LEARNING LANGUAGE THROUGH LITERATURE

I have recently put on the Internet a website that summarises my efforts over the years to marry together teaching literature with teaching language.  Materials on the site are sold (very cheaply) but you might be interested in seeing this sample.  The material is aimed at more advanced learners of English as a Foreign Language, but I think many native speakers might enjoy it as well.  The site is at: www.litandlang.co.uk

How do I love thee?

and

Yet, love, mere love (1850)

Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806 – 1861)

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How do I love thee? Let me count the ways. I love thee to the depth and breadth and height My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight For the ends of being and ideal grace. I love thee to the level of every day’s Most quiet need, by sun and candle-light. I love thee freely, as men strive for right. I love thee purely, as they turn from praise. I love thee with the passion put to use In my old griefs, and with my childhood’s faith. I love thee with a love I seemed to lose With my lost saints. I love thee with the breath, Smiles, tears, of all my life; and, if God choose, I shall but love thee better after death. Yet, love, mere love, is beautiful indeed And worthy of acceptation. Fire is bright, Let temple burn, or flax; and equal light Leaps in the flame from cedar-plank or weed: And love is fire. And when I say at need I love thee ... mark! ... I love thee -in thy sight I stand transfigured, glorified aright, With conscience of the new rays that proceed Out of my face toward thine. There’s nothing low In love, when love the lowest: meanest creatures Who love God, God accepts while loving so. And what I feel, across the inferior features Of what I am, doth flash itself, and show How that great work of Love enhances Nature’s.

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Writer’s background

Elizabeth Barrett Browning was born the eldest of twelve children at Coxhoe Hall, Durham, in the North of England. For many years, the Barrett family had run sugar plantations in Jamaica, using slave labour. Elizabeth’s father, Edward Moulton-Barrett, brought his family to England while keeping his Jamaican plantations. Elizabeth was educated at home and was something of a prodigy, reading Milton and Shakespeare before she was ten. By the age of twelve she had started writing poetry.

In adolescence, Elizabeth fell ill with lung problems for which the treatment prescribed, common at that time, was opium. She also suffered an injury to her spine as a teenager. Despite these problems, she spent her adolescent years learning Hebrew to read the Old Testament, later reading Greek and Latin authors and Dante’s Inferno all in the original languages. In contrast to the free-thinking tendencies of other Romantics, and while reading the modern ideas of Paine, Voltaire, Rousseau, and Wollstonecraft (which appeared in her later, socially aware writing) Elizabeth was nevertheless a committed Christian who worked for Bible and Missionary Societies. She underwent a religious experience similar to that of William Blake, which she described as ‘not the deep persuasion of the mild Christian but the wild visions of an enthusiast’.

In 1826 she published anonymously An Essay on Mind and Other Poems. In 1828 her mother died, the family fortunes declined and her father sold his English estate, eventually moving the family to London, where he ruled his children harshly, sending some of them to Jamaica to run the plantations, despite Elizabeth’s opposition to slavery (an opposition that did not prevent her living off its profits). Again, surprisingly perhaps for a Romantic writer, she translated classical Greek literature and wrote in the form of classical Greek tragedy. In 1838, she published The Seraphim and Other Poems.

Her health continued to cause problems and she spent a recuperative year at the seaside resort (a fashionable new idea) of Torquay in the Southwest of England, with her brother, who drowned there in a sailing accident. Elizabeth returned to her father’s house, spending the next five years as an ‘invalid’ (another fashion among wealthy persons of the time), while still writing.

The poems she published in 1844 brought her widespread fame, causing Robert Browning to write to tell her of his admiration for her work. Browning visited her in May 1845, and they began the celebrated courtship later portrayed in a play and a film. She expressed her love for Browning, six years younger than her, in the Sonnets from the Portuguese. Their union was opposed by Elizabeth’s father so the pair eloped to Florence, where Elizabeth’s health improved sufficiently for her to bear a son, although her father remained estranged from her until his death. Elizabeth’s Sonnets from the Portuguese were published in 1850, are typically Romantic and many critics feel they are her best work. The sonnet How Do I Love Thee discussed here was voted ‘the nation’s favourite love poem’ in one British survey.

Elizabeth’s later work is also typically Romantic in its social and political content. She supported the campaign for the unification of Italy, opposed male domination of women, the oppression of the Italians by the Austrians, child labour in British mines and factories, and slavery, among other social injustices. She died in Florence.

Language and Content Study

How do I love thee?

1(a). The poet uses the word ‘thee’ where we would use ‘you’ today. When would she have used the form ‘thou’?

1(b) What word would a writer using these forms have used to mean ‘your’?

2.In l.3 is the word ‘feeling’ a verb or a noun?

3(a). In l.6, the grammar checker on our word processor would probably correct the phrase ‘most quiet’ to what?

3(b) What is the rule that operates here?

4. In l.7 the verb ‘strive’ means to ‘struggle’. What form does this verb take in the simple past and past participle?

5(a). In l.13 we find the phrase ‘of all my life’; what would be a grammatically acceptable equivalent of this phrase today?

5(b) In l.13, we see the phrase ‘if God choose’.  We would expect this phrase to be ‘if God chooses’, so what is the explanation for the present form?

6. In the last line, what would be an acceptable alternative to the word ‘but’?

Yet, love, mere love,

1. What form of ‘acceptation’ would we use today?

2. In ll.2-3 ‘Fire is bright,/ Let temple burn, or flax’, the word ‘let’ is crucial; what to make the phrase more easily understood?

3. The verb ‘burn’ follows the noun ‘temple’ so it should really take form ‘burns’; why is it not do so?

4. What is ‘flax’, and what is it used for?

5. The phrase ‘at need’ in l.5 is difficult; it is found today in the description of requests being ‘at need or on demand’, which gives us an indication of what the poet meant; can you suggest an alternative phrase?

6. The word ‘mark’ (l.6) is usually used today in the physical sense of making a mark (e.g. on a piece of paper) or in the non-material sense of making an impression (‘The Romans left their mark on Europe with their legal system’), but here is has a different meaning which is no longer used; what is it?

7. Is there a difference between ‘aright’ as used here in l.7, and the word ‘right’ that we would use today?

8. What is the modern equivalent of ‘thine’ (l.9)?

9. How could you change the order of the underlined words in the lines: ‘There’s nothing low in love, when love the lowest (ll.9-10)?

10. What is the meaning of ‘mean’ in the sense in which it is used here ‘meanest creatures’ (l.10) and what is its most common meaning as an adjective today?

11. In l.13 we find ‘doth flash itself’ , an interesting phrase that has two elements we would probably not find in modern English; what are they and what would the modern form be?

Literary analysis

How do I love thee

As noted above, this poem was recently chosen the greatest love poem of all time in a large readers’ poll in Britain. It is one of the Sonnets from the Portuguese Elizabeth addressed to her husband, who used to call her ‘My little Portuguese’ because of her dark complexion. The conventional sonnet is said to have the ability to convey intense expressions of emotion (see Shakespeare’s Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day? on this site). Queen Victoria had come to the throne in 1837 so Elizabeth’s poems are firmly within what we call the ‘Victorian’ era, famed for its public Puritanism and insistence on rules. Nevertheless, this poem is an outspoken expression of passionate love and indeed, privately Victoria herself (1819-1901) was deeply in love with her husband Prince Albert and had eleven children with him. When he died relatively young she disappeared from public life for a long period and apparently slept with his folded nightshirt in her bed for the rest of her life. The dull cloud of what we know as ‘Victorian Puritanism’ actually begins to close over Britain later in Victoria’s reign – there was naked bathing on Britain’s beaches until the 1840s, for example – and was probably a reaction to the social problems caused by urban overcrowding in the later Industrial Revolution, as well as a rejection of the decadence of the Regency era that preceded Victoria’s reign. The period of Elizabeth’s creativity reflects the development of new ideas originating from the thinkers associated with the time of William Blake (also on this site).

There is a tradition in love poetry of ‘listing’ and ‘measuring’ the extent of one’s love for the other or the qualities of that other. This sonnet begins with the writer ‘counting’ the ways she loves her man and measuring the depth and breadth and height her soul can reach when it looks for the limits of being and of ideal grace. Notice how these statements are contained in the first four lines (quatrain) while the second quatrain introduces the repeated phrase ‘I love thee’, which again ‘lists’ different aspects of love. We can see that the passionate personal love the writer feels is compared to wider forms of love such as the way men ‘strive for right’ and ‘turn from praise’. Notice also that, despite Elizabeth’s independence of spirit, she is happy to use ‘men’ to include women. Today she would have to use the politically correct ‘As persons strive for right’, which doesn’t carry quite the same effect.

It is interesting to speculate on the religious nature of this poem, with its reference to the Christian concept of ‘ideal grace’ contrasting with ‘childhood’s faith’ and ‘lost saints’. In fact, there is no contradiction here: Elizabeth had been brought up within the strictly conventional traditions, beliefs and rituals of the Church of England, but seems to have felt that she could apply the Christian way of life to her dealings with the adult world without depending too much on orthodox religious structure.

Studying this poem shows how useful it is to have some knowledge of the writer’s life. Knowing how difficult her younger life was, with a tyrannical father (who never gave his permission for any of his children to marry, and disowned all those who did), losing her mother at a relatively young age and her favourite brother even younger, together with her own health problems, gives a deeper meaning to ‘my old griefs’. This awareness of early death in the family, together with her own ill-health, also gives extra resonance to the final phrase ‘and, if God choose, I shall but love thee better after death’. (Compare this sentiment to that expressed by John Donne in A Valediction, Forbidding Mourning, on this site.)

Yet, love, mere love

This is a rather more difficult poem than the previous one, although it shares the same form of the sonnet, and so I have included a modern ‘translation’ after the Answers to the Language and Content Study questions. It is a passionate statement of love from a person who is putting herself in a lower position than the object of her devotion. The work sits comfortably within the tradition of Christian European love poetry, seeing human love as a reflection of God's love.

The main idea of the sonnet is to say that all love, however ‘mean’ (in this sense, humble or of low value), is still a reflection of God's love. The writer claims that people can be made physically more beautiful as a result feeling love: ‘How that great work of Love enhances Nature’s [work]’.

Internet Research questions (for both sonnets)

1. Is the language of the poem the same as the informal language of the letters Elizabeth exchanged with Robert Browning?

2. Given the rhyme scheme of these sonnets, are they Petrarchan, Spenserian or Shakespearian?

Answers

How Do I Love Thee?

1(a). When the ‘you’ was the subject of the sentence; here ‘thee’ is the object of the verb ‘love’.

The system is:

Subject	Object	Possessive adjective	Possessive pronoun
I	me	my	mine
you (singular)	thee	thy	thine
he/she/it	him/her/it	his/her/its	his/hers/ø
we	us	our	ours
ye	ye	your	yours
they	them	their	theirs

1(b) thy

2. It is the present participle of the verb ‘feel’; the writer is describing how she is trying to find the limits of being and grace which she cannot see.

3(a). Quietest

3(b) (i) Regular adjectives of one syllable usually add -er and -est.

(ii) Adjectives of two syllables and end in -y (pretty), -ow (narrow), and -le (subtle in the), may also add -er and -est.

(iii) Usually, adjectives of two or more syllables use the words ‘more’ and ‘most’ to create comparative and superlative forms.

Examples: (i) sad, sadder, saddest (ii) pretty, prettier, prettiest (iii) beautiful, more beautiful, most beautiful.

4. ‘strove’, ‘striven’

5. ‘my whole life’.

5(a) It is a rare example of the English subjunctive, which could also be written as ‘if God should choose’.

6.‘only’

Yet, love, mere love,

1. ‘acceptance’

2. ‘whether’, so the phrase would be: ‘whether a temple burns, or flax’

3. It is in fact the English equivalent of the subjunctive that is not often found today, although you will find it in certain phrases (Whether he be man or beast).

4. Flax is grown both for its seeds, which are used in cooking and to make linseed oil, a solvent used by artists. Its fibre is used to make textiles, paper and soap, among many other uses. It is also one of the earliest plants to have been ‘domesticated’ by man.

5. I would suggest: ‘as I have to’.

6. ‘take note’ or ‘notice’.

7. Not really -they both mean ‘correctly’, as in ‘did I hear you aright?’ and ‘did I hear you right?’. The only point here is that ‘glorified right’ is very clumsy, so we would probably say ‘properly glorified’. This is an example of how we actually use English, as opposed to how English can be used. If you are a learner, you may have heard a teacher say: ‘Yes, you could say that, but a native speaker would not say it’. And that is the point of these exercises: by making you look at the changes in English over time, we introduce you to examples of how the language is used today.

8. ‘yours’ (see the table above).

9. ‘when the lowest love’

10. ‘low in the order of things’. Today it is most commonly used to describe someone who is ‘tight-fisted’ and does not like giving things to others.

11. The literal modernisation of the phrase would be ‘flashes’. The ‘doth’ is an older form of ‘does’, which is found with the verb today in three cases: the question form (‘Does he live in Manchester?’), the negative form (‘No, he doesn’t.) and the emphatic form (‘I tell you, he does live in Manchester!’). None of these cases applies here, but the ‘do’ auxiliary in normal sentences is often found, as in the Queen Gertrude’s famous line in Hamlet: ‘The lady doth protest too much’.

So English has eliminated ‘do’ as an auxiliary verb in ordinary statements but keeps it for questions and negatives, which is the cause of many mistakes for learners. We find people producing questions like *‘What you do?’ or *‘What you are doing?’ and negatives like *‘I not like this book’.

A modernised version of the sonnet Yet, love, mere love

Still, love, simple love, is really beautiful and worth accepting. A

fire is just as bright whether it is burning a temple or flax, and the

same light jumps in the flame coming from a plank of cedar wood

or from a weed; and love is fire. And when I say, as I have to, that

I love you – take note! – I am changed in your eyes and appear in

my real glory, aware of the new rays of light that shine from my

face into yours. There is nothing low in love because even the

lowest creatures can love; God accepts the lowest creatures who

love Him and loves them in return. And my feelings flash across

the poor features of my face and show how the great work done by

love improves the looks Nature gave me.

Internet Research questions

1. It is not easy to find the text of the letters written by Elizabeth and Robert, but the following address may be useful -
http://www.gutenberg.org/files/16182/16182-8.txt. The most noticeable difference is that she no longer uses the ‘thou’ and ‘thee’ forms. It seems as if these forms are already antiquated at the time of writing, but have a certain formality which she feels gives perhaps more depth to the poem. The truth is ... since we really are talking truths in this world ... that I never have doubted you – ah, you know! – I felt from the beginning so sure of the nobility and integrity in you that I would have trusted you to make a path for my soul – that, you know…. If you could turn over every page of my heart like the pages of a book, you would see nothing there offensive to the least of your feelings ... not even to the outside fringes of your man’s vanity ... should you have any vanity like a man; which I do doubt.

2. Look at http://www.sonnets.org/basicforms.htm where you will find that it is Petrarchan.