Elizabeth Barrett Browning opens this sonnet by agreeing with everyone, and the agreement is a trap. "Oh, yes! they love through all this world of ours!" sounds generous until the next line, where love is "called love forsooth." That old word, meaning roughly "in truth," drips with sarcasm. She will not deny that people love, she says, but she puts the word in quotation marks, as it were, and invites us to doubt it. Only in the last three lines, in this poem from her sequence *Sonnets from the Portuguese*, does she turn to the one person whose love she does trust: "my Beloved."
The central idea is that real love is measured by endurance, not intensity. The people of the first eight lines love easily and give up just as easily. The speaker's beloved "canst wait / Through sorrow and sickness, to bring souls to touch." Waiting is the test. The final line sets two attitudes side by side: "And think it soon when others cry 'Too late.'" Where other lovers see a deadline, he sees a beginning.
The imagery of the octave is odd, and deliberately so. The speaker's own experience comes first, as hearsay: she has "heard love talked," as though love were gossip rather than something lived. The flowers gathered then "smell still," a concession that could be wistful or could be slightly dry, since a scent is all that lingers. Then she sweeps across cultures: "Mussulmans and Giaours / Throw kerchiefs at a smile, and have no ruth / For any weeping." The picture of tossing a handkerchief suggests quick, careless choosing, and "ruth" (pity) is exactly what such lovers lack. By naming two opposed groups, believer and unbeliever, she means *everybody*. The stereotype belongs to its period, and today it reads as a borrowed exotic costume, but its job here is clear: it makes love look like a fashion that spreads over the whole world.
Then comes the strangest image. "Polypheme's white tooth / Slips on the nut if, after frequent showers, / The shell is over-smooth." The giant of Greek myth, who can crush men, is defeated by a slippery nut. The point seems to be that love of the shallow kind fails over trifles, so "not so much / Will turn the thing called love, aside to hate / Or else to oblivion." The comparison is comic and a little deflating. Enormous strength is undone by a smooth surface, and so is a grand passion. The phrase "the thing called love" repeats the earlier scorn, now treating love almost as an object that can be knocked off course.
The form carries the argument. This is a Petrarchan sonnet with an octave rhymed *abba abba* and a sestet rhymed *cdcdcd*. The octave's rhymes are heavy with repetition, four words in each sound: "ours," "flowers," "Giaours," "showers," and "forsooth," "youth," "ruth," "tooth." The effect is of a world of lovers who all sound alike. The sentence about the nut spills over the line break at "not so much / Will turn," so the argument runs straight across the usual division between octave and sestet. The real turn comes mid-line, after the full stop in "oblivion. But thou art not such," and then the next line breaks open at "such / A lover." The reader has to wait a beat for the noun, which is an apt trick in a poem about waiting.
The sestet's sounds change too. "Wait" and "late" rhyme, so patience and its opposite are bound together. "Touch" is a plain, physical word placed among the abstractions. The line "Through sorrow and sickness" may faintly recall wedding vows, though that is an inference from the phrasing and not something the poem states. The closing line is made almost entirely of one-syllable words, and "soon" meets "Too late" with a flat finality.
The poem is significant because it shows how sharp-tongued a love sonnet can be. Instead of simply praising the beloved, Barrett Browning clears the ground first, mocking cheap love, borrowing a giant from myth, and then lets one calm, patient man stand out against it. Her definition of love is not rapture but staying power, and she gets there by argument and wit as much as feeling.