Affecting authenticity: Sonnets from the Portuguese and Modern Love

Other references to the sonnet tradition include the transformation of the speaker in sonnet X:

Yet, love, mere love, is beautiful indeed

And worthy of acceptation. Fire is bright,

Let temple bum, 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. (lines 1-9)

Not the silent object, like the adored Stella of Sidney's Astrophel and Stella, Barrett Browning's speaker acknowledges the worth of her love. By the sonnet's syllogistic logic, she thereby becomes a speaking star, disavowing the unworthiness proclaimed in the first nine sonnets of the series by combining the roles of speaker and object of desire. Sonnet XIV rejects the catalogue of beloved features so frequently itemized in Renaissance sequences:

If thou must love me, let it be for nought Except for love's sake only. Do not say "I love her for her smile ... her look ... her way of speaking gently... for a trick of thought That falls in well with mine." (1-5)

Here, as elsewhere in the series, Barrett Browning counters the idealizing tropes of the amatory tradition with plain reality: "For these things in themselves, Beloved, may / Be changed, or change for thee,-and love, so wrought, / May be unwrought so" (7-9). The Sonnets continually announce that they authentically represent real emotions and real people by borrowing and then rejecting the conventions of the sonnet tradition.

In a typical Victorian comment on the Sonnets, James Ashcroft Noble, in an essay first published in 1880, suggests that Barrett Browning's Sonnets are marked by an "apocalypse of soul" in the intensity of the feelings conveyed:

In the case of any human being such an apocalypse would have a strange and peculiar interest, but when the revelation is of such a soul as Mrs Browning's it becomes a thing of priceless value. As we read we know not whether we are most keenly touched by the poem or by the beating of the poet's heart behind it, by the throb of warm blood in its pulsating lines. (52)

What Noble describes as the poems' corporeal connection to Barrett Browning might also be thought of as the authenticity effect, an effect not simply produced by readers' romantic or biographical interest, but by features of the poems themselves: the rhetorical space of conversation, selfreferential textuality, and a focus on modern life.

Nearly all of the fourty-four sonnets in Barrett Browning's sequence are addressed directly to her lover, either with the epithets "Dearest" and "Beloved" or indirectly through pronouns such as "thee" and "thy" Because the poems take up the question of closeness and distance, both emotional and physical, the close rhetorical space of the poems echoes the metaphors of the Brownings' relationship that recur throughout: the closed penknife, the enclosure of the dove's wings, the bee shut in glass, the vine twined round the tree. Barrett Browning makes no conventional claims about the relative longevity of her sonnets as compared to her love and no remarks at all about these sonnets as having any audience other than Robert Browning. Whether or not the poems were intended for publication, their rhetoric presents them as part of a private conversation. Several of the sonnets suggest precise referents outside the space of the text: "But only three in all God's universe / Have heard this word thou hast said" (11. 1-2); "I see thine image through my tears to-night, / And yet today I saw thee smiling. How / Refer the cause?" (XXX.1-3). Such references encourage us to read the Sonnets as documenting particular events. Sonnet XXVIII emphasizes the larger conversation of their courtship and also the poems' ground in external reality: