Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Sonnets from the Portuguese
Sonnet 1
EBB opens the sonnet sequence by placing herself in the tradition of pastoral love poetry going right back to the ancient Greeks. From Theocritus to Petrarch to Shakespeare it is a male-dominated poetic tradition marked by its own stereotypes. She enters this tradition, she insists, to write her own story. In the first four lines it is “the sweet years, the dear and wished-for years” but in the second quatrain they become “the sad years, the melancholy years,/Those of my own life” and they bring not gifts but a shadow. Prior to meeting the beloved her life had been dominated by griefs, by losses, by melancholy and illness. This is no convention – it is her own personal story.
In the final sestet she becomes aware of “a mystic Shape” that coming behind her takes control over her. She thinks it is Death only to be told it is “Not Death, but Love”. The sequence thus opens by placing opposite each other the twin powers of Death and Love, or Thanatos and Eros, two realities that break into our lives and remake us, two forces far stronger than ourselves.
The voice that rings out and answers her is a silver voice – silver is precious, beautiful, but not the highest metal which is gold. Is there some hint here that the moment of falling in love, having fallen into the power of love, is wonderful but something further, more precious, lies beyond it? The image of “silver” is carried on in later sonnets, notably Sonnet XXI in the second last line as “the silver iterance” of the lover saying ‘I love you’ that stands in contrast to the silent love of the soul. In Sonnet XXII it is only the supernatural angels that possess “some golden orb of perfect song”.
In the first Sonnet the speaker recounts the moment of first being overcome by love, first realising that their being has been remade by love.
Sonnet XIII
(roughly paraphrasing)
First four lines: Do you really want me to shape into speech, craft into poems, the love I feel for you? Are words so important to you that you think they can be like a bright torch showing us who we really are, making an image of us as lovers, that will be strong enough to endure the tough stuff life will throw at us? I have written this bundle of poems. I give them to you.
Second quatrain: The reality of love is something hidden in me and out of reach and I can’t achieve the objectivity and control that would let me both have the distance needed to write of love and be the one actually living it, experiencing it. In a way, like Nick in The great Gatsby, she is trying to be both “within and without”, simultaneously part of the action and the one recording it and reflecting on it.
First Tercet (3 lines): My experience of love and my whole being is a woman’s and so quite outside the whole verbalising, sonnet-making tradition of the Western canon. Forget all the posturings of love sonnets. I am inside “the silence of my womanhood”. In the play of the conventional sonnet-narrative/love-narrative I am at the stage of being the “wooed” but “unwon” woman, stranded on her pedestal.
Last tercet: Let the silence of my womanhood tear the garment, the fabric of my life through fearless, but silent bravery. If my heart was really to pour out its feelings they would include immense quantities of grief. My silence is largely to shield you, my beloved, from the full force of this grief.
In narrative terms the speaker is now at the stage of needing silence to let love transform her. Conventional language and imagery is of little help since her love is a woman’s, quite different from the male-narrative of traditional love poetry. Moreover, the ability to trust this love must come gradually since her life has a great undertow of grief (the death of her mother, the death of her brother, prolonged illness, pain, isolation, no longer being young).
She is frightened of speaking too much. The grief inside her, all that is trapped inside her, may be too much for the beloved who may turn away.
Sonnet XIV.
The rhyme scheme in this sonnet preserves the traditional divide between the octet and the sestet (a b b a a b b a/ c d c d c d). However, the meaning flows continuously through this sonnet with little sense of a volta ( a sudden turn in the meaning or message of the poem) in the tercet. The volta comes only in the last two lines.
(paraphrase)
Octet: Don’t love me for my looks, my smile, the sound of my voice, the way I think, the fact that our thoughts and concerns match so well. Anything of these things could change and then you might stop loving me.
Sestet: Also don’t love me out of pity. Once I had your love I might stop weeping and then you would also stop loving me. Love me just for the sake of love so your love can be eternal.
The speaker is here implicitly responding to praise and words of love from the beloved. All the things a man might say about how wonderful, beautiful, intelligent she is as a woman only make her worried. She is taking control of the situation, putting words in the beloved’s mouth in order to rebut them. She doesn’t want to be put on any kind of pedestal – not of good looks, not of intelligence and being the perfect companion, not of being the one who is so needy. Let love just be an unqualified miracle.
In poetic terms note how beautifully shaped this poem is. Using a mostly monosyllabic, very simple vocabulary, EBB weaves rhyme and alliteration to make her thoughts memorable and powerful. The last three lines are woven together with alliteration : the words “long . . lose .. love” binding back and forth across each other.
Note too how her simple direct language lets her capture male self-centredness so effectively - “for a trick of thought/That falls in well with mine”.
This sonnet echoes very powerfully against the narrative of The Great Gatsby where both the narrator and Gatsby give Daisy the aura of the idealised woman, the beloved on a pedestal, longed-for from afar, the green light across the bay, “the king’s daughter, the golden girl”, the one with the overwhelming “indiscreet” voice that draws in all who hear her, the one whose presence evokes magic places, wondrous enchanted events one is about to join in. The novel may also savage her as wilful, spoilt, fearful, cowardly – but the novel never gives her a voice, a real inwardness, an equality with the voices of Nick and Gatsby. Her cry of “You want too much” is maybe never really listened to in the novel.
Sonnet XXI
At this point in the implicit narrative of the sonnets the lovers are together. Both have confessed their love and accepted the other’s love. This sonnet delights in and celebrates the abundance of love. She implores the lover to repeat over and over “I love you”, likening the words to the “cuckoo song” that make spring, that are an inseparable part of spring and so are never tiring. There are things you can’t have too much of – stars, flowers, and being told by your lover that he loves you, provided always there is a “silent” loving with the “soul”.
As often the volta happens only in the last two lines.
Here, as so often in the Sonnets, EBB places erotic love within a religious/spiritual framework. It is the souls that love. It is the souls that triumph over death.
Sonnet XXII
In many ways this sonnet provides the clearest and strongest portrait of EBB’s image of an equal love, a love where neither is on a pedestal, neither is the wooing lover projecting his needs onto the other, but both souls are “erect and strong”. (Interesting choice of words!) But also, like Emily Bronte in Wuthering Heights, EBB images the perfect love as by necessity here on earth. She claims for love a deep spirituality different in nature from Christianity with its emphasis on the after-life. Her appeal “Let us stay/Rather on earth, Beloved” links directly to the Catherine-Heathcliff story in Wuthering Heights, one of the great classics of Romanticism.
The last two lines achieve a glowing beauty:
“A place to stand and love in for a day,
With darkness and the death-hour rounding it.”
Sonnet XXVIII
Opens with the paradoxical nature of these love sonnets – they transform what is “alive”, “quivering”, “tremulous” into “dead paper”. For all their words they seem “mute” compared to the intensity of the emotion that created them. She then recalls her first meeting with Browning “as a friend” on “a day in spring”. His love letters to her were like “God’s future” thundering on her “past”. And in the close she conceals the details of what Browning’s love letters said out of respect for that love.
This poem plays on the ambiguities of making poetry or making public the intimacy of love. In the octet she is referring to the letters he wrote to her – “this” letter said he wished to see her as a friend, “this” other letter set a date in spring to visit her, “this” is where he first wrote “I love thee” and on that letter she points out the paradox that such light paper should carry words so heavy with implications for her whole life.
This particular sonnet clearly traces the narrative of a developing love – from first meeting, to first intimations of love, to full love and commitment. Elizabeth Browning uses a clipped, condensed style to convey a sense of immediacy, as if she is talking directly to us while glancing through the bundle of letters.
Sonnet XXXII
This sonnet records a transformation in her attitude towards his love of her – she records how for some time she felt that someone like herself could not inspire real love in a man. She believed that just as the love blossomed so suddenly, it must die just as suddenly for him. Most of all, in the second quatrain and part of the first tercet, she sees herself as like “an out-of-tune /Worn viol” that must soon be laid down. She now accepts that this opinion of hers wronged him by refusing to believe in his sincerity or his capacity for love.
The closing lines provide the volta: “perfect strains may float/ Neath master-hands, from instruments defaced”. Perfect love does not require perfect bodies or even perfect people but is nourished most of all by “great souls”. It is the spiritual dimension of love towards which she turns her attention.
Despite all the insistence on “souls” throughout the sequence, the image of the “worn viol” is highly physical, as is the image suggested by the last two lines.
This sonnet forms an interesting contrast to the attitudes in The Great Gatsby. EBB stresses that love is, at least in her case, a love between imperfect people, certainly people with imperfect bodies. In the world that Fitzgerald creates physical perfection is all important – youth, beauty, sophistication, wealth, beautiful clothes, immense white houses, beautiful cars. Myrtle falls in love with Tom’s clothing and appearance and falls out of love with her husband shortly after the wedding when she realises the wedding suit was borrowed. The word “beautiful” occurs over and over across the book.
Sonnet XLII
The most famous sonnet of the sequence. The opening line suggests the poet will now “count” the ways in which she loves her lover. However, the poem is not about this. Rather than list the ways in which she loves her lover, there is a single sweep throughout the poem, stressing the absolute unqualified nature of her love. There is a balance between soaring, expansive images (“to the depth and breadth and height/My soul can reach”) and a subdues very simple image of love (“to the level of everyday’s/ Most quiet need”). The key adverbs she uses for this love are “freely” and “purely”, again insisting on the spiritual, religious overtones of this love.
In the last tercet the religious context she brings to love is most apparent. Although the poem seems to be entirely general about all people, all love, it is really quite specific to her own life, her griefs, her losses, her late discovery of love.
Focus Questions on the Sonnets
1. What images of love are presented in the Sonnets by EBB? In what ways do they develop a narrative of a love relationship?
2. Comment on how awareness of Death (mortality) and religious idealism shape EBB’s portrayal of love.
3. In what ways do the poems insist on being a woman’s perspective and containing a female viewpoint?
4. How has EBB adapted sonnet form and love poetry conventions to her personal ends?