When your eyes fall upon this page of dedication, and you start to see to whom it is inscribed, your first thought will be of the time far off when I was a child and wrote verses, and when I dedicated them to you who were my public and my critic. Of all that such a recollection implies of saddest and sweetest to both of us, it would become neither of us to speak before the world; nor would it be possible for us to speak of it to one another, with voices that did not falter. Enough, that what is in my heart when I write this, will be fully known to yours.
ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING: ‘Dedication. To my Father.’ Printed on the first page of The Poetical Works (1844)
Elizabeth Barrett was one of twelve children, all of whom suffered from their tyrannical father, who forbade them to marry. His wealth derived from Jamaican plantations, and she spent her childhood at Hope End, an imposing house in Herefordshire. With the freeing of the slaves, however, her father had to sell the mansion, and the family came to live in Wimpole Street in London. Influenced by the cruelty of the slave trade, Elizabeth displayed a reforming zeal in much of her writing. Her poem ‘The cry of the children’ (1843) influenced legislation to protect working children and was read in the House of Lords; ‘The runaway slave at Pilgrim’s Point’ (1848) spoke out against slavery in the United States; Casa Guidi Windows (1851) fulminated against the oppression of Italy by foreign powers; and Aurora Leigh (1856), a novel in blank verse, called for an end to the oppression of women and children. A woman of intense and profound feeling, she was so affected by the death of her brother, Edward Moulton, who drowned in the sea off Torbay in 1840, that she wore black for the rest of her life. She also suffered from an undiagnosed ailment, which confined her to bed in a darkened room. She accepted Mary Russell Mitford’s gift of a spaniel pup, Flush (which led to her poem and Virginia Woolf’s novel of that name), to help her in her grief. She lived the life of a recluse, before being eventually rescued by Robert Browning. He had read her latest collection of poems, which included ‘Lady Geraldine’s courtship’, one stanza of which must have caught his eye:
There, obedient to her praying, did I read aloud the poems
Made to Tuscan flutes, or instruments more various of our own;
Read the pastoral parts of Spenser – or the subtle interflowings
Found in Petrarch’s sonnets – here’s the book – the leaf is folded down! –
Or at times a modern volume, – Wordsworth’s solemn-thoughted idyl,
Howitt’s ballad-verse, or Tennyson’s enchanted reverie, –
Or from Browning some ‘Pomegranate’, which, if cut deep down the middle,
Shows a heart within blood-tinctured, of a veined humanity.
He wrote to her on 10 January 1845, confessing: ‘I love your verses with all my heart, dear Miss Barrett, – and this is no off-hand complimentary letter that I shall write. […] I do, as I say, love these books with all my heart – and I love you too.’ She resolutely declined to receive Browning (‘There is nothing to see in me […] If my poetry is worth anything to any eyes, it is the flower of me’), but eventually allowed him to visit her in Wimpole Street on 20 May 1845. They were married secretly on 12 September 1846 at St Marylebone Church; Elizabeth was dressed in nun-like black and wore a gold ring, which she took off after the ceremony and hid on the return journey to Wimpole Street. At the age of forty, she eloped with Robert on Saturday, 19 September, for the milder climate of Italy. They settled at Casa Guidi in Florence, where she gave birth to a son (Robert Wiedemann, known as Penini or Pen) in 1849.
She is best known today for Sonnets from the Portuguese (wonderfully translated into German by Rainer Maria Rilke). The title was chosen by Robert Browning, whose pet-name for Elizabeth was ‘My Portuguese’. To veil their highly personal nature, Elizabeth had originally called the sequence of forty-four love poems Sonnets Translated from the Bosnian, the last of which was written two days before the lovers’ wedding. Elizabeth did not show them to her husband until three years after their marriage. Browning had deprecated women novelists and writers of sonnets during their courtship, and it was only after the birth of Pen that she presented the sonnets to Robert. Having hurriedly thrust the volume into his pocket one morning at Bagni di Lucca, she immediately left the room. He was astonished at their quality and wrote a letter to his sister, describing how he and Elizabeth now knew each other better than ever before. He also told Edmund Gosse: ‘I dared not reserve to myself the finest sonnets written in any language since Shakespeare’s.’ Published in 1850 through the efforts of Browning, they were followed by Casa Guidi Windows (1851), but it was the publication of Aurora Leigh (1856) that made her name as the finest woman poet in English. Her Last Poems (1861) were published posthumously by her husband. The rift with her father lasted till his death: although she wrote him hundreds of letters (which he returned unopened) and frequently visited the family home when she returned to England, he remained intransigent. When he died some eleven years after her elopement, she turned to spiritualism in an attempt to establish contact. She was buried in Florence’s Protestant Cemetery.
The ship went on with solemn face;
To meet the darkness on the deep,
The solemn ship went onward.
I bowed down weary in the place,
For parting tears and present sleep
Had weighed mine eyelids downward. […]
The new sight, the new wondrous sight!
The waters round me, turbulent, –
The skies impassive o’er me,
Calm, in a moonless, sunless light,
Half glorified by that intent
Love me, sweet friends, this sabbath day!
The sea sings round me while ye roll
Afar the hymn unaltered,
And kneel, where once I knelt to pray,
And bless me deeper in the soul,
Because the voice has faltered.
And though this sabbath comes to me
Without the stolèd minister
Or chanting congregation,
God’s Spirit brings communion, He
Who brooded soft on waters drear,
Creator on creation.
Himself, I think, shall draw me higher,
Where keep the saints with harp and song
An endless sabbath morning,
And on that sea commixed with fire
Oft drop their eyelids, raised too long
To the full Godhead’s burning.
I thought once how Theocritus1 had sung
Of the sweet years, the dear and wished for years,
Who each one in a gracious hand appears
To bear a gift for mortals, old or young =
And, as I mused it in his antique tongue
I saw, in gradual vision through my tears,
The sweet, sad years, the melancholy years, . .
Those of my own life, who by turns had flung
A shadow across me. Straightway I was ’ware,
So weeping, how a mystic Shape did move
Behind me and drew me backward by the hair;
And a voice said in mastery while I strove,
‘Guess now who holds thee!’ ‘Death’ I said = but, there,
The silver answer rang . . ‘Not Death, but Love.’
(Castelnuovo-Tedesco)
My letters!1 – all dead paper, . . mute and white! –
And yet they seem alive and quivering
Against my tremulous hands which loose the string
And let them drop down on my knee tonight.
This said, . . he wished to have me in his sight
Once, as a friend = this fixed a day in spring
To come and touch my hand . . a simple thing, . .
Yet I wept for it! – This … the paper’s light …
Said, Dear, I love thee! – and I sank & quailed
As if God’s future thundered on my past =
This said, ‘I am thine’ – and so, its ink has paled
With lying at my heart that beats too fast =
And this … . O love, thy words have ill availed,
If, what this said, I dared repeat at last! –
(Castelnuovo-Tedesco)
With the same heart, I said, I’ll answer thee
As those, when thou shalt call me by my name! –
Lo, the vain promise! Is the same, the same,
Perplexed and ruffled by Life’s strategy?
When called before, I told how certainly
I dropped my flowers, or brake off from a game,
To run and answer with the smile that came
At play last moment, and went on with me
Through my obedience. When I answer now,
I drop a sad thought: – break from solitude –
Yet still my heart goes to thee … ponder how . .
Not as to a single good, but as to all my good! –
Lay thy hand on it, best One! . . and allow
That no child’s foot could run fast as this blood.
If I leave all for thee, wilt thou exchange
And be all to me? – Shall I never miss
Home-talk and blessing and the common kiss
Which comes to each in turn? nor count it strange,
When I look up, to drop on a new range
Of walls and floors . . another home than this? –
Nay, wilt thou fill that place by me which is
Filled by dead eyes too tender to know change? –
That’s hardest! – If to conquer Love has tried . .
To conquer grief, tries more; as all things prove! –
For Grief indeed is Love … and grief beside! –
Alas! – I have grieved so, I am hard to love –
Yet love me – wilt thou? open thine heart wide,
And fold within, the wet wings of thy dove, –
Oh, yes! – they love through all this world of ours! –
I will not gainsay love, called love forsooth! –
I have heard love talked in my dawning youth,
And since, not so long back but that the flowers
Then gathered, smell still! – Mussulmans1 and Giaours2
Throw kerchiefs at a smile, & have no ruth
For any weeping! – Polypheme’s3 white tooth
Slips on the nut, if after frequent showers
The shell is oversmooth, and not so much
Will turn the thing called love, aside to hate,
Or else to oblivion! – But thou art not such
A lover, my beloved! – thou canst wait
Through sorrow and sickness, to bring souls to touch,
And think it soon when others cry ‘Too late.’
How do I love thee? Let me count the ways! –
I love thee to the depth & breadth & height
My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight
For the ends of Being and Ideal Grace.
I love thee to the level of everyday’s
Most quiet need, by sun & candlelight –
I love thee freely, as men strive for Right, –
I love thee purely, as they turn from Praise;
I love thee with the passion, put to use
In my old griefs, . . and with my childhood’s faith:
I love thee with the love I seemed to lose
With my lost Saints, – I love thee with the breath,
Smiles, tears, of all my life! – and, if God choose,
I shall but love thee better after my death.
(Hart, Lippé, White)