Whatever degree of faculty I have, lies in poetry - still more of my personal happiness lies
in it - still more of my love. I cannot remember the time when I did not love it - with a
lying-awake sort of passion at nine years old, and with a more powerful feeling since, which
even all my griefs such as have shaken life, have failed to shake. At this moment I love it more
than ever - and am more bent than ever, if possible, to work into light . . . not into popularity
but into expression . . . whatever faculty I have (January 1842)

Elizabeth Barrett (1806-61) had strong feelings. She often suffered from the violence or
conflict of her emotions - but she set about working into light her poetic longing, 'Oh, to
shoot/My soul's full meaning into future years . . .' (Sonnets, no. 38) against many odds.

She was an intense woman, excited by ideas, who read widely. But at the time of writing, this
38-year-old life had been shaken by many griefs. A spinster and chronic invalid (spinal damage
since age 14 and suspected TB), she was on morphine for the pain. All summer in black silk,
and all winter in black velvet, she rested on a little sofa ('Winters shut me up as they do
dormouse's eyes'), hyper-tense with 'fits of fearfulness', introspective yet dreaming of a
wider world; grieving a dead brother; her best friend a dog. So, a clever but restricted and
lonely person - with an Old Testament-style father whom she loved, but whose emotional
dominance still oppressed all his adult children.

Soon she would meet her Nemesis, Robert Browning, and have her life turned around into
wildest-dream happiness. They felt like each other's personal destiny, and recognized this.
Such emotions sometimes felt comfortably ordinary to Elizabeth - 'I love thee to the level of
everyday's/Most quiet need, by sun and candlelight' (Sonnets, no. 43), sometimes divinely
transfiguring: 'Surely I have loved you, in the idea of you, my whole life long. . . . You have
lifted my soul up into the light of your soul, & I am not ever likely to mistake it for
the common daylight' (letter to Robert, 15 August 1846). They eloped to Italy - permanently.

Travel and marriage enlarged and illuminated her world. She was alert to change, especially
social change, and would call it in, in her poetry. How relevant, still, sounds: 'The old world
waits the time to be renewed' with 'New churches, new economies. new laws/Admitting freedom, new
societies'. And she published under her own name, at a time when many women writers hid their
identities behind a male pseudonym.

I find certain of her ideas interesting but much of the work stylistically dated, ornate and
busy, not travelling easily through time. More than her poems, I enjoy her correspondence (she
wrote volumes of letters), because she writes letters with verve, instinctively a poet,
observant, creative - more lively, responsive, direct than sometimes in her verse.

So the lines I've selected below are those that feel most direct and individual: awake to new
emotional experience. They speak of honesty - a heart breaking open into love; taking in
wide-open landscapes; the utter stuckness and bleakness of grief; feeling close to angels, to
light and to the infinite.

With typical passion, she saw poets as having to deal in essential truth - and working in a
direct way that leaves all who encounter this work changed for good. For her, poets are:

      The only truth-tellers now left to God,
      The only speakers of essential truth,
      Opposed to relative, comparative
      And temporal truths . . .

       [The poet] says the word so that it burns you through
      With a special revelation, shakes the heart
      Of all the men and women in the world. . . .
       (Aurora Leigh, i, 859-62; 905-7)


LADY GERALDINE'S COURTSHIP
 (lines 22; 229-32)

In nympholeptic climbing, poets pass from mount to star . . .'

. . . The book lay open, and my thoughts flew from it, taking from it
A vibration and impulsion to an end beyond its own,
As the branch of a green osier, when a child would overcome it,
Springs up freely from his claspings and goes swinging in the sun.

*

SONNETS FROM THE PORTUGUESE: XIV

Say over again, and yet once over again.
That thou dost love me. Though the word repeated
Should seem a cuckoo-song, as thou dost treat it.
Remember never to the hill or plain.
Valley and wood, without her cuckoo-strain
Comes the fresh Spring in all her green completed!
Beloved, I, amid the darkness greeted
By a doubtful spirit-voice, in that doubt's pain
Cry . . . speak once more . . . thou lovest! Who can fear
Too many stars, though each in heaven shall roll -
Too many flowers, though each shall crown the year?
Say thou dost love me, love me, love me - toll
The silver iterance! - only minding, Dear.
To love me also in silence, with thy soul.

*

AURORA LEIGH
 (lines 437-44)

. . . You forget too much
That every creature, female as the male.
Stands single in responsible act and thought
As also in birth and death. Whoever says
To a loyal woman, 'Love and work with me.'
Will get fair answers if the work and love
Being good themselves, are good for her - the best
She was born for . . .

*

THE CRY OF THE CHILDREN
 (lines 141-2)

. . . the child a sob in the silence curses deeper
Than the strong man in his wrath'.

*

SONNETS FROM THE PORTUGUESE: X

Yet love, mere love, is beautiful indeed
And worthy of acceptation. Fire is bright,
Let temple burn, or flax. An equal light
Leaps in the flame from cedar-plank or weed.
And love is fire; and when I say at need
I love thee . . . mark! I love thee . . . in thy sight
I stand transfigured, glorified aright,
With conscience of the new rays that proceed
Out of my face toward thine. There's nothing low
In love, when love the lowest: meanest creatures
Who love God, God accepts while loving so.
And what I feel, across the inferior features
Of what I am, doth flash itself, and show
How that great work of Love enhances Nature's.

*

A PROSPECT OF FLORENCE
 (lines 1-2; 10-20)

I found a house at Florence on the hill
Of Bellosguardo

[. . .]

No sun could die nor yet be born unseen
By dwellers at my villa: morn and eve
Were magnified before us in the pure
Illimitable space and pause of sky,
Intense as angels' garments blanched with God,
Less blue than radiant. From the outer wall
Of the garden, drops the mystic floating grey
Of olive trees (with interruptions green
From maise and vine), until 'tis caught and torn
Upon the abrupt black line of cypresses
Which signs the way to Florence . . .

*

GRIEF

I tell you, hopeless grief is passionless;
That only men incredulous of despair,
Half-taught in anguish, through the mid-night air
Beat upward to God's throne in loud access
Of shrieking and reproach. Full desertness
In souls as countries, lieth silent-bare
Under the blanching, vertical eye-glare
Of the absolute Heavens. Deep-hearted man, express
Grief for the Dead in silence like to death -
Most like a monumental statue set
In everlasting watch and moveless woe,
Till itself crumble to the dust beneath.
Touch it; the marble eyelids are not wet.
If it could weep, it could arise and go.

*

THE SOUL'S EXPRESSION

With stammering lips and insufficient sound
I strive and struggle to deliver right
That music of my nature, day and night
With dream and thought and feeling interwound,
And inly answering all the senses round
With octaves of a mystic depth and height
Which step out grandly to the infinite
From the dark edges of the sensual ground.
This song of soul I struggle to outbear
Through portals of the sense, sublime and whole,
And utter all myself into the air;
But if I did it, - as the thunder-roll
Breaks its own cloud, my flesh would perish there
Before that dread apocalypse of soul.

*

LIFE

Each creature holds an insular point in space;
Yet what man stirs a finger, breathes a sound,
But all the multitudinous beings round
In all the countless worlds with time and place
For their conditions, down to the central base,
Thrill, haply, in vibration and rebound,
Life answering life across the vast profound,
In full antiphony, by a common grace?
I think this sudden joyaunce which illumes
A child's mouth sleeping, unaware may run
From some soul newly loosened from earth's tombs:
I think this passionate sigh, which half-begun
I stifle back, may reach and stir the plumes
Of God's calm angel standing in the sun.