Sophia Eckley, who exploited Elizabeth, commissioned Michele
Gordigiani to paint the portraits of Elizabeth Barrett and
Robert Browning, now in London's National Portrait Gallery,
Harriet Hosmer sculpted their 'Clasped Hands',
Robert
commissioned Giorgio Mignaty to paint the salone of Casa Guidi
as it had been when Elizabeth wrote in it. These, with the
constant re-publication of the Sonnets from the Portuguese, present the
public picture of the Brownings' wedded love. But beneath the
surface another and opposite reality lurked.
Michele Gordigiani's portrait shows Elizabeth with dark Creole
features. Her family were slave owners in Jamaica, owning the
great Cinnamon Hill plantation. Her grandmother returned home
there following her marriage to Charles Moulton and her children
therefore took the name of their maternal grandfather, Barrett
Moulton Barrett, Moulton being a slave-dealer and himself part
Black. Edward, Samuel and their sister were sent to England for
their education, 'Pinkie' dying soon after of tuberculosis.
Edward married into another slave-trading family, this time
based on the Tyne, and Elizabeth and Edward were their
first-born children of a total of twelve, for whom Edward
Barrett Moulton Barrett constructed a Turkish-style palace
plonked down in the Malvern countryside, and which was furnished
by him with a magnificent library. Elizabeth and Edward studied
under a brilliant Irish tutor, McSwiney, who taught them Greek
and Latin, Elizabeth also studying Hebrew.(1) It was to
Elizabeth that fell the task of climbing out of the stigma of
their ancestry through her learning, through her poetry, through
her fame, dragging her family with her. But she, like her aunt,
was afflicted with tuberculosis and given the typical treatment
of laudanum.
John Kenyon used to say 'In Jamaica we are all cousins',
intermarriage to protect the heirs entail of large plantations
being typical. Such as that arranged to be between Romney Leigh
of Leigh Hall and Aurora Leigh in the eponymous poem dedicated
to John Kenyon.The West Indian merchant families, when in
London, particularly congregated in the St Marylebone Parish, in
Wimpole Street and Devonshire Place. To his dinner parties John
Kenyon would invite William Wordsworth, Walter Savage Landor,
Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Moulton Barrett, though
not the last two to the same party. Robert's father's mother's
family, the Tittles, had had Black and Jewish roots in Jamaica,
then moved to St Kitts. Robert's father obsessively drew images
of the Islands' inhabitants. Robert published Paracelsus, his poem about
the inventor of laudanum, in 1835. Elizabeth was asked in 1844
to fill up a volume of her poems, which she promptly did with Lady Geraldine's Courtship,
in which the low-born poet Bertram is wooed by the aristocratic
golden-ringletted Lady Geraldine. In one scene, in Sussex, they
are reading poetry together of
. . . the pastoral parts of Spenser -
or the subtle interflowings
Found in Petrarch's sonnets - here's the book
- the leaf is folded down!
Or at times a modern volume, - Wordsworth's
solemn-thoughted idyl,
Howitt's ballad-dew, or Tennyson's enchanted
reverie, -
Or from Browning some 'Pomegranate,' which,
if cut deep down the middle,
Shows a heart within blod-tinctured, of a
veined humanity! -
Robert, coming home from Europe found the volume given his
family by John Kenyon and so dashed off his first love letter to
her and thus began the courtship to be followed by their
clandestine marriage amd elopement to Italy in 1845. Years
later, their son Pen Browning, Robert Barrett Browning, would
publish their love letters for these are exquisite, as exquisite
as are the Sonnets. But one day, during that courtship, Robert
had cattily spoke against women writing novels, writing sonnets.
Elizabeth, who had already begun the famous cycle, did not tell
him of their existence, though she quietly continued the task.
It was not until after their son was born at Casa Guidi and
after they had gone with the new-born Pen to the coolness of
Bagni di Lucca when, one morning, Robert said something positive
about women's writing and Elizabeth quietly said she had once
written some things for him, and gave him these poems. Robert
wrote later, after her death, about 'that strange, heavy crown,
that wreath of sonnets, put on me one morning unawares, three
years after it had been twined - all this delay, because I
happened early to say something against putting one's loves into
verse: then again, I said something else on the other side, one
evening at Lucca'.(2)
He immediately saw their publishability. Together they sought a
title for the work, she wanting them half-hidden as translations
'from the Bosnian'. He, instead, being now EBB's literary agent,
decided upon 'Sonnets from the Portuguese', in reference to her
Creole darkness and to her similarity to the great Portuguese
epic poet's love, Caterina, of whom she had written in 'Caterina
to Camoens, dying in his absence abroad, and referring to the
poem in which he recorded the sweetness of her eyes' (1844). But
that title Robert gave the cycle carried with it also the nuance
of the infamous pornographic 'Letters from a Portuguese Nun'.
Later, the publication date would be called into question by the
bibliographic forger, Thomas J. Wise (1858-1937), who pre-dated
his 'Reading Sonnets' to 1847, though the Sonnets from the Portuguese
had received their initial publication under Robert's auspices
in 1850, along with EBB's Sonnet on 'Hiram Powers' Greek Slave'.
Somehow, here, the ground work is being laid for the scandal at
the heart of The Ring and the
Book concerning the letters by, or forged as if written
by, Pompilia to Caponsacchi.
The sonnets had always been published in Robert's edited version
of them. My editon for Penguin returns to the manuscript, now in
the British Library, that Elizabeth so shyly, with such hurt,
once gave to Robert at Bagni di Lucca, and which replicates its
Greek-like punctuation.(3)
To read the Sonnets in their own right, stripped of the Rialto
of mercantilism, is to find illness, learning and love
passionately harnessed within Petrarch's fourteen lines to
achieve magnificence and healing. Elizabeth, clearly, has been
at death's door. Instead, it is opened to let in, she believes,
love. The first sonnets celebrate this miracle. Sonnet I, 'I
thought once how Theocritus had sung', takes us to a long ago
Sicilian poet writing Idylls on the loves of shepherds and
shepherdesses.(4)
Elizabeth had read him in the schoolroom with her now-dead
brother, Edward. We find ourselves translated from English into
Greek, from modernity to antiquity, then as suddenly yanked back
by the hair to this moment in time where the transformation is
from death to love. Sonnet II, 'But only three in all God's
universe - ', also alludes to Edward's death so nearly prompting
Elizabeth's, but this time in the Judaeo-Christian context,
speaking of the presence of three, Robert, Elizabeth, God as
their witness, though also speaking of the death-weights, coins,
Rule Britannia pennies laid on Elizabeth's dead staring eyes to
close them, then continuing into Apocalyptic imagery such as she
had used in the sickroom drama she had written on the death of
the soul, Psyche Apocalypté,
following her brother's death at Torquay, but here as the
triumphal cosmic wedding song, recalling Spenser, Shakespeare
and Donne. Sonnet III, 'Unlike are, unlike, O princely Heart!',
renounces Robert to the world of social pageantry, accepting her
own likely dying, her 'leaning up a cypress tree',(5) but it had begun by speaking of their
two guardian angels as the two Cherubim whose wings enshroud the
Ark and which symbolize the presence of God, an image repeated
in Sonnet XXIII. Sonnet IV, 'Thou hast thy calling to some
palace floor', continues this abandoning of Robert to the joys
of this world rather than the sorrows of hers.
Sonnet V, 'I lift my heavy heart up solemnly', is particularly
profound. Elizabeth as a child with her younger brother had read
Aeschylus. Here she imagines herself as Electra at her father's
tomb, met not by her brother Orestes, her brother Edward, but by
her poet friend Robert. She counsels him to stand farther off,
at a distance from the remnants of the flames.(6) Interestingly,
Elizabeth's maid, Lily Wilson, who would accompany them to
Italy, then had two sons, naming these Orestes and Pylades. Had
she had a daughter she was to be named 'Electra'. Elizabeth
translated the Agamemnon.
Later, Robert would do so.(7) And not so well. Sonnet VI, 'Go from me. Yet I
feel that I shall stand', continues that admonition. While
Sonnet VII, 'The face of all the world is changed I think',
begins to admit hope, the sense of the footsteps on the stair.
Yet Sonnets VIII, 'What can I give thee back, o liberal', and
IX, 'Can it be right to give what I can give', plunge back into
prohibition.
Sonnet X, 'Yet love, mere love, is beautiful indeed', again
plays at the deepest level with Elizabeth's knowledge of Hebrew
and of Robert with his 'Bells and Pomegranates' as High Priest
Aaron, whose wife was named Elizabeth. In this sonnet she openly
proclaims her love for him, and speaks of it as light and fire,
as when a cedar temple burns or flax. She knows that the
priestly garb of white linen could not be washed and when soiled
was turned into wicks for the lamps in the Jerusalem Temple.(8) Sonnet XI, 'And therefore if to love
can be desert', slips back into renunciation, likewise Sonnets
XII, 'Indeed this very Love, which is my boast', and XIII, 'And
wilt though have me fashion into speech'. But the image of the
torch dropped at his feet recalls again the classic world where
the downcast torch symbolizes sexual satiety as at a consummated
wedding, or death as at a funeral.(9) Sonnets XIV, 'If thou must love me, let it be
for nought', and XV, 'Accuse me not, beseech thee, that I wear',
remind one of a newborn dragonfly, its wings strengthening and
glistening in the sunlight. Likewise XVI, 'And yet . . because
thou overcomest so', and XVII, 'My poet, thou canst touch on all
the notes'. Indeed, all these sonnets are about the choice she
must make now between death and love. In them she creates
mandalas of healing, incorporating the entire universe and their
private lives joined together in her sick room, so carefully
sealed against drafts and London's polluted air.
Sonnets XVIII, 'I never gave a lock of hair away' and XIX, 'The
soul's Rialto hath its merchandise' speak of her gift to Robert
of a lock of her hair and his in exchange. She speaks of herself
autobiographically, drawing her own self-portrait, her head to
one side (the result of the childhood tuberculosis to her spine
for which pain she took laudanum), her hair in spaniel locks
that she had thought would have been cut first by the funeral
shears (when she died sixteen years later, Robert was to cut
both her hair and Pen's, making his dead wife, his living son,
unrecognizable, and not give any of the locks away). She speaks
obliquely of his laurel-clad locks as purply black as those of
the classic poet Corinne who bested Pindar in competing with her
odes (EBB's poetry, particularly in its similes, plays games
with gender reversal). She lays Robert's lock of hair in a
locket at her heart, expecting it to be found by those who dress
her body for the tomb.
So often in these Sonnets, III, IV, VIII, XII, XXI, she
speaks of Robert as regal, as princely, as clad in purple robes.
Which he will be in Pen's portrait of him in his Oxford gown and
in a Savonarola chair.(10)
In Sonnet XXIV the paradoxes are ratcheted up unbearably - and
laughingly. She laughs at the idea of lying dead and mouldering
- and being close to Heaven, all of which she now willingly
exchanges in this Rialto for Robert's love here on earth. By
XXV, she is speaking of love and 'amreeta' in one and the same
breath, the Indian sacred draft but also the word used by her
for laudanum which she knows Robert knows, their courtship being
through his Paracelsus,
inventer of the same. In Sonnets XXVII, 'I lived with visions
for all my company' and XVIII, 'My own beloved, who hast lifted
me', she speaks of her drugged spiritualistic days being now
replaced by love, 'That Love, as strong as Death', a phrase
William Holman Hunt will himself sculpt on his wife Fanny's tomb
besides Elizabeth's in the 'English' Cemetery. The words are
taken from the Song of Solomon 8.6-7.
At Sonnet XXIX, 'My letters! - all dead paper , . . mute and
white! - ' the two genres cross over, indeed, they were
secretly simultaneous, the letters with their declarations of
love, the sonnets. Sonnet XXX, 'I think of thee! - my thoughts
do twine & bud', speaks of herself as the wild vine that
chokes the palm tree that is Robert, both allowing nature to
thrive but also fearing her deathly presence. Sonnet XXXI, 'I
see thine image through my tears tonight', has her be the
acolyte at the altar - who faints on the stairs, hearing
as he does so the Hebrew 'Amen'. Sonnet XXXII, 'Thou comest! -
all is said without a word! - ', gives us the mood swings to
depression, doubt and despair ending as it does with thoughts
'Like callow birds left desert to the skies'. Sonnet XXXIII,
?the first time that the sun rose on thine oath To love me',
continues that doubting. Then Sonnets XXXIV, 'Yes, call me by
my pet-name . . . ', and XXXV, 'With the same heart, I said,
I'll answer thee', truly admit the lovers into intimacy. 'Ba'
was the name, matched by Edward's 'Bro'. She now shares that
secret name by which her dead mother and brother had called
her with Robert. It is also the name of the soul bird of the
Egyptians that cannot return to the tomb if there is no name,
no portrait.(11)
Sonnet XXXVI, 'If I leave all for thee, wilt thou exchange And be all to me?' gives us
their talk of elopement, that plotting and planning in secret
from her father. Sonnet XXXVII, 'When we met first and loved,
I did not build Upon the event with marble', gives her fears
that their hands (those sculpted by Harriet Hosmer) will
unclasp, that the kiss will fall (as it did in Robert's
telling of her dying) between them. Sonnet XXXVIII, 'Pardon,
oh pardon, that my soul should make', ends with the exquisite
simile
As if a shipwrecked pagan,
safe in port,
His guardian seagod to commemorate,
Should set a sculptured porpoise . . . gills
a-snort,
And vibrant tail, . . . within the
temple=gate.
Sonnet XXXIX, 'First time he kissed me, he but only kissed',
bears witness to their bethrothal - or affair. Perhaps
Robert's comment against women's writing is from fear of
compromising letters, such as would later be used against his
widower father in a breach of promise suit. Sonnet XL,
'Because thou hast the power and own'st the grace', is
modelled on Shakespeare's powerful Sonnet XCIV, 'They that
have the power to hurt and will do none'. Sonnet XLI, 'Oh yes!
- they love through all this world of ours! . -', speaks, as
will Sonnet XLIV, 'Beloved, thou hast brought me many
flowers', of nosegays from Robert's New Cross. She speaks of
betrayals by Moslems and Giaours and of the Odyssey's Polyphemus
whose love turns to hate. Sonnet XLII acknowledges in this
private verse her fame as a great though imprisoned poet,
thanking her fans and asking that they salute this enduring
love.
Sonnet XLIII, 'How do I love thee? Let me count the ways',
sets my teeth on edge as much as does Shakespeare's CXVI, 'Let
me not to the marriage of true minds'. Far preferable to it is
Sonnet XVII, '"My future will not copy fair my past . . "', in the British Library manuscript sequence, which was not published there in the
Brownings' edition of the 1850 Poems but apart from the other Sonnets from the Portuguese.
Here, Elizabeth picks up the theme of Aaron's staff as Joseph
of Arimathea's pilgrim one budding with green leaves. The
sonnet cycle, though suppressed, has wrought its healing and
her freedom.
The Sonnets from the
Portuguese for decades were the only poems of
Elizabeth Barrett Browning that were kept in print - and they
were translated into numerous languages, Portuguese, Spanish,
French, Italian, German, Czech, Hngarian.(12) But she wrote
other sonnets as well, besides this cycle, always about
personal autobiographical events, using, as she had observed,
'the subtle interflowings Found in
Petrarch's sonnets'. She defied
her friend Wordsworth's sonnet on the sonnet, 'Nuns fret not
at their convent's narrow rooms'. When she and Robert came to
Florence they visited Hiram Powers' studio and there saw his
Greek Slave, a Christian woman auctioned off by Muslim Turks.
This caused her to write against that anguish she experienced
in her Wimpole Street sickroom shut up by her previously
slave-owning father, who had earlier at Hope End built them a
Turkish seraglio complete with crescents and minarets, that
anguish she had written of in her Sonnets from the Portuguese, now seeing this
bondage as pervading the globe, reaching to western America,
to eastern Russia.
They say Ideal Beauty cannot
enter
The house of anguish. On the threshold
stands
An alien Image with the shackled hands,
Called the Greek Slave: as if the sculptor
meant her,
(That passionless perfection which he lent
her,
Shadowed, not darkened, where the sill
expands)
To, so, confront men's crimes in different
lands,
With man's ideal sense. Pierce to the
centre,
Art's fiery finger! - and break up erelong
The serfdom of this world! Appeal, fair
stone,
From God's pure heights of beauty, against
man's wrong!
Catch up in thy divine face, not alone
East griefs but west, - and strike and shame
the strong,
By thunders of white silence, overthrown!
In this she picks up the theme from her girlhood of her love
of Lord Byron and his poetry for the freedom of Greece, and
her classical studies in the schoolroom with Bro, knowing that
Greek poets wrote epigrams for statues to say in ekphrasis. Here Elizabeth
becomes Euripedes' Alcestis'
Alcestis, becomes Shakespeare's Winter's Tale's Hermione, becomes alive and
free.
We do not find sonnets among her earlier poetry. It is in the
volume of Poems,
1844, that she first published in the genre, beginning with
another ekphrasis,
her lines 'On a Portrait of Wordsworth by B.R. Haydon', a
portrait which Haydon gave her and which hung in her Wimpole
Street sickroom, the sonnet opening 'Wordsworth upon
Helvellyn!' and speaking of him as 'poet-priest'. Her second
sonnet in that volume is the first version of 'My future will
not copy fair my past', and well worth reading in the light of
the Sonnets from the
Portuguese. Two of these sonnets are addressed to
George Sand, whom she much admired, though Robert did not. In
the 1850 Poems, where her sonnet on Hiram Powers' Greek Slave
appeared, she also wrote sonnets on 'Flush or Faunus', her
spaniel given her by Miss Mitford to console her following
brother's death by drowning and her own near-death, and three
Miltonesque sonnets on her blind Grecian friend, Hugh Stuart
Boyd.
Elizabeth Barrett Browning wrote in many genres, the epic in Aurora Leigh, the drama
in her translations from the Greek, the verse essay, the
romance, the lyric, but it is in the sonnet that the common
public most remembers her. Her sources for her sonnets are in
Petrarch, in Surrey, in Sydney, in Spenser, in Milton, in
Wordsworth. Her great friend, Anna Jameson, among her many
books, wrote The Loves of
the Poets, discussing Surrey's sonnet cycle to
Geraldine. It was Anna Jameson and her niece Gerardine who
accompanied the two poets Elizabeth Barrett and Robert
Browning on their elopement from Paris to Pisa. It was in
Vaucluse on that honeymoon that Flush, EBB's alter ego with
spaniel locks, dashed away from her into the fountain, being
baptized, Elizabeth said, in Petrarch's name.
Greatly daring, Elizabeth, a woman, had written sonnets to a
fellow but male poet, turning the tables on the genre. Greatly
daring, two poets married each other. That that marriage did
not continue the success that it began is not much recognized.
Robert and Flush were both jealous of Elizabeth's love for Pen
and Robert of the public's love for Elizabeth. Robert did not
write love poetry to her, save the few lines in The Ring and the Book,
which is the story of a husband murdering his wife. He never
returned to her grave site in Florence, he interfered with
Lord Leighton's design for her tomb, removing her portrait
from it and placing, not her name, nor her nickname of 'Ba',
but only her initials, 'E.B.B.', and her deathdate. The
portrait Robert has Francesco Giovannozzi give is the exact
opposite of Elizabeth, the seemingly blonde hair swept back
behind her ears into a chignon, tucked away from her face, her
head held up.(13)
We are looking not at E.B.B., the
wealthy Créole heiress from Jamaica, of the Michele Gordigiani
portrait, painted across the street in his studio in Piazzale
Donatello, but at the 'Lady Geraldine' this low-born poet
Bertram would like to woo. Visitors to the 'English' Cemetery,
who come because of the fame of Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Sonnets from the Portuguese,
cannot identify it without help from the custodian.
Julia Bolton Holloway
'English' Cemetery, Florence
Notes
1. Jeanette
Marks, The Family of the Barrett: A Colonial Romance (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1938), passim. This book carefully
researched primary materials in Jamaica and St Kitts
concerning the Barrett, Moulton, Tittle and Browning families.
Joseph Shore and John Stewart, In Old St James (Jamaica):
A Book of Parish Chronicles (Kingston,
Jamaica: Aston W. Gardner, 1911)., includes chapter on 'The Barretts of
Cinnamon Hill', and 'A Book of Slaves'.
2. Robert Browning and
Julia Wedgewood, a Broken Friendship as Revealed by their
Letters, ed. Richard Curle, 1937, p. 114; The Letters of Elizabeth
Barrett Browning to her Sister Arabella, ed. Scott
Lewis (Waco, Texas: Wedgestone Press, 2002), p. 371.
3. Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Aurora Leigh and Other Poems, ed. John Robert
Glorney Bolton and Julia Bolton Holloway (Harmondsworth:
Penguin, 1995).
4. In a Vision of
Poets, EBB wrote
Theocritus, with glittering locks
Dropt
sideway, as betwixt the rocks
He
watched the visonary flocks. (322-324)
From The
Complete Works of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, ed.
Charlotte Porter and Helen A. Clarke (New York: Thomas Y.
Crowell, 1900; AMS reprint, 1973), II.322. At the time of
Robert's courtship Elizabeth was translating Bion, Sappho,
Theocritus, Apuleius, Nonnus, Hesiod, Euripides, Homer,
Anacreon, ed. Porter, Clarke, VI.140-165.
5. EBB's tomb is now shaded by Etruscan cypress trees in
Florence.
6. Florence's Swiss-owned so-called 'English' Cemetery uses
Classical and Egyptian themes, though Judaeo-Christian, and
many of its Victorian tombs are shown with urns for ashes,
upon pillars (before cremation was practised or was legal), or
with obelisks and hieroglyphs, influenced by the 1828
Expedition of Champollion and Rosellini made to Egypt and
Nubia, funded by the Grand Duke of Tuscany.
7. Aeschylus, Prometheus
Bound, trans. Elizabeth Barrett Browning, ed. Porter,
Clarke, VI.81-134; Agamemnon,
trans. Robert Browning, The Poetical Works of Robert Browning, ed.
Robert Browning (London. Smith, Elder, and Co. 1889), vol XIII.
8. Rev. Dr. Edersheim, The
Temple, Its Ministry and Services as They Were at the Time
of Jesus Christ (London: Religious Tract Society,
1874), p. 74.
9. See, in this regard, particularly Milton's Comus. The up-ended torch
is frequent on tombs in the 'English' Cemetery, particularly
being shown in pairs for married couples.
10. See the frontispiece to Charles Hodell,The Old Yellow Book:
Source of Browning's The Ring and the Book.
Photo-Reproduction with Translation, Essay, Notes (Washington,
D.C.: Carnegie Institution of Washington, 1908), giving Pen's
portrait of his father in his Oxford robes, holding the Old
Yellow Book.
11. R.O. Faulkner, The Ancient Egyptian
Book of the Dead (London: British Museum Publications,
1990), passim, giving the Ba as the human-headed soul, partner
to the mummied body, preserving it from a second death.
12. Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Sonetos
Portugeuses, trans. Manuel Corrêa de
Barros (Lisboa: Relogio d'Agua, 1945); Sonnets portugais, trad.
Lauraine Jungelson (Paris: Gallimard, 1994); Sonnets
from the Portuguese/ Portugalske sonety, trans. Hanna
Zantovska (Bratislava: Nestor, 2001); Portugal Szonettek. Trans.
Kardos Laszlo. Budapest: Magyar Helkon, 1976; Sonetti
dal Portoghese, trad. Rina Sara Virgilito (Firenze:
Libreria delle donne, 2005); Sonetti dal
portoghese, trad. Bruna Dell'Agnese (Montebelluna:
Amadeus, 1991); Sonnette aus dem Portugiesischen.
Trans. Rainer Maria Rilke. Nachwort, Elisabeth Kiderlen
(Leipzig: Insel Verlag, 1991).
13. Julia Bolton Holloway, 'An Old Yellow Book, the Documents
in the Case: The Death and Burial of Elizabeth Barrett
Browning': Paper given at the Armstrong Browning Library,
2006; Lecture given to the Boston Browning Society, 2008: http://www.florin.ms/ebbdeath.html
IN STOCK
Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Aurora Leigh and Other Poems. Edited,
John Robert Glorney Bolton and Julia Bolton Holloway.
Harmondsworth: Penguin
Classics,
1995. xx + 517 pp.
ISBN 0-14-043412-7
IN STOCK Oh Bella Libertà! Le Poesie di Elizabeth Barrett Browning. A cura di Rita Severi e Julia Bolton Holloway. Firenze: Le Lettere, 2022. 290 pp.
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