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Elizabeth Barrett, Elizabeth Browning, Joy, Love, Poems, Robert Browning, Sonnets from the Portuguese
In the fall the grass begins to fade, turns brown, and withers away with the wind. Winter comes and covers the world in a blinding white frost. All is cold and dead. Life seems to be no more, and then in the shortest of days, the sky slowly transforms. The murky gray void melts away and begins to reveal the gentle blue radiance of springtime. Such was the life of Elizabeth Barrett.
In the Foreword to the book, The Love Poems of Elizabeth and Robert Browning (pgs. ix-xii), written by Louis Untermeyer, we read the following:
“The story of the Brownings is one of the strangest love stories of literature. Elizabeth Barrett was a thirty-nine-year-old invalid when Robert Browning, six years younger than she, stormed impetuously into her life. […]
Born in Durham, March 6, 1806, the eldest of eleven children, Elizabeth was extraordinarily precocious. […] At fifteen she injured her spine, either by a fall from a horse or by a strain caused by tightening the saddle girths. A persistent cough kept her confined in London with occasional visits to the seashore. The death of a beloved brother by drowning and her father’s jealous possessiveness plunged her into a half real, half-enforced melancholy. Approaching her forties, she seemed destined for a life of shrouded invalidism. […]
Just [then] Robert Browning was brought to her home. He was already in love with her, even before he saw her. She had praised some of his lines in a poem, ‘Lady Geraldine’s Courtship,’ and his first letter to her began, ‘I love your verses with all my heart, dear Miss Barrett.’ Then, after a page or two of literary compliments, he added boyishly, ‘And I love you too.’ In spite of her father’s disapproval, the young poet practically forced his way into the forbidding house, courted Elizabeth swiftly and tempestuously, and challenged the very authority of her father. To counteract Browning’s growing influence, Mr. Barrett made plans to move the entire family to the country. Browning was now aroused to act; on September 12, 1846, he persuaded Elizabeth to slip from the house and marry him secretly in Marylebone Church. A week later […], the married poets crossed the channel, passed to Paris, to Pisa, and finally to Florence where they began a new life.
In Italy Mrs. Browning made an almost miraculous recovery. In spite of a frail body, she grew almost robust; at forty-three she gave birth to a son. Husband and wife luxuriated in a climate which gave them energy as well as happiness. Theirs was a long and industrious idyl.”
The hopes of spring blossom into the joys of summer. Such were the lives of Elizabeth and Robert Browning. Below are three of my favorite love poems by Elizabeth Browning from her short work entitled, Sonnets from the Portuguese:
I I thought once how Theocritus had sung Of the sweet years, the dear and wished for years, Who each one in a gracious hand appears To bear a gift for mortals, old or young: And, as I mused it in his antique tongue, I saw, in gradual vision through my tears, The sweet, sad years, the melancholy years, Those of my own life, who by turns had flung A shadow across me. Straightaway I was ‘ware, So weeping, how a mystic Shape did move Behind me, and drew me backward by the hair; And a voice said in mastery, while I strove,– “Guess now who holds thee?”—“Death,” I said. But, there, The silver answer rang,–“Not Death, but Love.” XVI And yet, because thou overcomest so, Because thou art more noble and like a king, Thou canst prevail against my fears and fling Thy purple round me, till my heart shall grow Too close against thine heart henceforth to know How it shook when alone. Why, conquering May prove as lordly and complete a thing In lifting upward, as in crushing low! And as a vanquished soldier yields his sword To one who lifts him from the bloody earth, Even so, Beloved, I at last record, Here ends my strife. If thou invite me forth, I rise above abasement at the word. Make thy love larger to enlarge my worth. XX Beloved, my Beloved, when I think That thou wast in the world a year ago, What time I sat alone here in the snow And saw no footprint, heard the silence sink No moment at thy voice, but, link by link, Went counting all my chains as if that so They never could fall off at any blow Struck by thy possible hand,–why, thus I drink Of life’s great cup of wonder! Wonderful, Never to feel thee thrill the day or night With personal act or speech,–nor ever cull Some prescience of thee with the blossoms white Thou sawest growing! Atheists are as dull, Who cannot guess God’s presence out of sight.