Sonnets from the Portuguese by Elizabeth Barrett Browning

First published: 1850

Type of work: Poetry

The Work

Whenever English love poetry is discussed, almost invariably the opening of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s penultimate poem of Sonnets from the Portuguese is quoted: “How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.” The collection represents, variously, depending on the quoter’s prejudice, a gem of lyrical eloquence, an oversentimental extravagance, or a tired cliché. Browning’s masterpiece, Sonnets from the Portuguese, went through a complete cycle of literary reception, first being overpraised as “the noblest [sonnets] ever written,” then undervalued as overly emotional effusions, and eventually accepted as a major work. Despite minor cavils, Browning’s Sonnets from the Portuguese is assured a permanent reputation as one of the foremost collections of love poetry in the English language.

The recurring criticism of sentimentalism has some validity, but the charge may be met on several grounds. Elizabeth Barrett wrote Sonnets from the Portuguese during her passionate courtship with Robert Browning. They record the emotions of that time, and emotions are not always “recollected in tranquility” as William Wordsworth suggested poetry should be. Moreover, the poet never intended them for publication. Then, too, she was writing in a culture whose strictures against poetic display of emotion were less narrow than those of later times; indeed, compared to the other popular love lyrics of her time, Sonnets from the Portuguese are less sentimental, as an 1860 review in The Southern Literary Messenger attests. Finally, the sonnets were written by a poet to a poet, which makes them unique among love sonnets and allows for a freedom of emotional language that could be relied upon to be understood.

Browning did not, however, show the poems to her husband until three years after their marriage. When she did, he insisted that she publish the sonnets, which he reportedly deemed the best since William Shakespeare’s, in her 1850 volume of collected poems. He suggested the title “Sonnets from the Portuguese” to disguise the work as a translation. Neither of the Brownings believed that it would be in good taste to publicize their private relationship. Robert had admired Elizabeth’s early poem “Catarina to Camoëns,” which suggested the title, since Luis Vaz de Camoëns was a Portuguese poet.

Although individual sonnets were written in English since their vogue in the 1590’s (except for a 150-year hiatus between the sonnets of John Milton and those of Wordsworth), Browning’s Sonnets from the Portuguese represented the first true sonnet sequence in English since the Elizabethans. Since Shakespeare’s time, sonnets in English tended to follow the pattern established by Shakespeare’s sonnets: three sets of four lines (quatrains) concluding with a couplet. The sonnets Elizabeth Barrett wrote before Sonnets from the Portuguese followed this Shakespearean or “English” sonnet form. In her sonnet sequence, however, she followed the much more demanding Petrarchan or Italian form, where the first two quatrains share rhyme pairs and form a single unit (the octave) that rhymes abba abba. The remaining six lines, instead of breaking into quatrain and couplet, are similarly unified; the Italian form allows many variations, but the scheme Elizabeth Barrett settled on was invariably cdcdcd. This means that in the entire fourteen lines of each sonnet there are only four rhyme sounds, an unparalleled economy of rhyme.

The opening sonnet of the sequence introduces the biographical element that has always been at least part of the attraction of these love sonnets. In 1845, as she wrote these lines, Elizabeth Barrett was nearing forty, still living with a domineering father who had forbidden her to marry but encouraged her writing and her scholarship. The “antique tongue” represents the ancient Greek in which she was fluent and from which she had translated many classical works. A childhood accident had left her disabled and doubtful of her prospects for marriage even if her father’s ban had been lifted. No wonder, then, that a meditation on her “wished for years” were not just “sweet,” like those of the Greek pastoral poet Theocritus (third century BCE) but “sweet, sad” and “melancholy,” and “had flung/ A shadow across” the poet.

In the early poems of the sequence, this ambivalence of emotion is traced through the speaker’s expectation of Death rather than of Love and through skepticism about love. In fact, “Love,” the last word of the opening sonnet, comes as a surprise to the speaker just as it surprised Elizabeth when Robert proposed to her in the summer of 1845. In the second sonnet, the speaker protests that to accept the gentleman’s proposal would be to go against God’s will. In the third, the objection is to the many differences between them (a letter to Robert, dated March 20, 1845, strikes the same theme), and again the last lines refer to Death as her only expectation: “The chrism is on thine head,—on mine the dew,—/ And Death must dig the level where these agree.” (Lines 13–14). Robert was a young poet, six years younger than Elizabeth, and full of vitality. Elizabeth saw herself as an aging poet, resigned to death and to the idea of living alone. The earliest sonnets of the sequence reflect this harsh perception of reality; they are far from being idealizations of love.

In sonnet 4, the poet evokes the image of solitude that she saw as her fate. Depicting her suitor as a medieval troubadour, she urges him to sing at a balcony less run-down and deserted, images of the isolation brought on by her injury and her consequent opium addiction. She continues to ask the suitor to leave for his own good: If he stays merely to stamp out the “red wild sparkles” of her grief, she says in sonnet 5, he better beware that they do not burst into flame. Sonnet 6, one of her most anthologized poems, begins with the same theme, “Go from me,” and is no less insistent, yet she is clearly beginning to feel, not a softening of her conviction that the love is wrong, but a resignation to the inevitability of the suitor’s presence in her life. “. . . Yet I feel that I shall stand/ Henceforth in thy shadow. . . .” (1–2). The image of solitude in sonnet 4 dissolves into the two-in-one paradox of love: “Nevermore / Alone” (2–3), “pulses that beat double” (10), “. . . within my eyes, the tears of two.” (14). Sonnet 6 is a major transition in the sequence, the first to acknowledge the change in her life.

That change is the focus of sonnet 7, which opens “The face of all the world is changed . . .” (1). The speaker does not deny the earlier vision of Death but merely presents the suitor’s figure as standing between her and death (now lowercased). The suitor changes her expectations from “obvious death” to life with a vital young man. That poses a problem, however, in the next five sonnets, 8 to 12. In giving her life, the suitor gives her more than she can ever return, “For frequent tears have run/ the colours from my life” (8), leaving her nothing to offer him. She does not quite return to the plea for the lover to go—she knows since sonnet 6 that he is in her heart to stay—but she tells him to “Go farther” than using her life as a pillow for his head; he is to “let it serve to trample on,” the total self-giving of love. However, this image also suggests the lack of self-esteem that is the bane of love. This continues in sonnet 9, where the poet emphasizes the disparity in the exchange of “gifts,” but in sonnet 10 the speaker comes to realize that love itself is “beautiful indeed/ And worthy of acceptation” and she can finally say, “I love thee!” with confidence. “I am not all unworthy,” she observes in sonnet 11. “Indeed, this very love,” claims the next sonnet, “Doth crown me with a ruby.”

Sonnet 14, a justly famous poem, examines the psychology of love and warns against the danger of focusing love on any one quality of the beloved: “If thou must love me” (1)—even beginning with that “if” reveals how tentative her approach is to this unlooked-for situation—“let it be for nought / Except for love’s sake only.” (1–2). Sonnets 13 and 15 respond to the suitor’s apparent concern over the fact that she does not put her love into words; sonnet 21 reminds her wordier lover “To love me also in silence, with thy soul.” (14).

As the sequence progresses, the speaker grows more confident in her love, yet she is aware of the dangers of idealizing love. In sonnet 22 she imagines her soul “erect and strong” (1) with her lover’s and contrasts that with her bedridden body; yet she ends the poem preferring earthly love. “The world’s sharpness,” which before threatened her, is now more like “a clasping knife” closing harmlessly (sonnet 14). Love is now “as strong as Death” (sonnet 27, line 14). There are occasional moments of tears still (sonnet 30), for love does not mean an end to sadness. She is now confident enough to ask him to call her pet names (sonnet 33), and their love is now established enough for her to look back with wonder at its beginning (sonnet 32) and their first kiss (sonnet 38).

The series concludes with three sonnets of hopeful anticipation of life with the beloved: “My future will not copy fair my past” (sonnet 17, originally published separately). The metaphors of a “fair copy” of a manuscript, an impeccable final draft that corrects the false starts and errors of the first, is proper to a poet. Instead of fixing the past, she looks for a new future. Sonnet 48 is the famous “How do I love thee?” As critic William Going first pointed out in 1953, the poem is abstract and enumerative. Its intention is to conclude and summarize the whole sequence, and each of the eight ways of loving echoes a previous sonnet. Though long beloved as an individual sonnet, it gains even more luster as the capstone of the entire series.

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