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The Best Elizabeth Barrett Browning Poems Everyone Should Read - Interesting Literature
The Best Elizabeth Barrett Browning Poems Everyone Should Read - Interesting Literature
The Best Elizabeth Barrett Browning Poems Everyone Should Read - Interesting Literature
Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806-61) is less famous now as a poet in her own right, and
more familiar as the wife of Robert Browning, whom she courted through a series of
extraordinary love letters in the 1840s. It was not always this way. Once upon a time,
Robert Browning was the struggling obscure poet and Elizabeth Barrett Browning was
the one who, upon Wordsworth’s death in 1850, was considered for the post of Poet
Laureate. (In the end, Tennyson got the job.)
But Barrett Browning left behind some of the most interesting Victorian poems, written
in a variety of forms, genres, and styles. Here are some of her very best poems.
As well as writing some of the most famous love poetry of the Victorian era (see below),
Elizabeth Barrett Browning also explored and tackled social issues in her poetry.
In this poem, a dramatic monologue, she writes in the character of a black female slave
in the United States, on the run having endured a series of horrors: her lover has been
murdered and she has been raped, and the baby that resulted was deemed ‘too white’
because of its mixed ethnicity.
:
A tragic poem (we won’t give away the ending here though the stanzas below provide a
clue), the poem is still a powerful indictment of the treatment of black slaves in
nineteenth-century America. The poem was written to raise funds for the abolitionist
cause.
This is a tragic love poem, and another example of the dramatic monologue form. Set in
Italy, it sees Bianca weeping among the sorrowful song of the nightingales for her lost
love:
:
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‘A Musical Instrument’.
Focusing on the piper-god from Greek mythology, Pan, this poem tells of how the god of
shepherds fashions a flute from the reeds in a river, and starts to produce enchanting
music:
It’s a little-known fact that the first ever sonnet sequence in English was written by a
woman, and throughout history the sonnet sequence has tended to be associated with
male poets: Petrarch, Sir Philip Sidney, Shakespeare, George Meredith.
And although Barrett Browning’s title sounds as though she is translating poems
written by some Portuguese sonneteer, that title Sonnets from the Portuguese was in
fact a little in-joke: ‘Portuguese’ was Robert’s affectionate nickname for Elizabeth, so
these sonnets are from her and her alone: sonnets from Robert’s beloved ‘Portuguese’.
Another of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Sonnets from the Portuguese, is a fine love
poem about her courtship and eventual marriage to her fellow poet, Robert Browning.
In terms of its form, ‘Beloved, thou hast brought me many flowers’ is a Petrarchan or
Italian sonnet.
But unlike Petrarch’s medieval sonnets in the courtly love tradition, the relationship
between the man and woman has been consummated in Barrett Browning’s poem. The
courting has involved the gift of ‘many flowers’ – flowers, of course, are often associated
with poetry, as the etymology of the term anthology demonstrates.
Another poem from Barrett Browning’s sonnet sequence to Robert, this one sees her
espousing the idea of ‘love for love’s sake’. With its catalogue of features which the poet
says she wishes her lover will not single out, it forms a neat counterpoint to ‘How Do I
Love Thee?’ above:
Aurora Leigh.
Barrett Browning’s love affair with epic poetry began at a young age: when she was just
twelve years old, she wrote The Battle of Marathon, an epic poem about the battle
between the Greeks and Persians in 490 BC.
But her crowning achievement in the genre would be her long blank-verse novel Aurora
Leigh (1857), about an aspiring female poet, which takes in issues of marriage, female
authorship and independence, and what happened to women who ‘strayed’ outside of
the accepted norms of Victorian society: the so-called ‘fallen woman’, embodied here by
Aurora’s friend Marian Erle.
Although it’s often considered a verse novel, Aurora Leigh contains elements of epic
:
poetry.
‘A dog is a man’s best friend’, they say. But one hopes that in this case, as the old jest has
it, ‘man embraces woman’, and that what the anonymous author of this proverb had in
mind was the close bond between dogs and humans, whether men or women.
Flush, the name of the cocker spaniel belonging to Barrett Browning, was clearly a close
friend of his poet-owner, and Barrett Browning penned this lovely poem about her
beloved dog.
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Browning’s ‘How Do I Love Browning’s ‘Beloved, thou
Thee? Let Me Count the hast brought me many
Ways’ flowers’
Categories: Literature
Tags: Best Poems, Classics, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Poetry, Victorian literature
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