Elizabeth Barrett Browning was one among the most prominent poets during the Victorian era. Her poems were well known in the United States and the England.
She was a very studious child and was extraordinary with words. At the age of six, she used read novels, at the age of eight she was absorbed by Pope’s translations and by the age of ten studying Greek and writing her own “Homeric Classic”. She was well encouraged by her parents and they collected all her work and put it together under the name ‘Poems by Elizabeth B Barrett’.
By the age of 15, Elizabeth was in the hands of an illness which was not diagnosed then as science was not that advanced. She had to live with it and the pain that caused because of the disease forced her to have pain killers like Laudanum which is morphine prescribed during those days.
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Some biographers, tell that , may be due to this excessive intake, the hallucination she had made her write great poems with lots of wild vividness in her imagination in poems.
Gradually over the years, she gained her health and was much better by the time she married and settled in Italy.
“If thou must love me, let it be for nought”
– Elizabeth Barrett Browning
In this poem of Sonnet-14, Elizabeth clearly explains that love should not be for the sake for a specific reason, but real love is for love. You love a person who they are and not for any particular deed or look that you may like or might be of your choice.
The initial phase of the poem states that, she would love to be loved for “loves” sake and not for anything else. There are some people who say that they would love a person for their smile, their looks, their deeds, their character, their thoughts, her style of speaking and many more. These things are what Elizabeth does not like and said it openly in her poems also.
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She explains later in the poem, why she does not like to be loved in this manner as these characters or looks or thought are subject to changes over a period of time, and at that time, love may fade if loved for any specific reason.
She also states that nobody should be loved for feeling sorry as one day when the entire feel is lost and all the tears dried up, and then there would not be a reason for love or to be loved.
She concludes saying that when you love, love for the sake of love coz only that love would last for a lifetime and it would be still strong alive even if the person is not next to you.
A poem put in beautiful words to portray that people love theses days only for some reason and benefits and the true in depth love is not being felt. True love should be felt, and given so that the other person receives it unconditionally.