Love
and Death
in
E. B. Browning and Christina Rossetti poetry
The aim
of this paper is to analyse the work of Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Christina
Rossetti and establish if since they belonged to the same period of time they
therefore focus their work on the same topics and in the same way. In order to
do this we will focus in two topics that I think that represent the main ideas
of these two authors: Love and Death.
The
reason why I have chosen these two authors is because I think that the fact that
women began to express their feelings for the first time is very important not
only for poetry but also for arts in general.
During
all the past periods, women were only present in poetry through men; in other
words, men invented women’ voices imagining them saying what they longed to
hear. (1)
In the
Victorian era, women discovered their power not only as a passive object that is
described in order to create beauty: they used their own voice to show the world
their feelings and their thoughts, and therefore they proved they can be exactly
as complex as a man. Moreover, as Mrs Craik points out, women started to think
independently from men and they realized that they were no less than men, each
of them a distinct existence. (2)
Furthermore, it is
important to remark that women, as men, can have different points of view about
the same topics, even though they belong to the same era. This way, some are
more concerned about religion than others are, and the vision of death, love,
family… can change from one to another.
Therefore, the
question that we will try to answer is the following: had Browning and Rossetti the same ideas in
mind about Love and Death just because they both were women who belonged to the
Victorian era?
A
useful starting point for answering this question is to pay attention to their
biographies.
Browning
and Rossetti’s biographies
If we
take a look to their earlier days we can observe that they had a lot of points
in common.
As we
have said, they both belonged to the same period: Elizabeth Barrett Browning was
born in 1806 and lived some important years of her life in
In
their first years, they both had a brilliant education.
On the
one hand, since she was a teenager, Browning was very interested in culture in
general: she read the classics and studied philosophy, history and literatures.
Moreover, she had different languages and translated important works. Her first
poems were written when she was only eight years old and she published a long
Homeric poem when she was fourteen called “The
Similarly,
Christina Rossetti was also grown up in at atmosphere of culture and in a home
that encouraged the arts. Her father was Gabriel Rossetti, an Italian very
involved not only in arts and poetry but also in politics. Her mother was also
involved in arts and her brother Dante Gabriel Rossetti was a very important
influence for her, since he was a very recognised poet and painter. Furthermore,
Rossetti’s house was a meeting point for Italian exiles that debated about
politics, freedom, religion, arts and poetry before the children, who little by
little formed their personal point of view about life and culture. (6)
However, this
similar atmosphere is not the point that made these two poets so close.
Elizabeth Barrett
Browning and Christina Rossetti had a very important point in common: they both
suffered different serious illnesses since they were really young and this fact
is reflected along all their artistic production.
In the
first place, when she was very young, doctors found in Browning a nervous
disorder and she began to take opium. Some years later, she had problems with
her lungs and she had to stay in bed for five years, being considerate as a
semi-invalid and seeing only a few close relatives during this
time.
On the
other hand, Christina Rossetti suffered also different illnesses from her teen
ages, like throat infections, vomits, and heart problems that made her feel
exhausted all the time. Moreover, she contracted an illness called
After
knowing all these details of their biographies, the reader might think that they
both will have very similar thoughts and feelings, and therefore, a similar way
of writing. However this is not true and we will prove it by analysing some
poems of these two authors.
Love
Let us
start by showing two poems where Browning and Rossetti are talking about
love.
In the
first place, we have chosen the Sonnet XLIII of a collection of poems called “Sonnets from the Portuguese”, written
by Elizabeth Barrett Browning.
SONNET
XLIII
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 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. (7)
This
sonnet is just an example of the others written in this period (around 1850)
when Elizabeth B. and Robert Browning, another important poet, began their
relationship by writing letters to each other.
In this
poem, we can clearly see how a woman is describing all the ways of love she is
feeling for her lover.
This
way, she describes all her feelings from her deeper insights “to the depth and breadth and height/ my
soul can reach”; to her everyday life
“I love thee to the level of every day’s/ Most quiet
need, by sun and candlelight.”
Another
verse very important to remark is “I love
thee/ with the passion put to use In my old griefs”. I think that this sentence is a key to
understand the sense of the poem. Here,
In the
next verses, “I love thee with a love I
seemed to lose / With my lost saints”, she can be
making reference to her mother and brother, who died some years before she wrote
this poem. Therefore, she declares that the love she thought lost forever has
found a new receiver.
Finally,
the poem ends by saying that she will love him after death in the same way if
God decides that she has to die. (“if God choose, / I shall but love thee better after
death”)
It is
impossible to understand
After
analysing the poem, I think that two aspects need to be
emphasized.
First,
I want to remark that with her poetry, E. Browning is breaking the role of the
silent women who along the history were only the object of adoration: she, as a
woman, is talking with her own voice and claiming that she loves a man over
anything else: family, religion, death… and with her entire
self.
The
other important aspect is that
Let us
continue now by commenting a poem by Christina Rossetti where the author is
talking about the same topic: love.
The
work I have selected is “Trust me”, the poem nº6 of her “Monna Innominata”, that we can
find in the “Second Series” of her poems. (10)
TRUST
ME
Trust me, I have not earned your dear rebuke,
I love, as you
would have me, God the most.
Would lose not him, but you, must one be
lost,
Nor with
Unready to forego
what I forsook.
This say I,
having counted up the cost;
This, though 't be the
feeblest of God's host,
The sorriest sheep Christ shepherds with his
crook,
Yet, while I love
my God the most, I deem
That I can never love you over much:
I love him more, so let me love you too;
Yea, as I
apprehend it, love is such
I cannot love you if I love not Him,
I cannot love Him if I love not you. (11)
If we
take a look to this poem, we will realize that love is seen from a different
point of view by Rossetti.
In the
poem we have selected we can see perfectly how God is always in her
mind.
In the
first lines, we realize that the author is talking to her lover about the
feelings she has for God. He will always be the first thing for her and she
confesses that if she was obliged to choose between God and her lover, she will
choose God without doubts.
As the
Victorian web points out, the poet was an extremely devout Christian, and all
her religious ideas affected every work she created (12). This way, she mixes love and
religion, establishing always a line that put God in the highest place of her
personal “ranking”, being always defeated her love for a human being against her
love for God: God must come first.
However, in the
next lines, Rossetti declares that her love for God does not mean that she
cannot love her lover too (“I love him
more, so let me love you too”), that is solved in the end of the poem with
this statement:
I cannot love you
if I love not Him,
I cannot love Him if I love not
you.
In theses lines, we can see the whole
idea of the poem summed up: the poet points out that she will be able to love
her lover only with the strength that God gives her; so, she needs God first in
order to love her lover. This way, she establishes an invisible chain between
God and her lover, being both necessary for her, but giving always priority to
God.
This
poem is just an example of the collection “Monna Innominata”,
that Rossetti wrote in a moment of her personal life when she had to decide for
the second time in her life between her love for God and her love for a human being who did not shared the
same religious beliefs than her. At the first time, Christina broke her
relationship with her future husband (they were already engaged), James Collison, who was Catholic and did not share exactly the
same beliefs as the author.
At the
second time, Rossetti fell in love again, with Charles Carley, a linguist friend of Christina’s brother, and it is
thought that the sonnets of “Monna Innominata” could be written because of him.
This
time, Carley was agnostic and Christina felt that she
had to leave him because of that, keeping for herself a feeling of frustration
and pain that would be also reflected in other sonnets of this collection (13).
The
conclusion that we can make up after analysing this poem is the following:
Christina Rossetti gives always priority to God over anything else, even over
her love longing as a woman.
The
difference between one author and another is clear in this
topic.
On the
one hand, E. Barrett Browning claims that her first priority in life is her
lover, who she loves over anything else. Her love for him comes only from he
himself and from her insights and she needs nothing else if she is sure of her
lover’s love.
On the
other hand, we can realize that for Christina Rossetti love cannot be seen
separately from God: He is her priority and the love that she is able to feel
for another person comes directly from the strength that God gives
her.
Death
The
next topic I consider important to compare in these two authors is the way they
face death, a topic very discussed in the Victorian era that takes an
outstanding place in the works of these two women because of their proximity
with it due to their illnesses and suffering.
On the
one hand, I have chosen the sonnet XXIII from “Sonnets from the Portuguese” in order
to illustrate Elizabeth B. Browning’s point of view.
SONNET
XXIII
Is
it indeed so? If I lay here dead,
Wouldst
thou miss any life in losing mine?
And
would the sun for thee more coldly shine
Because
of grave-damps falling round my head?
I
marveled, my Beloved, when I
read
Thy
thought so in the letter. I am thine--
But...so
much to thee? Can
I pour your wine
While
my hands tremble? Then my soul, instead
Of
dreams of death, resumes life's lower range.
Then,
love me, Love! Look on me--breathe on me!
As
brighter ladies do not count it strange,
For
love, to give up acres and degree,
I
yield the grave for thy sake, and exchange
My
near sweet view of Heaven, for earth with thee! (14)
The
poem begins with two questions that
The
next lines are the most important of the poem, since they give the whole a
complete meaning. With the words “Then my
soul, instead / Of dreams of death, resumes life's
lower range” she is refusing her wishes of death in order to continue a
painful life just because she knows that her lover would suffer if she leaves
the earth.
Due
to this statement we can say that Elizabeth B. Browning was a woman who thought
about death but we can also say that she refused all these ideas thanks to the
love she felt for her lover. Therefore, we could think that she found in love a
reason to defeat her everyday sufferings.
In
the last verses of this poem, the same idea is repeated again. Now she is making
reference to people who changed their love for a better position in life, and
she compared them with herself who is changing death for a life full of love
besides her lover, as she says in the last two lines of the poem: “I yield the grave for thy sake, and exchange
/ My near sweet view of Heaven, for earth with thee!”.
As a
conclusion, after having commented the poem, we can point out that Elizabeth
Barrett Browning shows that her hopes of dying are defeated with the love she
feels and with the love she receives from her lover, and therefore she exchanges
her wish of leaving by the wish of her lover of her staying beside him in
earth.
On
the other hand, I have chosen the poem “If Only” by Christina Rossetti, a poem
that we can find in her Devotional Pieces. I have selected this work In order to
show how she deals with Death and how she gives priority to God over anything
else again.
IF
ONLY
If I
might only love my God and die!
But
now He bids me love Him and live on,
Now
when the bloom of all my life is gone,
The
pleasant half of life has quite gone by.
My
tree of hope is lopped that spread so high,
And
I forget how summer glowed and shone,
While
autumn grips me with its fingers wan
And
frets me with its fitful windy sigh.
When
autumn passes then must winter numb,
And
winter may not pass a weary while,
But
when it passes spring shall flower again;
And
in that spring who weepeth now shall
smile,
Yea,
they shall wax who now are on the wane,
Yea, they shall sing for love when Christ shall come. (15)
From
my point of view, the key to understand the poem and therefore Rossetti’s mind
is in the first lines:
If I
might only love my God and die!
But
now He bids me love Him and live on,
In
these two lines, Rossetti is expressing her hopes of dying and finally meeting
God, but she points out that God makes her keep going with her life and
therefore she feels obligated to go on living.
With
these two verses we realize two important aspects. On the one hand, Rossetti’s
inclination to death; and, on the other hand, God influence over this
inclination: Christina Rossetti refuses her ideas of leaving human world to
satisfy God, so we can say that she finds the reason to keep going in her
religious beliefs.
In
the next lines, we can find her reason for wanting an end for her days: she is
in the middle of her life (around forty years old) and she thinks that she has
already lived all the good experiences that life offers, so there is not reason
to going on except God.
In
the rest of the poem, Rossetti uses a metaphorical language that we will try to
explain.
First
of all she says that “my tree of hope is
lopped and spread so high” that stands for her wishes and hopes in life, and
what she expected to live (the tree spread so high) but finally she did not (now
the tree is curved).
Then,
she uses the seasons to talk about the different stages of
life.
First
of all she talks about summer, the earlier days and youth, when all “glowed and shone”, that is to say, the
happier days. Then she names autumn, her present stage, and next she talks about
the future speaking about winter, the last days.
At
the end of the poem we see how she talks about the last season: Spring, which we
can identify with death, as far as she points out that this is the stage when all sufferings will disappear and
where people finally meet God.
To
sump up, this means that in order to make it to spring (the meeting with God),
we have to pass not only summer (the youth), but also autumn (the middle stage)
and winter (the old age).
After
having analysed piece by piece the poem we can conclude that for Rossetti God
was the only reason to keep on living because to meet him she had to live not
only her earlier days but also her old age, in order to finally meet God as a
reward for all her sufferings over the years.
Now
that we have commented two poems of these authors where they talk about death,
the difference between Browning and Rossetti before this topic is also very
clear.
Since
for Browning the only reason to keep on living and forget her illnesses and
sufferings is her lover and her feelings of love towards another human being,
Rossetti finds a reason for going on in God and she feels obligated to live in
order to deserve Heaven and God acceptation.
Conclusion
After
having analyzing these two authors through the main topics of their poetry and
after having exemplified this with two poems of both authors, I think that now
we are able to solve the question that we raised at the beginning of the paper,
that was if E. Barrett Browning and Christina Rossetti had the same points of
view about life and deal with the topics in the same way just because they both
belonged to the Victorian Era.
The
answer is clearly negative since even though they are speaking about the same
topics, they have a different conception of them.
On the
one hand, we have seen through the Sonnet
XLIII from Sonnets from the Portuguese, by E. Barrret Browning; and through Trust Me, by Christina Rossetti, how
they deal with love.
This
way, we have seen that while for Elizabeth Browning the most important thing in
the world is his lover and the love she can give and receive from him, for
Rossetti the most important thing is God and her beliefs and she would leave her
love if he do not understand and share her religious
values.
On the
other hand, we have seen through the Sonnet XXIII by Browning and by the poem If Only by Rossetti that they face death
in two different ways.
On the
one hand, Browning keeps on living to satisfy her lover and to enjoy the love
she is feeling. Due to this love, she is able to forget her worries about her
pain and illnesses and focus all her strength in her
lover.
On the
other hand, Rossetti’s religious beliefs and her hope of meeting God as a reward
for her sufferings in Earth are the reason for continuing living even though she
feels that the good days of her life are gone.
The
final conclusion of this paper is now clear: Browning and Rossetti are two
different women with different conceptions of Love and Death and these
differences are summed up in the answers that these poets would give to this
question: is love for a human being stronger than love for
God?
Evidently, while
Browning would agree, Rossetti would not.
Bibliographical
Sources
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Byecroft, Breanna. “Representations of the Female Voice in Victorian Poetry”.
The Victorian
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Hollis.
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Barrett Browning." Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. 4 Jan 2008, 21:58
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Kingma Wall, Jennifer. “Love and Marriage: How
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“Christina
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Adolfo, ed. Florilegio By Christina Rossetti. Ediciones Hiperión S.L : Madrid. 1997.
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Bocher, Joshua. Christina Rossetti: Between Love of
God and Love of
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Sarabia,
Adolfo, ed. Introduction Letter. Florilegio By Christina Rossetti. Ediciones
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Pictures:
Picture
of E.B. Browning from:
View Images Beta.
Picture
of Christina Rossetti from :
Smith, Gwen D. 10 January. http://www.library.unt.edu/rarebooks/exhibits/women/default.asp
Last
Picture:
Illustration made by Dante Gabriel Rossetti for a book written by Christina
Rossetti: Smith, Gwen D. 10 January. http://www.library.unt.edu/rarebooks/exhibits/women/default.asp