“Stop all the Clocks, Cut off the Telephone” by W.H. Auden and “How do I Love Thee?” by Elizabeth Barrett Browning are both poems that are expressing the author’s love for someone. However, with the aforementioned poems, the poets are in a different point in their experience of love. While Browning is writing for someone in that moment, Auden is writing in mourning for someone. Together, these poems show the power of love through life and after death. In “How do I Love Thee?” Browning is expressing how she loves someone, to someone as if the person it was directed to was in the room with her. This is different than the tone in Auden’s poem, “Stop all the Clocks, Cut off the Telephone”, where he is writing this after someone he loved died. I feel like the line, “He was my North, my South, my East and West” from Auden’s poem and the line, “I love thee to the depth and breadth and height” from Browning’s …show more content…
unique as the record of a woman’s heart by a woman, it is the truth.” (140). Smith explains this idea when he goes in to further analysis of the poem, “It is the heart of her, and the unforgettable eighth line is as an image of silver to refurnish our dull conception of that purity means” (Smith 140), in the poem Browning is saying that she has a pure love that she doesn’t expect to get any reward out of it. This poem is expressing the love for someone in a strong way, that shows that Browning loves this person in every way and every day, she expresses this by saying “I love thee to the level of everyday’s, most quiet need, by sun and candle light” (5-6). Another way she expressed this in the poem is when she said, “I love thee with the breath, Smiles, tears, of all my life” (12-13). From these lines it’s an understanding that Browning has an unconditional love for this person, through every moment good and