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Across Borders of Time: Treatment of Love as a Theme in Shakespeares Sonnet 18 This 5-page undergraduate essay examines three authors’ treatment of the theme of love across time. Specifically, this essay compares and contrasts the ways that Shakespeare’s “Sonnet 18" (1609), Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s “How Do I Love Thee?” (1850) and Denise Levertov’s “Love Poem” (1978) negotiate the subject of love. This essay suggests that Barrett Browning’s and Shakespeare’s sonnets present a more rational and controlled depiction of love within contexts, while Levertov’s free verse poem depicts a vision of love which is allowed to include potentially controversial subjects, such as sexuality and religion. Barrett Browning’s Victorian poem concerns a listing of the possible ways to love someone, and ends with a declaration that love continues after death. Shakespeare’s Elizabethan sonnet considers comparing the love object to a summer’s day, but finds that such a comparison is problematic because of the changeability of summer. The poem concludes by noting that the speaker’s poem will immortalize the love object. Levertov’s poem uses suggests the things that the love object gives in their relationship. The three texts are obviously quite different in their treatments of their theme. All three love poems, however, suggest the links between love and nature, as well as love and transcendence.
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