Elizabeth Barrett Browning gives the woman in this poem a title that sounds like a household report: "A Woman's Shortcomings." The word makes us expect a list of petty faults. What we get is a single, serious charge. The woman at the centre is charming, courted and perfectly polite, and she does not love anyone. The poem's central idea is that love is not a pastime of glances and pleasant evenings. It is a total commitment, and anything less should not be given the name.
The first two stanzas describe her in the third person, and the language is quietly commercial. She "has counted six, and over, / Of a purse well filled, and a heart well tried," as if her suitors were coins on a table. Her suitors "give her time," while her soul must "slip / Where the world has set the grooving." A groove is a track that carries you along without choice. The image suggests that she drifts into the pattern society has cut for her, with no passion driving it. The poem is careful to say she is not a liar: "She will lie to none with her fair red lip." Her offence is subtler. Her fan trembles, her eyelids rise and fall, she hears "bold words, unreproving," and "her silence says – what she never will swear." She implies a great deal while promising nothing.
At the third stanza the poem turns on her. "Go, lady!" is half dismissal, half dare, and the speaker now addresses her directly. The sarcasm sharpens. She is told to "drop a smile to the bringer" of the serenade, as if a smile were a coin tossed to a street musician, and to "bask tenderly beneath tender eyes," which makes her a creature seeking warmth rather than giving it. She is to "join new vows to old perjuries." After the earlier insistence that she never lies, "perjuries" is a hard word, and it suggests that these small, ambiguous gestures still add up to broken faith.
The last two stanzas replace mockery with a series of demands, each opening with "Unless you can." Real love, the speaker says, means that after the song "no other is soft in the rhythm," and that when he leaves, "all men else go with him." It means finding that "your beauty itself wants proving" until he has praised it. It means being able to "muse in a crowd all day / On the absent face that fixed you." The speaker's ideal is also extreme. Love must survive "behoving and unbehoving," a coined phrase that seems to mean both the fitting and the unfitting. It ends with "Unless you can die when the dream is past." Modern readers may find this almost frightening, and it is worth asking whether the poem is celebrating devotion or setting a standard no one could meet. The way the speaker piles up conditions suggests that this standard may be partly the point.
The form drives all of this home. Each eight-line stanza rhymes ABABCDCD, and each ends on a rhyme with "loving." The refrain hardens as it repeats: "love seeks truer loving," then "love seeks better loving," then the commands "dare not call it loving," "fear to call it loving," and finally "never call it loving." The poem begins with an observation and ends with a prohibition. The rhythm helps, too. The lines tumble along in a light, tripping beat, with longer and shorter lines alternating, and many of the rhymes are double ones ("over / lover," "grooving / loving"). The effect is dance-like, which suits a woman who moves through courtship so lightly. The tune stays light while the argument turns severe.
The poem is significant because it looks at the courtship market from inside a woman's world and refuses to treat it as innocent. It also refuses to treat her as a simple villain. Her failing is a shortage of feeling, and the speaker finds that more troubling than dishonesty.