Poesía inglesa de los siglos XIX y XX    

Sonnets from the Portuguese,  Elizabeth Barret Browning  

1. Poem: Sonnet III  

Unlike are we, unlike, O princely Heart!
Unlike our uses and our destinies.
Our ministering two angels look surprise
On one another, as they strike athwart
Their wings in passing. Thou, bethink thee, art
A guest for queens to social pageantries,
With gages from a hundred brighter eyes
Than tears even can make mine, to play thy part
Of chief musician. What hast thou to do
With looking from the lattice-lights at me,
A poor, tired, wandering singer, singing through
The dark, and leaning up a cypress tree?
The chrism is on thine head,---on mine, the dew,---
And Death must dig the level where these agree.[i]

 

2. Introduction

There are principally two ways to read Elizabeth Barret Browning sonnets. One way is to see her sonnet sequence as autobiographical-- as personal expressions of her love and the other is to concentrate in the poem refusing the interpretation from an autobiographical point of view. Certainly it is a rather convincing way to read the love poems in the former way, given the biographical facts that correlate her writing of the sonnets to her courtship with Robert Browning. In this analysis of the poem will be related with the author’s personal information, however, it will not be the central idea of this commentary, but its purpose is to add relevant information in order to clarify the author’s intention and meaning.[ii]

 

3. Historical background

Elizabeth Barret Browning’s Sonnets from the Portuguese, first published in 1850, is a sequence of 44 love sonnets written in secret by herself in during her courtship with fellow poet Robert Browning.[iii]

 

The complete work relates an ascendant and complex evolution of Browning’s feelings towards Robert, it moves from sorrow, darkness and fear, to passion joy and profound exhilaration. Each of the sonnets represents a point in the relationship between Elizabeth and Robert.[iv]

 

Sonnet III represents the insecurity that remains in the early sonnets, where we can clearly notice Elizabeth’s self-doubt and insecurity of this relationship. Distance is the prevailing theme in Sonnet III, where EBB expresses her fears, doubts about the insincere feelings of her suitor.

 

Sonnets from the Portuguese stands as a significant contribution to literature: Not only does Barrett Browning successfully revive the form of the Italian sonnet developed by Petrarch in the fourteenth century – whose works she happened to be translating at the same time that these poems were written – but she also expands the traditional conventions of such a form to include a feminine variation as yet unseen in poetry.[v]

 

4. Analysis of the poem

Abiding by tradition, each of the poems in the sequence is comprised of fourteen lines, written in iambic pentameter, and separated into an octet (eight lines), in which the poem's story or question is introduced, and a sestet (six lines), in which the topic is resolved. The rhyme scheme of the octet follows the pattern abba, abba; the sestet can typically rhyme cde, cde, or – as Barrett Browning utilized it – cdc, cdc. However, it is Barrett Browning's precise application of this rigid, long-established, masculine structure that allows her innovative feminine (even feminist) deviations to show up so significantly.[vi]

 

Two characters are present in this poem: the author and the beloved (the author is present and the beloved is absent).

 

In this first quatrain, the author already introduces the mood and tone of the whole poem: ‘distance’, the main idea stressed through out Browning’s text, her prime concern is expressing her doubts, her sadness and the distance she feels between her and her beloved.

 

From the very beginning of the poem, EBB starts repeating the word ‘unlike’, she wants to stress the ideas of difference and distance, as if ‘thou’ belonged to a world completely different from the speaker’s. So the anaphora makes the relationship between the two characters ‘I’ and ‘Thou’ distant, just as the apostrophe ‘O princely Heart’ she tries to catch the reader’s attention to the fact that the male character’s nature is splendid and generous (this idealization is used in the next stanzas to contrast with the speaker’s own nature).

 

Unlike are we, unlike, O princely Heart!
Unlike our uses and our destinies.

 

Preserving the same idea mentioned before, in the following two lines she uses the image of ‘ministering two angels’ being the metaphor of each character’s soul, who looks on one another surprised as if they are from completely different worlds and for them to be together is a strange thing.

 

Our ministering two angels look surprise
On one another, as they strike athwart

After staying the ideas of difference and distance in the first four lines, she justifies why that distance by defining each character’s nature. In the following quatrain we can clearly appreciate that the author starts a comparison, she delimits these two worlds, she is aware of the fact of each one’s position: heaven and darkness.

 

[…]Thou, bethink thee, art
A guest for queens to social pageantries,
With gages from a hundred brighter eyes
Than tears even can make mine, to play thy part

of chief musician

 

The speaker feels that her lover's talent and nobility of character place him in a higher order and worship him exaggeratedly. Elizabeth identifies her lover as “A guest for queens to social pageantries”, a beautiful creation surrounded by luxury and richness, that even his “tears” which she cannot even reach are the metaphor of that world impossible for her to achieve. The author’s intention is to show the one loved in the best possible light, she uses this idealized description to stress the idea of distance between her and her beloved.

    

In contrast with her lover, she is defining herself as ‘poor’, ‘tired’, ‘wandering singer’… words full of negative connotations due to her physical state and her mood was absolutely dark at the time  she was writing, she was an invalid woman 6 years older than her suitor and with health problems. So she is reluctant to accept the affections of her suitor, unsure if his sentiments can possibly be sincere. She asks:

 

[…] What hast thou to do
With looking from the lattice-lights at me,
A poor, tired, wandering singer, singing through

 

She represents herself as a “wandering singer, singing through the dark”. The references of darkness related to the poet and the lattice lights to the suitor stress again the general mood of distance between these two characters.

 

On the other hand, the cypress tree, a symbol of mourning, represents not only Barrett's own nearness to death, but also her perpetual sadness since the loss of her mother and, even more, her closest brother, Edward, years before.  The author continues emphasizing the idea of distance using another comparison: ‘he’ has the chrism, synonym of holy or sacramental and ‘she’ the dew, seems to be connected with tears, sadness and melancholy, again she establishes a boundary between the two characters that separates them.

 

Elizabeth finishes the last line with the most pessimistic end: the ‘Death’, deliberately written in capital letter to give prominence to this word. The end is the death and for her, the death is the only way that can make equal their existence. The author is foregrounding her negative impression of the future, a tragic end that makes this love impossible.

 

[…]The dark, and leaning up a cypress tree?

The chrism is on thine head,---on mine, the dew,---
And Death must dig the level where these agree.

 

In general terms, we can understand through out the sonnet the poem's speaker mistrust about her suitor's attraction to such a gloomy creature, while at the same time, doubts her own ability to reciprocate his generous affection.

 

5. EBB connections to Romanticism

Through this poem we can realize that Elizabeth Barrett Browning is being a Romantic rather than a Victorian poet in many aspects:

 

EBB shares with Wordsworth’s "important poetic principles": writing poetry is based on personal experience, in this case the common theme of love enriching meaning through the "creative, 'egotistical' imagination”. That is writing from the individual point of view and self-reflection which very much characterized the Romantic period. The theme of ‘love’ is the only divergence point from both movements (EBB’s development of love feelings and Wordsworth philosophical sonnet, a move from the private to the public, from a 'womanly' to a 'manly' sonnet, from the sentimental to the philosophical).[vii]

 

According to the form of the sonnet we find a direct connection to Wordsworth’s spherical sonnet, which was characterized by the lack of division, removing then need of a new idea within a sonnet. The removal of the break between the octave and the sestet results is a single concept without interruptions.

 

As we have seen EBB takes the theme of distance as starting and central point of the sonnet, she describes and reflects her feelings using opposite images and metaphors with the purpose to stress the idea of distance.[viii]

 

6. Conclusion

Elizabeth Barret Browning brings a new vision to the sonnet after the romantics. She uses the traditional “love poem” form but from a feminine point of view, and her dark tone adds a new vision of love within the sonnet.

 

This sonnet provides the common theme of love but reflecting a more sensitive part of human being: the instability and insecurity that love produces.

 

The sonnet has had a powerful effect on me as reader, as these emotions come from real life experience, from universal feelings. My point is that the Victorian love represented by Elizabeth Barret Browning could also be applied to modern love.