Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s “Sonnet 14” from Sonnets from the Portuguese features a speaker who has now accepted her suitor’s love, but now she has some demands to make regarding the nature of that love.
First Quatrain: “If thou must love me, let it be for nought”
The speaker still sounds a bit tentative as she states, “If thou must love me”; she continues to feel that she needs to remain somewhat uncertain as she contemplates their relationship. At the same time, her tentativeness is to some extent offset by engaging the term, “must.” At least she does not insult the man by saying, “if you really love me.” She accepts that his love is true but yet suffers the possibility that it might change.
Thus, she asks that the reason he love her must be for no other “[e]xcept for love's sake only.” She does not want him to love her for any physical characteristic such as “her smile.” Nor can she accept it if he merely loves “her look” or “her way / Of speaking gently.”
Second Quatrain: “That falls in well with mine, and certes brought”
She then reveals the reason this kind of attention is unwelcome: by focusing on a look, a smile, or way of speaking, the suitor might fall victim to “a trick of thought.” Such things change from day to day with the mood of each partner: if her smile pleases him one day—what happens on the day she has no smile for him?
If she looks at him with kindness one day but appears only melancholy the next—what then happens to the love that was heralded by her kind look? So it is also with her speech. She knows that she will not always say gentle, pleasing things that delight the ear of her belovèd.
She therefore plainly states, “these things in themselves, Belovèd, may / Be changed, or change for thee.” Even if she does not intend the change, his appreciation of those things could change, and she is aware that the love that is based on changeable things cannot endure.
First Tercet: “May be unwrought so. Neither love me for”
The speaker adds another caveat that is most important to her: she has repeatedly emphasized that she has lived a melancholy life, weeping streams of tears, and she is now asking her belovèd not to love her out of pity. She asserts that at some point she “might forget to weep.” And again if his love is strengthened by her tears, that love would not hold up if her tears dried up.
Second Tercet: “Thy comfort long, and lose thy love thereby!”
She then avers that because of him she sees herself losing her melancholy; she is enjoying now and hopes to continue to enjoy “[his] comfort long.” But if he loved her as he pitied her, she would “lose [his] love thereby!”
But if he merely loves her “for love’s sake,” he will continue to love “through love’s eternity.” As long as love exists, so will his love for her.
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