"And yet" is a strange way to begin a poem, and it is the first clue to what is going on. The speaker is already mid-argument, answering some doubt she has been voicing, and the sonnet is the moment she gives in. Part of Elizabeth Barrett Browning's sequence *Sonnets from the Portuguese*, it is about surrender, but a surrender that she works hard to redefine. Being conquered by love, she argues, need not mean being crushed. It can mean being raised up.
The opening lines build a picture of a king who is also a protector. Because the beloved is "more noble and like a king," he can "fling / Thy purple round me," the royal colour becoming a cloak thrown over a frightened person. The comfort is physical. She imagines her heart growing "too close against thine heart" to remember "how it shook when alone." The word "shook" is blunt and vulnerable. It shows that the fear she mentions is real, and that the closeness is a shelter from it.
Then comes the poem's key turn, which arrives in the middle of line 6 rather than where the form would lead us to expect it. "Why, conquering / May prove as lordly and complete a thing / In lifting upward, as in crushing low!" The "Why" sounds almost like a laugh, as if she has just seen the answer to her own worry. The antithesis of "lifting upward" and "crushing low" holds the poem's whole argument. Her fear was that love would be a defeat. She now sees that victory comes in two kinds.
The structure carries this argument. The sonnet follows the Petrarchan pattern: an octave rhyming ABBAABBA, then a sestet rhyming CDCDCD. The rhymes in the first part are tightly knitted, with "king," "fling," "conquering" and "thing" chiming together, which suits a speaker working her way toward certainty. The sentences also refuse to stay inside their lines. "Fling / Thy purple," "grow / Too close" and "conquering / May prove" all spill over the line ends, so the thought rushes forward like someone talking herself into a decision. The metre is a steady iambic pentameter, which keeps the rush under control.
The sestet supplies the image that clinches the case. A "vanquished soldier yields his sword / To one who lifts him from the bloody earth." The scene is surprising. A defeated man gives up his weapon, but the winner's reply is to help him up. The war language, with "strife," "vanquished" and "sword," runs through a love poem, and it makes the surrender feel serious. When she announces, "Here ends my strife," the verb "record" gives it the weight of something written down and made official, almost a treaty. She is not dragged into this peace. She declares it herself.
That sense of agency continues in the last three lines. "If thou invite me forth, / I rise above abasement at the word." Notice that she rises, and the invitation only has to be spoken. The self-abasement she may have felt before, perhaps the sense of being unworthy, falls away at a single word. The final line is made almost entirely of plain, short words: "Make thy love larger to enlarge my worth." It is half request and half instruction, and the echo of "larger" in "enlarge" binds his generosity to her growth. Modern readers may bristle slightly at the idea that her worth depends on his love. But the poem presents this as an exchange. His love grows, she grows, and the king's power is judged by whether it makes someone else bigger.
What makes the sonnet significant is the way it takes the old vocabulary of kings, conquests and surrenders, which usually describes domination, and turns it toward generosity. The speaker never pretends to be unafraid. She admits her heart "shook," and she reasons her way out of the fear in front of us. That honesty, together with the controlled form, makes the final line convincing. It reads as the conclusion of an argument she has won with herself, which is why it feels earned.