Emily Brontë, Elizabeth Barrett Browning & Christina Rossetti 2: Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806-1861)

 

Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806-18610

Portrait by an unknown artist after Field Talfourd 

A paper and poetry reading given at St Peter’s Church, Eastern Hill, Melbourne as part of the series ‘Poets and the Faith’ on Tuesday the 13^th of August 2024.

Another poet named Emily from this time lived across the ocean in Amherst, Massachusetts. She spent even more time cooped up at home than Emily Brontë, whether by choice or chance. I mention Emily Dickinson because she directed that the poem we have just heard be read at her funeral. Also, as it happens, later in her life Dickinson had a portrait of Elizabeth Barrett Browning hanging on her bedroom wall.  

In 2009 in Great Britain, Carol Ann Duffy was named the first woman poet laureate. 159 years before, Elizabeth Barrett Browning was nominated the first woman laureate, but the job was given to Alfred Tennyson, the favourite of Queen Victoria.

At the age of four Elizabeth Barrett is making up fully formed verse, by 11 she is writing an Homeric hymn ‘The Battle of Marathon’, out of interest, and at 14 her father publishes this work privately, her first book of poetry. The girl who will eventually turn into Elizabeth Barrett Browning is a prodigy. Some readers say ‘precocious’, but even ‘prodigy’ is not a useful word when after all, she just does this stuff because she likes to and because she can.

She was a tomboy. She climbed trees She went fishing. She had too many ideas. She said them. This picture of Elizabeth goes some way to dispelling the legend that follows her of being a reclusive invalid. There is no question that she suffered from ill-health (often chronic) and disability for most of her life. Whether she fell from a pony, or some such accident, seems likely, however medical opinion to this day (and there is a raft of literature on possible diagnoses) cannot agree on her condition. Unlike Emily Dickinson though, who stayed in her room by choice, Elizabeth stayed in her room because she had to.

Disability, in Elizabeth’s case, far from being a sign of weakness, becomes her reality, the limitation that calls on faith for purpose and enables her, against the odds, to write profusely and to effect. 

Sonnets from the Portuguese 

VI

Go from me. Yet I feel that I shall stand

Henceforward in thy shadow. Nevermore

Alone upon the threshold of my door

Of individual life, I shall command

The uses of my soul, nor lift my hand

Serenely in the sunshine as before,

Without the sense of that which I forebore …

Thy touch upon the palm. The widest land

Doom takes to part us, leaves thy heart in mine

With pulses that beat double. What I do

And what I dream include thee, as the wine

Must taste of its own grapes. And when I sue

God for myself, He hears that name of thine,

And sees within my eyes, the tears of two.

 

XIV

If thou must love me, let it be for nought

Except for love’s sake only. Do not say,

“I love her for her smile … her look … her way

Of speaking gently, … for a trick of thought

That falls in well with mine, and certes brought

A sense of pleasant ease on such a day!” –

For these things in themselves, Beloved, may

Be changed, or change for thee, - and love so wrought,

May be unwrought so. Neither love me for

Thine own dear pity’s wiping my cheeks dry,

Since one might well forget to weep who bore

Thy comfort long, and lose thy love thereby.

But love me for love’s sake, that evermore

Thou may’st love on through love’s eternity.

 

XXII

When our two souls stand up erect and strong,

Face to face, silene, drawing nigh and nigher,

Until the lengthening wings break into fire

At either curvèd point, - what bitter wrong

Can the earth do us, that we should not long

Be here contented? Think. In mounting higher,

The angels would press on us, and aspire

To drop some golden orb of perfect song

Into our deep, dear silence. Let us stay

Rather on earth, Beloved, - where the unfit

Contrarious moods of men recoil away

And isolate pure spirits, and permit

A place to stand and love in for a day,

With darkness and the death-hour rounding it. 

The central fact in the Browning story is that she was courted by the young poet Robert, but her father would not allow her to marry anyone, anyone at all, the same going for all his family. So being a woman with a mind of her own, she and Robert eloped. Italy was interesting and, in an unexpected turn of events, they lived there happily ever after. This Romantic image was reinforced in their lifetimes by a set of 43 poems which is also at the same time one long poem entitled ‘Sonnets from the Portuguese’. We know that these private poems were never intended for publication, that she only plucked up the courage to show them to Robert after they’d been living in Florence for some time, and that it was Robert who encouraged their publication. The sonnets detail Elizabeth’s doubts, sense of unworthiness, emerging hopes, stunned amazement, and other emotions experienced when falling in love with someone, and then staying in love with them. The poems dwell on the mystery of what is happening. They speak to what is unknown and in this way are emblems of faith, sometimes faith alone.

Sonnets from the Portuguese 

XXIV

Let the world’s sharpness, like a clasping knife,

Shut in upon itself and do no harm

In this close hand of Love, now soft and warm;

And let us hear no sound of human strife,

After the click of the shutting. Life to life –

I lean upon thee, Dear, without alarm,

And feel as safe as guarded by a charm,

Against the stab of worldlings, who, if rife,

Are weak to injure. Very whitely still

The lilies of our lives may reassure

Their blossoms from their roots! accessible

Alone to heavenly dews that drop not fewer;

Growing straight, out of man’s reach, on the hill.

God only, who made us rich, can make us poor. 

XXVI

I lived with visions for my company

Instead of men and women, years ago,

And found them gentle mates, nor thought to know

A sweeter music than they played to me.

But soon their trailing purple was not free

Of this world’s dust, - their lutes did silent grow

And I myself grew faint and blind below

Their vanishing eyes. Then THOU didst come … to be,

Beloved, what they seemed. Their shining fronts,

The songs, their splendours … (better, yet the same, …

As river-water hallowed into fonts …)

Met in thee, and from out thee overcame

My soul with satisfaction of all wants -

Because God’s gifts put man’s best dreams to shame.

 

XLII

How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.

I love thee to the depth and breadth and 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 every day’s

Most quiet need, by sun and 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 a 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 death. 

We are used to hearing her most famous line, “How do I love thee? Let me count the ways,“ in splendid isolation. But the line arrives at the very end, in the penultimate sonnet. We can see how Victorian readers would have been surprised and amazed by this culminating moment to everything that has gone before. The poet is claiming her belief in love, but in love not simply as a declaration but as an affirmation that rises above loss, change, and all the vicissitudes of time, even death. Also, very quietly but emphatically, the poet recurrently speaks of God. 

Elizabeth did many things we think of as modern. For example, she kept her family name as well as her married name, without aid of a hyphen. The sonnets are not from the Portuguese language. ‘The Portuguese’ was one of Robert’s terms of affection for Elizabeth, due to her olive complexion. making the title of the series an endearment and a witticism. At the age of 20 she had published a work entitled ‘An Essay on Mind’, which is mentioned in our context because it signifies something of Elizabeth’s attitude to religion, which is that religion, and therefore faith, are all an essential part of the life of the mind. I find that this way of seeing Elizabeth helps us explain, and at least appreciate, her lifetime of roving interest in the spiritual life.

Growing up, her family attended Anglican worship each Sunday morning. This was augmented, we could say, by attendance the same evening at the local Congregational church (Sampson 68), a practice more common in the 19^th century than any time since. She took a passing interest in Dispensationalist church thought and other manifestations of Nonconformism. Later in Italy she became involved in spiritualism, even as she spent each day in Florence listening to the singing from the Roman Catholic church directly across the lane from her home at Casa Guidi. Some may say this sounds like ‘shopping around’. I think it reveals the expansiveness of her own searching for meaning. The spiritual life informs her life’s work, one of her essays stating “poetry is where God is.” When she asserts “if you desire faith, then you have faith enough,” Barrett Browning is opening a common existential reality. It is apparent that her Congregationalism informs her social activism, whether in England where she gradually becomes an abolitionist of slavery (the slavery in Jamaica that benefitted the Barrett family) or in Italy helping lead the charge for national Unification. She was also a feminist before feminism.

Link: 1847

The foundation of St Peter’s Eastern Hill, as the screen here testifies, was 1846. Though my history tells me St Peter’s became the parish church of the city of Melbourne in 1847 because, amongst other things, that’s when Melbourne becomes a city. 1847 is called the annus mirabilis of the Brontë sisters, the year that saw the publication of ‘Jane Eyre’, ‘Agnes Grey’ and ‘Wuthering Heights’. And 1847 is the year Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning arrive to live in Italy for the rest of their life together. It is 1847 when Christina Rossetti, aged 17, has a set of poems published by her family and begins writing in all sorts of poetic forms, this time in earnest.

Indeed, there is a curious symmetry here as well. Today, Elizabeth is politically more famous in Italy than England because of her public expressions and actions in support of the Risorgimento, the movement for a united and republican (even) Italy. It is this same anti-monarchical (at times) and independent cause that led the Rossetti family to leave Naples for London 30 years earlier. Put simply, they found themselves on the wrong side. The Rossettis escaped the very political upheaval that Elizabeth walked into simply by landing up in the middle of Tuscany in 1847. The Carbonari Rossettis went into self-imposed exile in England because of politics Later, the Brownings went into self-imposed exile in Italy because of marriage. 

Elizabeth Barrett Browning Sources

Works

Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Selected and edited by Colin Graham. Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2021

The poetical works of Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Henry Frowde Oxford University Press, 1911

Also

Fiona Sampson. ‘The fire of all these souls’, in The Tablet, 13 March 2021, pp. 12-13

Fiona Sampson. Two-way mirror : the life of Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Profile Books, 2021

Marjorie Stone. ‘Elizabeth Barrett Browning”, in Oxford dictionary of

national biography, volume 8, pp. 233-243. Oxford University Press, 2004

Virginia Woolf. Flush. Edited with an introduction and notes by Kate Flint. Oxford University Press, 1998