Affecting authenticity: Sonnets from the Portuguese and Modern Love

Studies in the Literary Imagination, Fall 2002 by Houston, Natalie M

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:

My letters! all dead paper, mute and white!

And yet they seem alive and quivering

Against my tremulous hands which loose the string

And let them drop down on my knee to-night.

This said,-he wished to have me in his sight

Once, as a friend: this fixed a day in spring

To come and touch my hand ... a simple thing,

Yet I wept for it!-this,... the paper's light ...

Said, Dear, I love thee; and I sank and quailed

As if God's future thundered on my past.

This said, I am thine-and so its ink has paled

With lying at my heart that beat too fast.

And this ... 0 Love, thy words have ill availed

If, what this said, I dared repeat at last!

By referring to the courtship letters (not published until 1899), sonnet XXVIII self-consciously invokes its own status as an apparently authentic text. The italicized words operate as if they were quoted speech, apparently more authentic than the paraphrase in lines 4-6, yet the mark of emotional truth is silence in the final lines. The sonnet constructs additional layers of apparent documentation only to remind us that emotional experience can never be fully documented, whether in sonnet form or any other text. In summarizing the stages of this most famous Victorian courtship, Barrett Browning also updates her sonnet series by gesturing toward the narrative energy of modern romance-the progression toward marriage usually charted in the novel.