Eliz. B. Browning's Sonnet XIV from Sonnets from the Portuguese

Scott Kimball

Browning's Sonnet XIV is wrought with the lessons learned with the experience of passing love. The poem opens with the heavy-hearted, "If you must love me," which begins immediately a turn on the sonnet model of inviting or bereaving love. Reluctantly, Browning will accept this love if it is different from what she has known before.
Written in the spirit, if not the letter, of a Shakespearean sonnet, XIV is structured with the typical crescendo of this, that and the other--in this case the things that Browning doesn't want her love to be about: "her look," "her way of speaking gently," the way these attractions bring a certain lifting joy to the person looking on them, and certainly not for pity or endearment. She has broken the sonnet up into three forms, mapping the kind of love she is/is not looking for. The first two quatrains speak to the first kind of faulty love: the superficial. The third quatrain deals on a pitious love and the concluding couplet reinforces Browning's desires for a different kind of love, "love for love's sake."
And that's a more serious kind of love, more truly empassioned and more physically and emotionally close. The other kind of love, the passing kind, Browning shows with one-sided possessives, repeating often "her ___" (her look, her way of speaking gently, her smile) or "thy/thine ____" (thine own dear pity, thy comfort long, thy love). That kind of love is not possessing both people, it is instead being possessed by only one of them and placed upon the other. Browning doesn't want that, she wants the objective love, the real love...in the words of Etta James, "the kind of love that lasts past Saturday night." Her "love" (a word used 9 times in a 14-line poem) extends beyond the persons, and cannot be so easily unwrought as the other kind.
For herself and for her love, Browning wishes her couplet love (an appropriate placement for love), the love for love's sake...more simple than ever and thus lasting "through love's eternity," since it is neither contingent upon the conceits and qualities of only one lover nor upon the lovers themselves; it simply is.