To love me also in silence with thy soul (13-4). Say thou dost love me, love me, love me-tollįollowed, on the same line, by the Volta and the second poem of the text, its only appearance: The register of passion and restatement comes to its crescendo in: Terms and phrases are recurrent: “over again” and “once over again” in line 1, “Too many… though” occurs both in line 10 and 11, variations of speech (“Speak”, “cry”, “Say”) are dotted through out the poem. The poem, then, calls for communication and repeated expression, with its punctuation and vocabulary reflecting this content. Sonnet 21 creates an argument for the use of repeated speech in love, viewing the repetition of the words, “I love you” as unable to lose their force and power. The term ‘complementary opposite’ implies two seemingly conflicting concepts that are two necessary sides of the same system. The double poem arises, then, by accessing the complementary opposite of what the sonnet sets up. Within the poem, however, the register does not fluctuate. “Sonnets from the Portuguese” do not shift from a poem of distance to a poem of intimacy: they all remain, rather, within the same register of emotion, though that register might be more passionate in one sonnet than another (sonnet 21, for example, has more ardent tone, centered on enunciation and evocation, then sonnet 32, which is a more level narration). In Elizabeth Browning, this dialogue of the poem with itself exists on a much subtler level than it does in Arnold.
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