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Shakespeare’s Sonnets

Browning may have modeled her poem on the Italian sonnet form innovated by Francesco Petrarch, but many critics have compared her use of language and imagery to that of Shakespeare. As such, it’s worth reading “How Do I Love Thee?”—and indeed other poems from Sonnets from the Portuguese—alongside Shakespeare’s masterful sonnets.

E. E. Cummings, “i carry your heart with me”

“i carry your heart with me” provides an example of a twentieth-century take on the sonnet form. Though experimental on the levels of language, punctuation, and syntax, Cummings’s poem is, at its core, a rather conventional love sonnet. For this reason, it makes for a lovely companion to “How Do I Love Thee?”

Lord Byron, “She Walks in Beauty”

Lord Byron’s “She Walks in Beauty” features a speaker who feels preoccupied by a woman’s appearance and enumerates the many aspects he finds most appealing about her. Although not explicitly a love poem, it’s comparable to Browning’s sonnet for the way the speaker’s reflections on the woman’s beauty often take on metaphysical dimensions.

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