The greeting card lyrics “Why Do I Love You So Much?” and the Browning sonnet “How Do I Love Thee?” share similarities in their exploration of love, but also have differences in their use of poetic elements. Both pieces use imagery to convey their emotions, such as the metaphor of trust in the card and the metaphors of light and depth in the sonnet. Repetition is also utilized in both, with the refrain “Why Do I Love You So Much?” in the card and the repeated phrase “I love thee” in the sonnet. However, the sonnet is structured with a strict rhyme scheme and metrical verse, while the greeting card is more free-form in its lineation and lacks a specific meter. As the card states, “Why Do I Love You So Much? Because you’re a part / of my favorite memories / as well as my / most important dreams.” In contrast, the sonnet declares, “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.” In summary, both the greeting card and the sonnet express love through the use of poetic devices, but differ in their approaches to form and structure.
Daily Archives: April 7, 2023
In the card greeting, I would label it as a prose versus a poem only because it uses standard sentences that don’t require critical thinking in order to understand it. Both the card and “Sonnet 43” by Elizabeth Barnett Browning reinforce the passion in the author’s love. For example, in “Sonnet 43″, Browning explains, ” I love thee with the breath/Smiles, tears, of all my life” (Browning lines 12-13). This emphasizes the passion behind the author’s love to the point where she invests her life energy into loving. Similarly, in the greeting card, it says “Because you’re a part/of my favorite memories/as well as my/most important dreams”. In both quotes, the author mentions their personal life and includes love as a part of their priorities. In “Sonnet 43”, there is more repetition with “I love thee” to compare the love, and in the greeting card the repetition is more subtle and indirect to where the author repeats the different reasons why they love.
