Earlier Western writers used to make the claim that for a poem to be a ‘true poem’ it must admit the possibility of death.
You find this in the writing of Spanish Poet Federico Garcia Lorca, and a great many British and European poets of the 20th Century.
There are many points here that need clarification, here. The main two are –
-what is a ‘true poem’?
– what does ‘the possibility of death’ mean in reference to poetry?
These are both ways of valuing, of giving relevance. They are ways of putting a poem into a system of importance, immediacy. This in turn reflects a temporal need for engaging with contemporary political and cultural concerns, and for pressured expression.
Not many lived up to the injunction, of course, but the point is that it was an aspirational claim.
A ‘true poem’ was a poem that worked wholly as a competent and professional piece, as well as having the emotional and psychological impact of its subject and its parts. It was a poem that could stand by itself, beyond autobiography. What is implied here, also, that it is a poem that would have wide cultural relevance. How wide that is/was is another matter. This was still the period of Western cultural hegemony.
The ‘possibility of death’ was a way of saying that the poem addressed and also expressed wholly contemporary fears and dreads. Its competence was its ability to transcend, to go beyond, these fears and dreads, into a possibility of redemption or even calm.
– The Norse skald Egill Skallagrimsson, in Egill’s Saga, wrote a series of what he termed ‘neck verses’. (see Ian Crockatt’s The Song Weigher: complete poems of Egill Skallagrimsson, tenth century Viking and Skald (Arc, 2017).
In an earlier skirmish he had killed Erik Bloodaxe’s son. He later found himself forced to seek shelter and sanctuary with the family.
His wife demanded his death. What saved his life, so the saga goes, was his renown as a professional skald, and as such his work was highly valued. He was able to write a series of new-form verses for the occaision.
This, of course, could well be a bragging, a fiction engrandising his abilities and person.
But we read hear the valuing of the work, of putting it into a greater system of relevance than personal expression.
Earlier generations of writers to this, called on the valuation of God, that a poem had to be worthy of addressing God. Of course, very few were, and so that failure to do so reflected the failure of mankind to live up to religion’s demands, and instead to address our basic humanity as the true one, and the calling on God or valuation through reference to God as aspirational and ultimately beyond human competence.
But this valuing concentrates expression, energises content, and captures the relationships between competence and aspiration.
Both of these are found in the Sonnets from the Portuguese.
1
The first point to be made about the Sonnets from the Portuguese, is that they were not… from the Portuguese. Nor were they translations from other literatures.
Wiki tells us:
Browning proposed that she claim their source was Portuguese, probably because of her admiration for Camões and Robert’s nickname for her: “my little Portuguese”. The title is also a reference to Les Lettres Portugaises
The title was suggested, strongly, by Robert Browning as a publication title. He had learned bitterly from his own experience. His first published book, Pauline, an emotional autobiography, had been savaged.
This is not the same as the ‘telling it slant’, of Emily Dickinson, but of deflection.
The Sonnets from the Portuguese were autobiographical. They were originally written as personal responses, private, and yet with professional competence and skill.
The title eschewed personal claims, however, and put them in the realm of public expression. As far as the chosen form, language tropes of the period, and spheres of reference allowed, thy were recognisable and accessible, of their time. They went beyond the abilities of the accepted codes and modes of expression, however, and owned their own place in the canon of majorly male writers
The series charts a growth in awareness, from a state of apparent utter dejection, spiritual or/and existential, to one of uplift, fullness, emotional renewal.
The form used is that of the Italian/Petrachan sonnet: ABBA ABBA CDCDCD.
This falls into an octave followed by sextet. If we look at Sonnet 32 we can see how this works:
The first time that the sun rose on thine oath
To love me, I looked forward to the moon
To slacken all these bonds that seemed too soon
And quickly tied to make a lasting troth.
Quick-loving hearts, I thought, may quickly loathe;
And, looking on myself, I seemed not one
For such man’s love! – more like an out of tune
Worn viol, a good singer would be wroth
To spoil his song with, and which, snatched in haste,
Is laid down at the first ill-sounding note.
I did not wrong myself so, but I placed
A wrong note on thee. For perfect strains may float
‘Neath master-hands, from instruments defaced, –
And great souls, at one stroke, may do and dote.
The change-over from octet to sextet is seamless. The ‘turn’ takes the tone of a critique of itself, it answers objections, off-sets contrary arguments. What it does is state the case for the legitimacy of the state of mind/being, and of its depicted working-through to a place of resolution.
It may not be comfortable reading at time, especially for our own sensibilities, but the sonnets demand to be taken on their own terms.
We can read the sonnets as they are in themselves, but we wrong them not to read them as personalised expression, as autobiographical.
The self-doubt, for instance, and then the self-defamation. Why so? Are they over-stated, as a device for exploring responses to the experience?
At the time of writing, 1845-6, she was aged thirty-nine to forty, unmarried, and long an invalid, cut off from ‘society’ and shut in with few though devoted friends, an over-protective very Victorian father, and her books. Not forgetting her devoted maid. Her pet dog, Flush (who cleaned up after him?).
Her age, as well as her long illness, weighed heavily against her as a woman in the marriage mart of society. Self-doubt melded with self-blame (her favourite brother she had begged to visit her by the sea in convalesce, had drowned on his visit. For which she blamed herself).
The tone of her writing was becoming very sombre; after the hugely prolific writing phase of 1841 to 44 she was bound to hit a rocky time.
Stalled, and ill, when out of the blue came this younger writer to her door. He had not the acclaim of readers that she had just gained; he had been publishing as long, but the public did not warm to his works very readily.
And yet this lack of self-esteem in her writing was one aspect of the required ‘demure demeanour’ required of women of the period, especially women of standing. Her father was on the wealthy side of the very strict social divide.
What I am asking here, is how we now read the extremes of emotion she portrays here, in the sequence as a whole, and in this poem.
This is one of the great strengths of the writing, that she can, indeed, express that range of emotion.
It is this interiority, the closetted atmosphere, that gives authenticity, and raises the sonnets above facility, above experiments in form, language, and ‘playing the writing game’ .
The self she portrays in her writing is how she envisaged her real self. We, as outsiders, would probably see a very different person. But that vulnerable opening, admittance, to the inner self these sonnets allow, was a huge act of revelation from one so closed off, and shut away.
The self she saw was the image through which this sequence of sonnets came.
Sonnet 7
The face of all the world is changed, I think
Since first I heard the footsteps of thy soul
Move still, oh, still, beside me, as they stole
Betwixt me and the dreadful outer brink
Of obvious death, where I, who thought to sink,
Was caught up into love, and taught the whole
Of life in a new rhythm. The cup of dole
God gave for baptism, I am fain to drink,
And praise its sweetness, Sweet, with thee anear.
The names of country, heaven, are changed away
For where thou art, or shalt be, there or here;
And this … this lute and song … loved yesterday
(The singing angels know) are only dear,
Because thy name moves right in what they say.
Two long sentences, joined together by the shorter central one, lines second half of seven, through to line nine. She expresses the effects of the emotions, and also discriminates between them.
Throughout the series she is constantly being overtaken by the emotions of the courtship, and also reigning herself in. She denies – not the power of the love, but her own deserving.
All her writing charts this growing into herself as a person in her writing: we hear her distinctive tones and moods through the conventions of the accepted tone, range, and subject matter, of Victorian women’s writing.
These conventions constitute an attempt to gloss over the very distinctive voices that were becoming heard in women’s writing of the period. And that glossing is itself an attitude of publishers and reviewers, part of their assumed role of tutors in sensibility, morality.
And then here was the strong current of women’s writing stirring up the calm waters of the Empire’s (sluggish?) seas.
She wrote many other sonnets around this period.
What followed was a whirlwind of emotion, and, as we see in the sonnets above, her strong hand handling the reins, of courtship, marriage, elopement, Italy, and motherhood.
Then came the great poems: Casa Guidi Windows; Aurora Leigh.
There is the question of whether we can approve psychopathology for the sake of the work. It follows a very fine line.
The character of Aurora Leigh was not an invalid as her author, but a woman exploring and using her power and position as a woman to gain self-determination. She struggled to support herself, and was willing to struggle.
The romantic gain at the end… I was unhappy with. Was it a kindness to her reader’s expectation of a kind of happy ending, a la Jane Eyre?
Is the argument that the spirit was allowed to emerge from the maimed man, when earlier the physicality of his aggressive masculinity was blinding him to his true nature?
As the generous introduction to the Wordsworth edition of Collected Poems of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, by Dr Sally Minogue (2015), draws to our attention Elizabeth Barrett Brownings’ used explicit breastfeeding imagery within Aurora Leigh.
She had not the Victorian physical fastidiousness that we have come to expect of the era.
She ended her sequence:
Beloved, thou hast brought me many flowers,
Plucked in the garden, all the summer through
And winter, and it seemed as if they grew
In this close room, nor missed the sun and showers.
So, in the like name of that love of ours,
Take back these thoughts which here unfolded too,
And which on warm and cold days I withdrew
From my heart’s ground. Indeed, those beds and bowers
Be overgrown with bitter weeds and rue,
And wait thy weeding; yet there’s eglantine,
Here’s ivy! – take them, as I used to do
Thy flowers, and keep them where they shall not pine.
Instruct thine eyes to keep their colours true,
And tell thy soul, their roots are left in mine.
The self-doubt is still there, but meliorated by the certainty of being wholly loved.
I admit to being rather taken with all the flowers. The two named, her own, are eglantine/honeysuckle, and Ivy. In Victorian flower language we have: ‘generous and devoted affection’, and ‘Fidelity. Marriage’ (see https://fiveminutehistory.com/the-language-of-flowers-the-secret-victorian-code-of-love/).
Her own shaded and shadowy self, combined with the physically blinded, aggressive male of Aurora Leigh: all failed people? Yet these were the characters also of Robert Brownings ‘dramas’. These can be read as attempts to round out the empire-builders and hugely successful characters of Victorian expansionism. The reality behind the images; the ugly inside of the statues.
The great foundations of Western thought are found wanting in Robert Browning’s poems. If not ‘found wanting’, then too capable of abuse. The casuistry of his characters shows a great wasting of talents, of knowledge, education, for a selfishness, a littleness of mind.
Without the aspiration, the struggle for expression, for wholeness, the poems would appear sentimental, vapid, an example of a facility with language.
Did she really mean death when she wrote of it?
There are many kinds of death; I think we can safely say she felt she was dying inside. To dismiss that as a personal crisis-experience would be a terrible arrogance.
To come back to the Sonnets: the discovery of oneself as loved by another, though, not out of duty, but romantically, in the body, and wholly, is all expressed in this sequence.
It is no small thing.
For that the sonnets won fame, were revered highly, and deserve our appreciation still.
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