Some of Elizabeth Barrett Browning's poems have their own ClassicNotes. Click the links to access our guides for the following poems:
Sonnet 24 (Let the world's sharpness, like a clasping knife)
Sonnet 43 (How do I love thee? Let me count the ways)
Some people, it seems, are literally born hardwired to do—and excel in—certain things. For Mozart to have been apprenticed as a shoe cobbler would have been abomination against nature. To have relegated Albert Einstein to a life as a high school science teacher would make as much as sense as Secretariat giving pony rides at a state fair. Elizabeth Barrett Browning—all evidence strongly suggests—was literally born to become a poet. Born to the point where she could allow no external restrictions placed upon this gift to keep that gift in bondage.
Her first success came at the tender age of eight with her very first attempt. That poem was written in honor of mother’s upcoming birthday celebration. This success did not extend beyond her densely populated home; she would actually publish a poem until later. A whole six years later when the fourteen year old girl’s collection The Battle of Marathon underwent a print of 50 copies at the expense of her father. The gift of family recognition of a child’s talent cannot be underestimated and the Barrett household’s reaction to young Elizabeth’s status as potential prodigy is certainly proof of that.
As fate would have it, Elizabeth Barrett Browning is also an example of what happens when a family tries to restrain a great artistic spirit. The love poems which comprise her most famous work, Sonnets from the Portuguese, reflect not just the profound passion of a woman toward the man she loves. Those poems detail—much more implicitly—the passion a prisoner feels toward one who has smuggled a key to the cell door allowing them to escape in the night. When she famously asks of her husband Robert Browning “How do I love thee ?” in her most recognized poem, consider one of the ways she then goes on to answer that query:
“I love three freely, as men strive for Right”
Freedom and the escape from that authority which would deny it is the underlying thematic thread which unites all of Browning’s poems together into single tapestry. This celebration of her freedom to love as she chooses and the equation of that freedom with righteousness is quite telling and too often overlooked. The bulk of those love sonnets is, admittedly, devoted to traditional expressions of passion and romance, but the very fact that she was capable of writing to Browning and the publishing those expressions of love informs the poet’s entire subsequent career.
The opening lines of her poem “Insufficiency” provide sufficient evidence to argue in favor of this contention:
“When I attain to utter forth in verse
Some inward thought, my soul throbs audibly
Along my pulses, yearning to be free”
Browning’s admiration for America is intertwined with the pervasive quality of this appreciation for the quality of a life resulting from an escape from bondage. In “The Landing of the Pilgrim Fathers” she writes of those seeking freedom from persecution:
“Amidst the storm they sang,
And the stars heard and the sea;
And the sounding aisles of the dim woods rang
To the anthem of the free.”
The woman whom most likely know only for that line “How do I love thee” was, in fact, a passionate believer in the quality of freedom and an equally passionate critic of social conditions inhibiting the affirmation of such values. Far from being merely a writer of Victorian love poems, Elizabeth Barrett Browning used her poetry as a social critic and for political protest. She wrote poems speaking out on the evils of enforced child labor in England. She wrote poems in praise of Italian freedom fighters battling for re-unification of the country. Her most highly regarded and academically praised work, “Aurora Leigh,” is about a woman who rejects the imprisonment of settling for a conventional life as wife and mother to pursue the dangerous freedom of becoming a poet.
Elizabeth Barrett Browning is, above all else, the poet of freedom, praising nothing else so highly and defending nothing else with such vigor. Her personal story is that of a young girl and young woman stimulated and encouraged by a father to fully pursue her god-given talent only to become an adult woman whose artistic spirit first imprisoned by bad health and was then almost crushed by the autocratic rule of that very same man. Robert Browning became the key slipped into her hand in the darkness of night which allowed her to escape that prison in which she’d been held for more than half her life. That Browning moved well beyond merely excelling in the writing of love poems to celebrate the unique qualities of freedom wherever she turned her observant eye should not come as a great surprise.
