Elizabeth Browning’s poetry

Dr. Shirley Carreira

 Biography
• Browning was the first of eleven children born
to Edward and Mary Barrett.
• She was privately educated and spent much of
her childhood in the country.
• She became ill at age 15 and consequently she
was virtually incapacitated as the result of a
spinal injury and lung ailment.
• In 1833 she translated Prometheus Bound and
received high praise.
• After moving to London, Browning began
publishing her own writings.
• Her first collection entitled The Seraphim and
Other Poems was published in 1838, and her
second volume Poems, by E. Barrett was
published in 1844.
• The second volume was also published in the
United States and included an introduction by
Edgar Allan Poe.
• After the drowning death of her brother in the
early 1840s, Browning became a virtual
recluse.
• She conducted most of her friendships through
letters.
• In 1845, Browning received a telegram from the
poet Robert Browning. The telegram read "I love
your verses with all my hear, dear Miss Barrett. I
do, as I say, love these books with all my heart -
and I love you too."
• The two met several months later and fell in love.
• They wrote to each other daily and the letters
from their courtship are a wonderful record of its
progress. During this period, Browning composed
her famous Sonnets from the Portuguese, which
were published in 1850.
• Her father opposed the relationship and they decided to
elope on September 12, 1846.
• Shortly after their marriage, Elizabeth and Robert departed
for Pisa, Italy and ultimately settled in Florence.
• In Italy, Browning regained her health and in 1849, gave
birth to the couple's only child, Robert Wiedemann Barrett.
• The Brownings lived in Florence for the next 15 years, with
occasional visits to London.
• Browning published several works based on Italian politics
entitled Casa Guidi Windows (1851) and Poems Before
Congress (1860).
• During this period, she also produced her most ambitious
work entitled Aurora Leigh (1856). The poem is a love story
that defends a woman's right to intellectual freedom.
• Her father had never forgiven her.
 Sonnets from the Portuguese
• Sonnets from the Portuguese, written from 1845 to 1846 and first
published in 1850, is a collection of forty-four love sonnets written
by Elizabeth Barrett Browning.
• The poems largely chronicle the period leading up to her 1846
marriage to Robert Browning.
• The collection was acclaimed and popular even in the poet's
lifetime and it remains so today.
• Elizabeth was initially hesitant to publish the poems, feeling that
they were too personal. However, Robert insisted that they were
the best sequence of English-language sonnets since Shakespeare's
time and urged her to publish them.
• To offer the couple some privacy, she decided that she might
publish them under a title disguising the poems as translations of
foreign sonnets. Therefore, the collection was first to be known as
Sonnets from the Bosnian, until Robert suggested that she change
their imaginary original language to Portuguese, probably after his
nickname for her: "my little Portuguese."
 Sonnet XLIII
Imperfect rhymes
(slant or off-rhymes)

How do I love thee? Let me count the ways. Her love exceedes over the extent of the
I love thee to the depth and breadth and height widest search she can endure in search of
My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight God
For the ends of Being and ideal Grace. He has become so necessary as the
I love thee to the level of everyday's daily needs of a human being, like air,
Most quiet need, by sun and candle-light. water and food.
I love thee freely, as men strive for Right; Her love is unconditional and therefore
I love thee purely, as they turn from Praise. free. It is her choice, because she feels
her love is right. It is also a pure and
humble love that does not require
I love thee with the passion put to use retribution.
In my old griefs, and with my childhood's faith. In the sestet, the speaker now looks to
I love thee with a love I seemed to lose the past and compares her new found
passions with those of the old griefs (her
With my lost saints,--I love thee with the breath, father oppression, her disease etc.).
Smiles, tears, of all my life!--and, if God choose, But she also says that her former religious
I shall but love thee better after death. feelings are now given to her lover. And if
God grants it, she'll carry on loving him
even more after her own death.
 Sonnet XXVIII
The speaker is looking at the love letters from her beloved and reacting to each
stage in the development of their relationship. She has taken her bundle of letters in
her hands. Despite the fact they are
My letters! all dead paper, mute and white! only “dead paper”, they contain a
And yet they seem alive and quivering love story and become alive. Her
Against my tremulous hands which loose the string trembling hands make them
"quiver," after having untied the
And let them drop down on my knee to-night, string that holds the letters
This said,--he wished to have me in his sight together .
The speaker begins to report what
Once, as a friend: this fixed a day in spring each letter says. The first one she
To come and touch my hand . . . a simple thing, selects tells us that in the beginning,
the two experienced friendship, and
Yet I wept for it!--this, . . . the paper's light. . . she was delighted that he simply
Said, Dear, I love thee; and I sank and quailed wanted to see her. In the next letter
As if God's future thundered on my past. she selects, he tells her that he wants
to come and "touch [her] hand," and
This said, I am thine--and so its ink has paled this day was "in spring.“
With lying at my heart that beat too fast. The next letter contains a
And this . . . O Love, thy words have ill availed declaration of love that makes
her feel God has changed her
If, what this said, I dared repeat at last! future. The following letter tells
The final letter excites the speaker so much that she cannot bring her that he was hers.
herself to repeat any part of it or even report a hint of what it
says.
 Together for good
Against all the expectations they lived one the most passionate and inspirational
love stories of all time.
 The cry of the children
• The poem entitled The Cry of The Children is a poem
written by Elizabeth Barrett Browning in 1842.
• It is a poem about children exploitation.
• Elizabeth also had concern in social injustice, slavery,
and women’s right.
• She was born in England in 1806 and lived until 1861,
which is Victorian Era. In this era, the Industrial
Revolution caused major changes in agriculture,
manufacturing, mining, transport, and technology
and had significant effects on the social,
economic, and cultural conditions which started in
England and spread to the world.
 1st stanza The first stanza of this poem
focus on how much children
cry. Their suffering is
emphasized by comparisons to
• DO ye hear the children weeping, O my brothers, animals.
People were (and still are by
• Ere the sorrow comes with years? most) valued as more
• They are leaning their young heads against their important than animals, and
Elizabeth brings in a hint of
mothers, role reversal. Why should
• And that cannot stop their tears. animals be free to play and be
happy, while children are
• The young lambs are bleating in the meadows, suffering?
• The young birds are chirping in the nest, The poet is drawing attention
to what industrialization is
• The young fawns are playing with the shadows, doing to the children in cities.
• The young flowers are blowing toward the west: The repeated reference to
‘brothers’ could suggest that it
• But the young, young children, O my brothers, is because men are in power
that this is happening.
• They are weeping bitterly!
They are weeping in the playtime of the others,
• In the country of the free.
 2nd stanza
• Do you question the young children in the sorrow This stanza tells about the suffering
of little children who are forced to
• Why their tears are falling so? work when they are so young.
• The old man may weep for his to-morrow Children are very distressed by
• Which is lost in Long Ago; their plight, so they cry every day.
Old people would cry as they wish
• The old tree is leafless in the forest, some more time of life.
• The old year is ending in the frost, Everything that is old in nature has
a past story.
• The old wound, if stricken, is the sorest, People are not able to see the
• The old hope is hardest to be lost: children’s suffering.
Fatherland (instead of
• But the young, young children, O my brothers, motherland)= points out to a land
• Do you ask them why they stand governed by men who seem to be
• Weeping sore before the bosoms of their mothers, insensitive.

• In our happy Fatherland?

 3rd stanza The faces of the children looked
pale sunken on this suffering and
their faces looked sad every day.
• They look up with their pale and sunken faces,
Children say that the work is too
• And their looks are sad to see, hard for them, they are exausted.
• For the man’s hoary anguish draws and presses
It is too early for them to die.
• Down the cheeks of infancy;
• “Your old earth,” they say, “is very dreary, The old ones should give the answer
why the children are weeping,
• Our young feet,” they say, “are very weak; because they are the people who
have power to stop suffering.
• Few paces have we taken, yet are weary—
• Our grave-rest is very far to seek:
• Ask the aged why they weep, and not the children,
• For the outside earth is cold,
• And we young ones stand without, in our
bewildering,
• And the graves are for the old.”
 4th stanza
• “True,” say the children, “it may happen As they are forced to work from a very
tender age, in dreadful working
• That we die before our time:
conditions, they know that they would
• Little Alice died last year, her grave is shapen die before their time.
• Like a snowball, in the rime.
Little Alice symbolizes all children
• We looked into the pit prepared to take her: working in mines and factories.
• Was no room for any work in the close clay! She died in the pit where she worked
• From the sleep wherein she lieth none will wake her, in a mine and didn’t have a proper
burial.
• Crying, ‘Get up, little Alice! it is day.’
• If you listen by that grave, in sun and shower, The other children say it is as if Alice is
sleeping. They even see that smiles
• With your ear down, little Alice never cries:
grow in Alice’s eyes, because she
• Could we see her face, be sure we should not know finally finds relief in her death.
her,
• For the smile has time for growing in her eyes: Death is the only way to get rid of
suffering. Thus, the children say it is
• And merry go her moments, lull’d and still’d in good for them if they can die in young
• The shroud by the kirk-chime. age.
• It is good when it happens,” say the children,
These children who die a silent and a
• “That we die before our time.” tragic death are blessed souls as death
is better than their living conditions.