LOVE AND RELIGION

ELIZABETH BROWNING & ROBERT BROWNING

How do I love thee? By Elizabeth Browning

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 everyday's

Most quiet need, by sun and candle-light.

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.

(Information taken from http://www.cswnet.com/~erin/ebbpoem.htm#xliii)

Porphyria’s Love by Robert Browning

The rain set early in tonight,
The sullen wind was soon awake,
It tore the elm-tops down for spite,
and did its worst to vex the lake:
I listened with heart fit to break.
When glided in Porphyria; straight
She shut the cold out and the storm,
And kneeled and made the cheerless grate
Blaze up, and all the cottage warm;
Which done, she rose, and from her form
Withdrew the dripping cloak and shawl,
And laid her soiled gloves by, untied
Her hat and let the damp hair fall,
And, last, she sat down by my side
And called me. When no voice replied,
She put my arm about her waist,
And made her smooth white shoulder bare,
And all her yellow hair displaced,
And, stooping, made my cheek lie there,
And spread, o’er all, her yellow hair,
Murmuring how she loved me—she
Too weak, for all her heart’s endeavor,
To set its struggling passion free
From pride, and vainer ties dissever,
And give herself to me forever.
But passion sometimes would prevail,
Nor could tonight’s gay feast restrain
A sudden thought of one so pale
For love of her, and all in vain:
So, she was come through wind and rain.
Be sure I looked up at her eyes
Happy and proud; at last I knew
Porphyria worshiped me: surprise
Made my heart swell, and still it grew
While I debated what to do.
That moment she was mine, mine, fair,
Perfectly pure and good: I found
A thing to do, and all her hair
In one long yellow string I wound
Three times her little throat around,
And strangled her. No pain felt she;
I am quite sure she felt no pain.
As a shut bud that holds a bee,
I warily oped her lids: again
Laughed the blue eyes without a stain.
And I untightened next the tress
About her neck; her cheek once more
Blushed bright beneath my burning kiss:
I propped her head up as before
Only, this time my shoulder bore
Her head, which droops upon it still:
The smiling rosy little head,
So glad it has its utmost will,
That all it scorned at once is fled,
And I, its love, am gained instead!
Porphyria’s love: she guessed not how
Her darling one wish would be heard.
And thus we sit together now,
And all night long we have not stirred,
And yet God has not said a word!

(information taken from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Porphyria%27s_Lover. This page was last modified 23:40, 10 January 2008)

ELIZABETH BROWNING’S BIOGRAPY

Elizabeth Barrett Browning (March 6, 1806 – June 29, 1861) was one of the most respected poets of the Victorian era.

Elizabeth spent her youth at Hope End near Great Malvern, England. The Barrett family had amassed a considerable fortune from the Jamaican sugar plantations inherited by her father, Edward Moulton Barrett, who was born there. The Barretts had been associated with Jamaica for generations. As a boy he emigrated to England with his brother and sister (she is the subject of the painting “Pinkie” in the Huntington Museum). He and his wife, Mary Graham-Clarke, were parents of twelve children (Elizabeth was the eldest). Elizabeth was educated at home and attended lessons with her brother's tutor and was thus well-educated for a girl of that time.

In her early teens, Barrett contracted a lung complaint, possibly tuberculosis, although the exact nature of her illness has been the subject of speculation. She was subsequently regarded as an invalid by her family. The first poem we have a record of is from the age of six or eight (the manuscript is in the Berg Collection of the New York Public Library; the date is in question because the 2 in the date 1812 is written over something else that is scratched out). A long Homeric poem titled "The Battle of Marathon" was published when she was fourteen, her father underwriting its cost. In 1826 she published her first collection of poems, "An Essay on Mind and Other Poems." Its publication drew the attention of a blind scholar of the Greek language, Hugh Stuart Boyd, and another Greek scholar, Uvedale Price, with both of whom she maintained a scholarly correspondence. At Boyd's suggestion, she translated Aeschylus's "Prometheus Bound" (published in 1833; retranslated in 1850).

The abolition of slavery, a cause which she supported (see her work The Runaway Slave at Pilgrim's Point (1849)), considerably reduced Mr. Barrett's means. He with his family first to Sidmouth and afterwards to London. After the move to London, she continued to write, contributing to various periodicals "The Romaunt of Margaret", "The Romaunt of the Page", "The Poet's Vow", and other pieces, and corresponded with literary figures of the time, including Mary Russell Mitford. In 1838 appeared The Seraphim and Other Poems.

The death of her brother, Edward, who drowned in a sailing accident at Torquay in 1840, had a serious effect on her already fragile health; and for several years she rarely left her bedroom. Eventually, however, she regained strength, and meanwhile her fame was growing. The publication in 1843 of "The Cry of the Children" gave it a great impulse, and about the same time she contributed some critical papers in prose to Richard Henry Horne's A New Spirit of the Age. In 1844 she published two volumes of Poems, which included "A Drama of Exile", "Vision of Poets", and "Lady Geraldine's Courtship".

In 1845 she met her future husband, Robert Browning, who had written to her after the publication of her Poems. Their courtship and marriage, owing to her delicate health and the extraordinary objections made by Mr. Barrett to the marriage of any of his children, were carried out secretly. After a private marriage at St Marylebone Parish Church, she accompanied her husband to the Italian Peninsula, which became her home almost continuously until her death.

The union proved a happy one. In her new circumstances Elizabeth's strength greatly increased. At the age of 43 she gave birth to a son, Robert Wiedemann Barrett Browning, called "Pen". The Brownings settled in Florence, and there she wrote Casa Guidi Windows (1851) under the inspiration of the Tuscan struggle for liberty, with which she and her husband were in sympathy. In Florence she became close friend of British-born poets Isabella Blagden and Theodosia Trollope Garrow.

The verse-novel Aurora Leigh, her most ambitious, and perhaps the most popular of her longer poems, appeared in 1856. It is the story of a woman writer making her way in life, balancing work and love.

Among Browning's best known lyrics is Sonnets from the Portuguese (1850) - the 'Portuguese' being her husband's petname for dark-haired Elizabeth. The title also refers to the series of sonnets of the 16th-century Portuguese poet Luis de Camões; in all these poems she used rhyme schemes typical of the Portuguese sonnets. In 1860 she issued a small volume of political poems titled Poems before Congress. Her health underwent a change for the worse; she gradually lost strength, and died on June 29,1861. She is buried in the English Cementery, Florence.

Mrs. Browning was a woman of singular nobility and charm. Mary Russell Mitford described her as a young woman: "A slight, delicate figure, with a shower of dark curls falling on each side of a most expressive face; large, tender eyes, richly fringed by dark eyelashes, and a smile like a sunbeam." Anne Thackeray Ritchie described her as: "Very small and brown" with big, exotic eyes and an overgenerous mouth.

( Information taken from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elizabeth_Barrett_Browning. This page was last modified 21:58, 4 January 2008; http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/ebrownin.htm )

ROBERT BROWNING’S BIOGRAPHY

Robert Browning (May 7, 1812–December 12, 1889) was a British poet and playwright whose mastery of dramatic verse, especially dramatic monologues, made him one of the foremost Victorian poets.

Robert Browning was born in Camberwell, a suburb of London, England, on May 7, 1812, the first son of Robert and Sarah Anna Browning. His father was a man of both fine intellect and character, who worked as a well-paid clerk for the Bank of England. Robert's father amassed a library of around 6,000 books, many of them obscure and arcane. Thus, Robert was raised in a household of significant literary resources. His mother, with whom he was ardently bonded, was a devout Nonconformist. He had a younger sister, also gifted, who became the companion in her brother's later years. As a family unit they lived simply, and his father encouraged his interest in literature and the Arts.

In childhood, he was distinguished by love of poetry and natural history. By twelve, he had written a book of poetry, which he destroyed when no publisher could be found. After being at one or two private schools, and showing an insuperable dislike of school life, he was educated by a tutor.

Browning was a rapid learner and by the age of fourteen was fluent in French, Greek, Italian and Latin as well as his native English. He became a great admirer of the Romantic poets, especially Shelley. Following the precedent of Shelley, Browning became an atheist and vegetarian, both of which he later shed. At age sixteen, he attended University College, London, but left after his first year. His mother’s staunch evangelical faith circumscribed the pursuit of his reading at either Oxford or Cambridge, then both only available to members of the Church of England. Through his mother he inherited musical talent and he composed arrangements of various songs.

In 1845, Browning met Elizabeth Barrett, who lived in her father's house in Wimpole Street. Gradually a significant romance developed between them, leading to their secret marriage in 1846. (The marriage was initially secret because Elizabeth's father disapproved of marriage for any of his children.) From the time of their marriage, the Brownings lived in Italy, first in Pisa, and then, within a year, finding an apartment in Florence which they called Casa Guidi (now a museum to their memory). Their only child, Robert Wiedemann Barrett Browning, nicknamed "Penini" or "Pen", was born in 1849. In these years Browning was fascinated by and learned hugely from the art and atmosphere of Italy. He would, in later life, say that 'Italy was my university'.

Browning's poetry was known to the cognoscenti from fairly early on in his life, but he remained relatively obscure as a poet till his middle age. (In the middle of the century, Tennyson was much better known.) In Florence he worked on the poems that eventually comprised his two-volume Men and Women, for which he is now well known; in 1855, however, when these were published, they made little impact. It was only after his wife's death, in 1861, when he returned to England and became part of the London literary scene, that his reputation started to take off. In 1868, after five years work, he completed and published the long blank-verse poem The Ring and the Book, and finally achieved really significant recognition. Based on a convoluted murder-case from 1690s Rome, the poem is composed of twelve volumes, essentially comprising ten lengthy dramatic poems narrated by the various characters in the story showing their individual take on events as they transpire, bookended by an introduction and conclusion by Browning himself. Extraordinarily long even by Browning's own standards (over twenty thousand lines), The Ring and the Book was the poet's most ambitious project and has been hailed as a tour de force of dramatic poetry. Published separately in four volumes from November 1868 through to February 1869, the poem was a huge success both commercially and critically, and finally brought Browning the renown he had sought and deserved for nearly thirty years of work.

In the remaining years of his life, as well as traveling extensively and frequenting London literary society again, Browning managed to publish no less than fifteen new volumes. None of these later works gained the popularity of The Ring and the Book, and they are largely unread today. However, Browning's later work has been undergoing a major critical re-evaluation in recent years, and much of it remains of interest for its poetic quality and psychological insight. After a series of long poems published in the early 1870s, of which Fifine at the Fair and Red Cotton Night-Cap Country were the best-received, Browning again turned to shorter poems. The volume Pacchiarotto, and How He Worked in Distemper included a spiteful attack against Browning's critics, especially the later Poet Laureate Alfred Austin.

According to some reports Browning became romantically involved with Lady Ashburton in the 1870s, but did not re-marry. In 1878, he returned to Italy for the first time in the seventeen years since Elizabeth's death, and returned there on several occasions.

The Browning Society was formed for the appreciation of his works in 1881.

In 1887, Browning produced the major work of his later years, Parleyings with Certain People of Importance In Their Day. It finally presented the poet speaking in his own voice, engaging in a series of dialogues with long-forgotten figures of literary, artistic, and philosophic history. Once more, the Victorian public was baffled by this, and Browning returned to the short, concise lyric for his last volume, Asolando (1889).

He died at his son's home Ca' Rezzonico in Venice on 12 December 1889, the same day Asolando was published, and was buried in Poets' Corner in Westminster Abbey; his grave now lies immediately adjacent to that of Alfred Tennyson.

( Information taken from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Browning. This page was last modified 21:13, 15 January 2008 )

TEXTUAL ANALYSIS

Elisabeth Barrett Browning the most respected and successful woman poet of the Victorian period. Her works are thoughtful and delicate, but also offer profound ideas, especially on spiritual topics. We can see that in the poem I have chosen, ‘How I love thee?’, she shows all her love towards her husband Robert Browning, whom I am going to talk about, too. Elisabeth suffered a lot due to her illness, as we could read in her biography. That suffering combined with her ethical and intellectual strength, made her the champion of the suffering and oppressed. Her most famous work is Sonnets from the Portuguese, a collection of love sonnets. By an large, the most famous poem from this collection, with one of the most well-known opening lines in the English language, is number 43: ‘How do I love thee? Let me count the ways’.

Apart from that, I have looked up the biography of the author of this poem and we can identify the addressee. It is addressed to her husband. This marriage loves each other so much and it is shown in this poem. It starts with a question addressed to her husband but she does not ask him directly but through her thoughts. During the course of the poem, she will answer this question in an exquisite way which shows her purest spirit and her love towards her husband.

After having explained that, I would like to expound the poem itself. It is a short poem, if we compare it with Mr. Browning’s poem. It starts with an open question which she answers easily explaining what she really feels. From the second line to the fourth, the author shows us what is inside her. She uses terms as “the depth” or “For the ends of Being and ideal Grace”, which refers to a way of saying what she wants to express her emotions. She resorts to intense terms to demonstrate her love, terms which are not just words. But, at the same time, I think she uses them to say that those are the only words to be written to express her love. Besides that, Elisabeth also shows her strength in her words. We can see it in the following six lines. Here, she tells his husband that she loves him all the time, “Most quiet need, by sun and candle-light”, and with those words we can see that her love does not know anything about boredom nor routine but a pure love that does not finish and it is always alive. So, it never stops. Moreover, she uses terms as “freely” and “purely” which refer to Religion. Elizabeth had a profound religious faith, she believed that "Christ's religion is essentially poetry—poetry glorified ( information taken from http://press.umsystem.edu/fall1997/lewislm.htm), and this tendency influences her in her poems. So, her love is pure and free, she loves as a person who tries very hard to achieve goodness, the objective of a religious person. And, apart from that, this love she mentions, as pure and free, is the love which anyone should have to God, according to Religion, which she refers at the end of the poem. And not only this, she refers also to Religion in the tenth line, where she expresses that her love is as pure as the faith she had when she was a child, faith in God. To finish the poem, the author tries to say that her love is like this love she thought to be lost when she lost her saints, with smiles and tears of all her life. It seems that Elisabeth wants to tell her husband that she will love him even after death if “God choose”.

As I said before, the poet I have chosen to be compared to Elisabeth Browning is her husband Robert Browning. The poem I have selected is ‘Porphiria’s lover’, where he also talks about love but differently and in a longer way, as we can observe in his work illustrated on the top of the paper. This poem is his first short dramatic monologue, and also the first of his poems to examine abnormal psychology. This poem is a good example to explain this abnormal psychology. As we can notice, this work is a detailed description of a couple in a difficult situation. I have written difficult situation because the author shows love in a strange way. The opening lines provide a sinister setting for the macabre events that follow. It is clear that the speaker is insane, as he strangles his lover with her own hair to try and preserve forever the moment of perfect love she has shown him.

A possible inspiration for the poem is John Wilson's "Extracts from Gosschen's Diary", a lurid account of a murder published in Blackwood's Magazine in 1818. A man knifes a woman to death, talks of the corpse's blue eyes, golden hair, and white breasts, and describes the feeling of perfect happiness the murder gives him. Although he stabs her repeatedly, the woman never cries out and at the same time she is capable to say that she loves him, ‘Murmuring how she loved me—she’. The man in the poem wishes to stop time at a single perfect moment and so kills his lover and sits all night embracing her carefully arranged body. He seems convinced that Porphyria wanted to be murdered, and claims "No pain felt she" while being strangled, adding, as if to convince himself "I am quite sure she felt no pain." He may even believe she enjoyed the pain, because he, her lover, inflicted it. When she's dead, he says she's found her "utmost will," and when he sees her lifeless head drooping on his shoulder, he describes it as a “smiling rosy little head”, possibly using the word "rosy" to symbolize the red roses of love, or to demonstrate his delusion that the girl and their relationship are still alive. (Information taken from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Porphyria%27s_Lover) I totally agree with this possibility because the murder that Mr. Browning reflects in his poem is very similar to the murder published in Blackwood’s Magazine and the description of the woman is really similar to the real victim, her yellow hair, the blue eyes, rosy little head.

As I said before, both poets write about love but totally different. Both also write about God and use terms like “pure” but we need to explain the difference between them. For example, at the beginning of the poem of Robert Browning, a couple is inside a room, it is raining outside and the man is listening to the storm until Porphyria, the woman, “shuts the cold out and the storm” and “kneeled and made the cheerless grate blaze up, and all the cottage warm”. It seems to be so beautiful because of the way she does it with tenderness. As we go on to read the poem, the author continues by describing the situation, “Withdrew the dripping cloak and shawl, And laid her soiled gloves by, untied Her hat and let the damp hair fall, And, last, she sat down by my side And called me” and “Murmuring how she loved me”. But there is a moment where everything he expresses about this beautiful loves is broken. We can see that in the thirty-second line until the forty-first, “Happy and proud; at last I knew Porphyria worshiped me: surprise Made my heart swell, and still it grew While I debated what to do. That moment she was mine, mine, air, Perfectly pure and good: I found A thing to do, and all her hair In one long yellow string I wound Three times her little throat around, And strangled her”. That point changes completely the course of the poem and makes the poem be truly different, his love is not following the same pattern as Elisabeth’s. She writes all the time about her love and she does not change it.

About Religion, we can see that both authors have connotations which refer to God. For example, in Porphyria’s Lover we can see in “And yet God has not said a word!” that, after having killed the woman, he thinks that God has accepted his action, as if it was her salvation. But, here, as we know that the poet became atheist, the way he deals with this theme is different from Elizabeth’s reference. Moreover, Robert claims that she does not suffer “No pain felt she; I am quite sure she felt no pain”. It seems that he is justifying his act by saying that she was enjoying because she was going to be saved in a religious sense. We also can observe that justification in his possible inspiration. But at the same time, when he talks about God, he knows that he has committed a crime and he expects God to punish him. Since he had no sign of God, he justifies the murder.

Apart from anything else, we can see in “How do I love thee?” that the use of Religion is totally different from Robert Browning’s, as we have seen. For example, “I love thee with the breath, Smiles, tears, of all my life!---and, if God choose, I shall but love thee better after death”. Here, the presence of God is not a way to justify something, as in the case of Porphyria’s Lover. This is a beautiful way to express that she does not mind if he dies, she only knows that she loves her husband so much and it is what Religion diffuses, the eternal love.

TABLEAUX VIVANT

Besides all I have commented, I would like to point out some words I have found in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Porphyria%27s_Lover:

The mirrored effect produced by Porphyria's modelling of the persona in the first half, and the persona's reciprocal modelling of her after strangulation is indicative of a popular Victorian art form called Tableaux Vivant in which humans were used as art in order to recreate actual paintings. This is indicative of the allegorical content of "Porphyria's Lover" in which both characters imitate the process of artistic creation: when art is created or published, it is dead and forever unchanging. In the last few lines of the poem, Porphyria is manipulated in much the same way as the speaker was in the first few lines of the poem. Tennyson shares similar ideas in "The Lady of Shalott", as do other Victorian authors who contribute to the popular conversation about the artistic process.

I think that the author shows perfectly this kind of art, as I could understand it. We can see when the poem is finishing that there is an image which gives expression to his words, “The smiling rosy little head, So glad it has its utmost will, That all it scorned at once is fled, And I, its love, am gained instead! Porphyria’s love: she guessed not how Her darling one wish would be heard. And thus we sit together now, And all night long we have not stirred, And yet God has not said a word!”.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

· http://www.cswnet.com/~erin/ebbpoem.htm#xliii (link from http://www.cswnet.com/~erin/browning.htm)

· http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Browning. This page was last modified 21:13, 15 January 2008.

· http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elizabeth_Barrett_Browning. This page was last modified 21:58, 4 January 2008

· http://www.victorianweb.org/authors/ebb/index.html