Summary
The speaker, addressing her lover, asks him to love her "for love's sake only." She lists a series of non-optimal bases for love, quoting things her lover might hypothetically say about her—that he loves her smile, her looks, or her gentle voice, or even the way she thinks, which brings him a feeling of relaxation and enjoyment. These individual traits might change, the speaker points out, or the lover's reactions to them them may change. Therefore, any love built upon them can be just as easily destroyed.
Analysis
This poem is an Italian sonnet, and, like many instances of the sonnet form, it is primarily used to advance an argument in pithy and concise language. Like other traditional sonnets, it is written in iambic pentameter. The most common meter type in English, iambic pentameter feels both elegant and natural, allowing the poem to maintain a certain rhythmic consistency without feeling overly stylized. The same can be said of the rhyme scheme. Like other Italian sonnets, this one begins with two repetitions of an ABBA rhyme pattern. This, too, creates for the reader a feeling of poetic, musical repetition that nonetheless feels conversational and somewhat subtle. Because they are tied together by shared rhymes, the first eight lines of the poem constitute a self-contained section, with its own clear sub-argument that fits within the broader context of the poem.
The conversational element of the poem's tone is important when it comes to building our impression of the speaker and her argument. The speaker comes across as passionate and possibly in real distress about her situation—which is to say, a moment of communicative disconnection with a lover. At the same time, she is strikingly rational. Some of this rationality comes through in the sounds of her speech: a measured, predictable meter and rhyme scheme. This section of the poem also features lots of L, N, and S sounds. All of these are soft, slowing the poem down. They evoke whispers and therefore an intimate tenderness with the addressee, but they also increase our sense that the speaker is controlled and stately in her delivery. Meanwhile, the actual content of the speaker's arguments is also rational, to an almost comic degree. Taking into account that all of her own characteristics are impermanent, the speaker then takes the logical stance that any emotional attachment formed because of those characteristics is also impermanent. Her distress over such an abstraction might seem overwrought or dramatic, so it matters that Browning has presented the speaker as such a logical and controlled individual.
The speaker takes for granted that superficial aspects of her identity, such as the way she looks, are no more fleeting and impermanent than things we typically think of as far more profound—such as the way that she and her lover interact and spend time together, or the way she thinks. While she first asks her lover not to value her for her smile and other aspects of her appearance, she then asks him not to value her even for the way she thinks. Because the speaker first lists these more clearly superficial aspects, the poem at first seems to be critiquing Victorian ideals of femininity, and the overvaluing of appearances and manners in women. While the poem does indeed offer a critique of those expectations, it is only part of a broader concern over the impermanence of all personal characteristics. In other words, gender roles are framed here because they are a way of valorizing specific ephemeral things, not because they are uniquely fleeting.
