Who Is Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Last Sonnet?

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Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s (EBB) Sonnets from the Portuguese (1850) explore the romantic progression of her growing attachment to her eventual husband Robert Browning. EBB discarded the traditional Victorian poetic archetype, by indulging in her feelings that she experienced during her dating period with her husband. Angela Leighton describes Browning’s female voice as being “noisily, exuberantly and provocatively, to the contemporary world of her age”. The voice that EBB creates depicts modern events that challenge the male poetic voice as she pushes back against social expectations, exploring, through a female voice the values of the perfect redemptive lover. Sonnet I establishes the sadness and direness of the state of her life, illustrated …show more content…

Through the use of a spatial metaphor ‘Depth and Breath’ and polysyndeton to represent the scope of her love, we see the change in EBB’s voice as being confident and self-assured. This relates to her context as she is overcoming the social expectations of Victorian women in the 19th century. Professor Eric Robertson stated that “no woman’s heart indeed was ever laid barer to us, but no heart could ever have laid itself bare more purely”, from this we can recognize the astonishing bravery of EBB as she overcame the difficult social expectations laid upon women in the Victorian era. To continue, EBB’s poetic feminine voice is furthered with a parallelism “I love thee freely…I love thee purely…I love thee with the passion” suggesting and abolishing movement of women speaking out about their love. However this was criticized as it didn’t cohere with the values of the Patriarchal society. Furthermore, Browning was so captivated with the social expectations of her time to the extent that her silence made her lose the faith with her youth, nonetheless through the combination of asyndeton and synecdoche in the line “Smiles with tears, of all my life! – and, if God chose” suggests that the wiser and less conserved she has become the more she has been able to tap into her youth. The progression of EBB’s feminie voice is contrasted from sonnet (I) as her now jubilant tone and growth of her persona correlates to the eventual rise of women rights. The parallelism “I shall but love thee better after my death” acts as a balance to the sombre beginning and it also signifies the transformation of her persona as she now undermines the possibility of

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