Victorian Age

Throughout the Victorian Age there has been many talented authors, poets, and writers, but the two that stood out the most were Christina Rossetti and Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Both authors have left a heavy impact on English Literature but they both did it in very different ways. In the Victorian Age both of these authors were well known especially Rossetti's poem, "A Birthday", because she was just not famous for her writings, but her unique style of writing. She was also known to be the greatest woman poet in all of English literature. Brownings poem, "Sonnet 43", also talks about the love she has for her significant other . She is also known to be the best known poet of her time. The Victorian Era was also known as the romantic period at the time.

In "A Birthday" by, Christina Rossetti, she explains the feelings she has felt about her new found love. When Rossetti says, "My heart is like a singing bird/Whose nest is in a watered shoot (A Birthday 1-2)." This shows the pure happiness and the joy she feels about her new lover. She feels the excitement and joy that love can give. Rossetti also says, "Because the birthday of my life/Is come, my love is come to me (A Birthday 15-16)". In these lines she explains how it is actually not her birthday but this new persons, and how she has fallen in love with him and how the meaning of love has come into her life. She is a product of her time because since the Victorian Era was about romance, she captured the significance of love in a relationship.

In "Sonnet 43" by, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, she explains the way she loves her husband. First she asks how she loves thee and then later says, "I love thee with the passion put to use/ In my old griefs, and with my childhoods faith (Sonnet 43 9-10)." It presents the theme of the poem and the depth of love she feels for her husband. These lines explain that she loves her husband from the best of youth and old. At the end of the poem she says, "I shall love thee better after death (Sonnet 43 14)." She loves her husband freely and with compassion. She expects to love him in life after better than when she was alive. Browning is a poet of her time because she wrote about romance during the Victorian Era also.

Both of them being female authors played big part during the Victorian Era. Christina Rossetti suffered from a nervous breakdown, due to her fathers mental illness, which caused her to write. She also stuck to her religious beliefs due to her family and herself being a High Anglican. Elizabeth Barrett Browning eloped with Robert Browning caused her to write about him. Her writing about their love and they way she felt about it. These events that caused them to write, helped them create poems for the Victorian Age. Both poems were portraying how they contributed to being products of their time.