Signifying that this love is not limited to physical desires, but transcends the human body and reaches a much higher and nobler level. She also equates her love for her husband with those things she needs
to live, 'to the level of every day's Most quiet need'. In other words she loves him as much as her own life and this love is as essential to her as the food and drink that sustains her and the very air she breaths.
Christina Rossetti's 'A Birthday' shares the positive and uplifting aspects of love that is found in Elizabeth Browning's 'How Do I Love Thee' but it goes much further in celebrating the joy and jubilation that love brings. She declares,
My heart is like a singing bird
Whose nest is in a watered shoot;
My heart is like an apple-tree
Whose boughs are bent with thickest fruit (L1-4)
She uses images of nature and summer time to depict love as life giving, fresh and fertile. The over laden branches highlight the extreme happiness and fulfilling nature of love. Then she declares that her heart is even 'gladder than all these'. In fact love in this poem is almost too idealized and has a fairy tale make-believe quality to it when she says,
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Raise me a dais of silk and down:
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Hang it with vair and purple dyes:
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Carve it in doves and pomegranates.
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And peacocks with a hundred eyes:
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Work it in gold and silver grapes.
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In leaves and silver fleurs-de-lys; (L9-14)
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She depicts love as luxurious objects, rare fruits, exuberant and boastful peacocks and rare and expensive metals in intricate designs. This reflects a rather pompous and inflated depiction of love. It is
almost too perfect. A blissful ideal that is...