When My Love Stands Next To Your Love: Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Sonnets from the Portuguese

Elizabeth Barrett Browning is one of the most celebrated female authors of the Victorian age, and it is not due to the fact that she was married to Robert Browning (528). Unlike Dorothy Wordsworth, who seems to be included in this book because of her connections with her brother, Barrett Browning was able to make a name for her self because of her fantastic writing. It was her husband, however, that finally convinced her to publish a collection of love sonnets she wrote for him during their courtship under the pseudonym Sonnets from the Portuguese. Sonnet 28 contains many feelings that one who is in the middle of a courtship would have. Barrett Browning begins by addressing the sonnets with quite the negative perspective, saying “[m]y letters! all dead paper, mute and white!” (1). The first line does not make her sound incredibly confident in her writing ability or her relationship that is at hand, yet later on in the sonnet she describes the meeting that Robert Browning has set up. Still, it can easily be understood that her she does not feel that her writings are worth anything while she is writing either to him, or in her personal sonnets she has written. This sonnet tells of the first time that they intend to meet, so she has not seen him for the first 28 sonnets. Her doubts are expressed through her writing. Barrett Browning seems to be afraid when she explains that her letters “seem alive and quivering / [a]gainst my tremulous hands which loose the string / [a]nd let them drop down on my knee to-night.” (2-4). After tonight, her fear for the relationship she is having can rest at ease. As she lets these letters “drop down,” she no longer has anything to worry about. Yet her “tremulous hands” express a certain amount of anxiety or fear. They are not dead, for Barrett Browning feels that they have some enormous amount of power that she is still very aware of.

She doesn’t want to give up these poems (obviously…she ends up writing forty-four altogether). The next four stanzas tell of the planned meeting between the lovers. It is their first meeting and quite an exciting event for Barrett Browning. She says “he wished to have me in his sight / [o]nce as a friend: this fixed a day in spring / to come and touch my hand” (5-7). I can see how, in this time, a letter from a man like that would be something that is very exciting. I suppose now-a-days a letter like that would be very exciting. The reader sees her doubt in her letters turn to an excitement for the future meeting for while it is a “simple thing,” she “wept for it!” (7-8). What an exciting event! When Robert Browning used the phrases “Dead, I love thee” and “I am thine,” Barrett Browning cannot hold in her happiness (9, 11). Her happiness can be found in the fact that she holds onto the letter from him so much that “its ink has paled” (11). Pardon the cliché, but how poetic! The next line seals the deal, when Barrett Browning confesses that the ink has paled “[w]ith lying at my heart that beat too fast” (12). As she clutched onto the letter, she held it close to her breast with happiness and joy. That brings to mind such a wonderful image.

The last two lines of the sonnet are the most cryptic to me. She ends with saying “[a]nd this…O Love, they words have ill availed / [i]f, what this said, I dared repeat at last” (13-14). She speaks of his words as being unhelpful if she is to repeat them. If she acts to excited, perhaps she will feel as if she is overstepping her bounds. She cannot let Robert Browning know of her excitement because that would be too unladylike. Barrett Browning wrote the sonnets without any intention for them to be seen by anyone, including Robert Browning. When she eventually showed him the sonnets, he found them to be amazing (530). She wrote all of these sonnets as a way of expressing her happiness and love for Mr. Browning before they were officially together and married, almost like a diary of their courtship.