Sonnet. A sonnet is a fourteen-line poem that follows one of a number of different rhyme schemes. Petrarchan sonnets follow the rhyme scheme abbaabba cdcdcd. Shakespearean sonnets follow the rhyme scheme abab cdcd efef gg.
Repetition. Repetition is the writer’s conscious reuse of a sound, word, phrase, sentence, or other element.
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Sonnet 43 (“How do I love thee . . .”) comes from Browning’s book, Sonnets from the Portuguese, which is a sequence of forty-five sonnets that Browning wrote to chronicle the stages of her love for her husband Robert. “The Portuguese” was one of Robert’s pet names for Elizabeth. Because of the deeply personal nature of the poems, Elizabeth didn’t intend for them to be published and read by the general public. However, she finally decided to publish the pieces under the title Sonnets from the Portuguese. This title was meant to imply that the poems were translations of pieces written in Portuguese, not her original work. The best-known sonnet sequences had been written by men, and it was unusual to use the form to tell a love story from the point of view of a woman. Sonnet 43 is by far the most recognizable of any of the poems in the sequence.
After reading the sonnet, mark the rhyme scheme following the example below.
Do you think there are different types of love? What might these different types be, and to what might you compare each type?
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