An Aesthetic Reading Of Mrs. Browning's Love Poems

Elizabeth Barrett Browning(6 March 1806 – 29 June 1861),also known as Mrs.Browning,was one of the most prominent English poets of the Victorian era.Her representative work,Sonnets from the Portuguese(1850),is widely spread and popular from generation to generation.Her sonnets,full of love and charm,are exquisite,attractive and infectious.Some of her sonnets are considered as great as Shakespeare's.The research on her Sonnets from the Portuguese,either from home or aboard,is mainly concerned with Mr.and Mrs.Browning's love story.The aesthetics of the sonnets still remain to be explored and analyzed in detail.All good poems have common aesthetic characteristics.This paper,therefore,focuses on an aesthetic reading of Mrs.Browning's love poems from the aesthetics of sound,image,and structure.The thesis is divided into three parts: Introduction,body and conclusion.The introduction chiefly introduces Mrs.Browning and her love poems;the general review on the studies of Sonnets from the Portuguese both from the international and domestic critics;Li Zehou's aesthetics theory.The body includes three parts: the musicality of sound;the tension of images;the integrity and harmony of structure.Chapter one deals with the musicality of sound.The musicality is the distinctive feature of the poems.The rhyme and rhythm represent the musicality of poems.We can enjoy the aesthetics of sound through the research on the regularity and variations of the rhyme and rhythm.Chapter two mainly discusses the tension of images.The poems employ different images to express the poet's emotions and experiences.Poems usually don't describe concrete things but emphasize more on the abstract concept and the expressing of the feelings.The fresh,fancy images make the poems fascinating.This chapter uses two rhetoric ways of metaphor and repetition to show the tension of the images of life,death and love.Chapter three focuses on the integrity and harmony of the structure.The whole thesis applies the aesthetic theory of Li Zehou and probes into the beauty of Mrs.Browning's love poems through both of its form and contents.The research can fully express the beauty of her love poems and guide people to learn to enjoy the beauty of her love poems in all dimensions.