Question

Sonnet from the Portuguese, Number 14:

If Thou Must Love Me

If thou must love me, let it be for nought

Except for love’s sake only. Do not say

“I love her for her smile – her look – her way

Of speaking gently – for a trick of thought

That falls in well with mine, and certes brought

A sense of pleasant ease on such a day” –

For these things in themselves, Beloved, may

Be changed, or change for thee – and love, so wrought,

May be unwrought so. Neither love me for

Thine own dear pity’s wiping my cheeks dry –

A creature might forget to weep, who bore

Thy comfort long, and lose thy love thereby!

But love me for love’s sake, that evermore

Thou mayst love on, through love’s eternity.

Question:

3. How does the ideas of lines 1, 13 and 14 build upon the ideas in the rest of the poem?

Answer 1

This sonnet is a beautiful romantic one whose idea is so original but true. The whole concept of the sonnet talks about love. Here the author is Elizabeth Barrett Browning and she so beautifully conveys that one must love for the sake of love and nothing else. She says that love should be the only cause of oving someone because other things that we see in a person may fade away but not love. The physical beauty or the personality may change but not love thats always constant.

The brief background to the her shows us that Elizabeth was a woman who was not great to look at infact she was quite sickly and pale due to her sickenesses. She would constantly be sick which made her look very weak and ill. So when she did fall in love she wanted to tell her lover that she has no beauty and no great personality but she wanted to be loved for the right reason, hence the poem was written.

The first and last lines are in a way a summary to the entire poem. It kind of sums up the entire poem where she is stressing on the fact of love which is the main and underlined word. She wants love to happen but ot for anything else but love itself. We can see through all the other lines that watever it says it always leads back to the last line of loves eternity and the forvermore of love. She is stressing that in order to have everlasting love we do not need anything else but love itself.

The best kind of love is love itself with nothing else attached to it, no rules or logic, beast or personality, only love in itself.