Browning Peal Essay

Browning PEAL Essay Robert Browning uses many techniques one such example being his continuous reference to women being similar to roses. Browning uses the imagery of roses throughout the poem to represent women and femininity. It is a common practice in literature for poets to refer to women as flowers, in particular roses; such as Browning has done in ‘Women and Roses’. This is because they represent natural beauty that has been created by God, which compliments the woman Browning is talking about because it shows his feelings on how he believes they don’t have to try to be beautiful.

Roses also represent love and passion, the colour red is an intimate colour that represents seduction and sometimes danger as seen in ‘Of Mice and Men’ where Curley’s wife is referred to as having “full rouged lips” and “red fingernails”. The thorns on roses continues this theme of potential risk, because the simple idea of men picking roses for women could injure the man due to the thorns on the stem, this could represent how men have to fight past the hard things in love to get to the beauty or the woman.

In ‘Women and Roses’, Browning also uses roses as a representation of the stages through a woman’s life going into womanhood and how she grows from a young shoot full of promise to something incredibly beautiful and natural and eventually to an old and wilted flower, “bees pass it unimpeached”. The poem is about finding perfect love with a woman, which is represented as finding a rose with no thorns, thorns being the trouble in a relationship or a woman.

Browning wrote ‘Prospice’ after his beloved wife, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, died in 1861. The poem shows Browning’s beliefs on death and how he feels that he will once again be reunited with his love in the afterlife. The title ‘Prospice’ can be translated as ‘look forward’, and in this poem, published in 1864, Browning is most likely looking forward to death, when he expects ‘I will clasp thee again’, meaning he will be with Elizabeth once more.

Such optimism seems to contrast noticeably with the religious doubt or searching of many Victorian writers. But Browning does not claim that there is anything easy about facing death, instead he shows one way of coping. He gives the ‘Arch Fear’, death, a ‘visible form’ so that he can imagine taking him on in one last fight to show that he will not be taken easily, ‘Barriers’ and ‘guerdon’ suggest a tournament took place. In ‘A Woman’s Last Word’ Browning uses Roman numerals to show the breaking down of a omplex subject such as a woman’s feelings after an argument. By doing this it makes it easier for the reader to follow and distinguish the different stages of feelings the character goes through and also shows the changes in direction of her attitude until she reaches submission towards her love. This is a good technique used as he wrote the poem from a woman’s point of view and has gone into a lot of detail on how she feels and reacts to the argument.