of infinity as she explains her seemingly endless love, "I love thee to the depth and breadth and height / My soul can reach when feeling out of sight /." She also clearly states her daily dependency on this love by using the day and night images of "by sun and candlelight." She continues with a declaration of how essentially necessary and vital this love is with, "I love thee with the breath / Smiles, tears, of all my life /." In Rossetti's poem, the first image provided is in the title "Promises Like Pie-Crust" implying that love's promise is as fragile as a thin piecrust. She continues with other images that confirm her reluctance to pursue a loving relationship: "Let us hold the die uncast / Free to come as free to go." She also references sunlight, but here she differs from Browning in that it is a remembrance of another time, another love: "I, so cold, may once have seen / Sunlight, once have felt the sun." Her poem ends with the sad observation, "If I promised, I believe / I should fret to break the chain," which does not speak of love as something desirable, but rather, as a state of bondage.
Imparting how these poets feel about the subject of love, the tone of these two poems differ. "How Do I Love Thee- exudes serenity and devotion making this one of Browning's most beloved poems.
