Love and Faith—Savior of Elizabeth Barrett Browning

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Love and Faith—Savior of Elizabeth Barrett Browning

Elizabeth Barrett Moulton-Barrett was born on March 6, 1806 near Durham, England into a large family with altogether 12 children, among whom Elizabeth ranked the eldest. Her father, Edward Moulton-Barrett, being the owner of some Jamaican sugar plantations, has earned this big family a respectably prosperous living. And in 1809, with his great fortune, he purchased Hope Land, which was an estate of 500 acres in the neighborhood of the Malvern Hills. Due to the family’s affluence, Elizabeth was able to indulge in a privileged childhood life of great material sufficiency and comfort, which was described as riding her pony around the grounds, visiting other families in the neighborhood, and arranging family theatrical productions with her eleven brothers and sisters. Although she had never been exposed to any form of formal education, Elizabeth had well taught herself by reading voraciously a great number of Shakespearian plays, parts of Pope's Homeric translations, passages from John Milton’s Paradise Lost, and the histories of England, Rome, and Greece before the age of ten. She began writing poetry at a very early age. In 1819, her first composition The Battle of Marathon which was deemed as a juvenile epic was published by her father in 50 printed copies. It was a poem consisting of four books of rhyming couplets. She later referred to it as "Pope's Homer done over again, or rather undone."


Elizabeth’s fancy-free and literary childhood life was not to last. In 1821, at the age of 15, she encountered the misfortune which was to be responsible for the subsequent lifelong invalidism: she fell accidentally from the horse and injured her spine. Sooner this ignited her constant ailments in her lung, which others have speculated as tuberculosis. In the meanwhile, a nervous disorder was diagnosed with her, of which attendant complaints such as headaches, weakness and fainting were thereafter to torment her all her life.

In 1838 when her beloved brother, Edward, who accompanied her to Torquay, on the Devonshire coast to help improve her weak body drowned there two years later, it dealt a grave blow to her by leaving her prostrated for months and it was touch and go for her at times, hovering between life and death. Her grief and guilt is expressed in “De Profundis”;  (To be continued in the following)

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III
The heart which, like a staff, was one
For mine to lean and rest upon,
The strongest on the longest day
With steadfast love, is caught away,
And yet my days go on, go on.

IV
And cold before my summer's done,
And deaf in Nature's general tune,
And fallen too low for special fear,
And here, with hope no longer here,
While the tears drop, my days go on.

This composition in memory of her beloved brother was apparently laden with mournfulness and remorse. An evident touch of long-existed and perhaps rooted despair could be sensed at the very sight of such words and phrases: “the longest day”, “go on, go on”, “deaf” and so on. Her brother’s death noticeably profoundly aggravated her already fragile health. Thereafter, she was completely confined to her own room and saw actually no one except her immediate family and a few intimate friends. Due to her physical invalidism and utter seclusion from outer world, joys and pleasures were cruelly and helplessly deprived of, as one of her quotes reads: "At painful times, when composition is impossible and reading is not enough, grammars and dictionaries are excellent for distraction." In her own world, though painful and intolerable at times, she had been reading extensively and one once noted that her room was filled with books and papers other than any other kind. This kind of cloistered and solitary life lasted for about 5 years until in 1844 when she published another of her works: Poems, which earned her considerable fame and established her as one of the most popular poetesses in the field of British literature in the age of Victoria.

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1.3 She and Robert’s married life of unalloyed happiness

However, the most significant and personally lifelong beneficial result of the publication of her Poems was the commencement of Robert Browning’s passionate and persistent pursuit of her. It was like two overly suffered souls which had been living long in the same kind of despair have finally found in each other the image, or the reflection of each other. Love found a way out for both. And thus mutual sympathy and deep understanding for each other took root instantly and developed gradually, actually, rapidly during their courtship through constant correspondences between each other.

It was a love late in come for Elizabeth Browning. Being desperately an invalid and clinging only to her literary composition to expose herself to the outer world, she could see no hope of love that would be ever bestowed upon her. Her illness had made her feel “completely dead to hope of any kind.” But God’s love came down on her just in buckets beyond her expectations. However, like anyone who has been long living in insecurity and seclusion with no ray of hope for future and almost everything, she refused to be convinced that Robert actually loved her as much as he declared in his seemingly professed yet passionate lines. She responded silently yet heartrendingly without any inclination to be willing to confide and commit herself to him, someone to her coming out of nowhere. She felt frightened and threatened rather than flattered by Robert’s words and any hope which would spur herself on to step forward was strictly suppressed in her already deadly heart engulfed in untold misery. All her doubts and mixed fears were well expressed in the Sonnets from the Portuguese, which were written during the following two years along with Robert’s restless and passionate courting.

Robert’s steadfast and unfailing love for her has finally removed all of her doubts and incredulousness. She was set free like a bird long cooped up in the cage, though startled and what she had been expecting (or she hadn’t even thought of any kind of expectation) might not be the freedom from seclusion and confinement to her own either psychological or physical restrictions. But love did conquer all, and brought into her life of infernal sufferings pure and secure joys, which was to be discerned in the Sonnets from the Portuguese. She then was revitalized and underwent a joyful and blissful resurrection. Life was no longer void of hope and happiness, no longer dominated by untold miseries.

Regardless of her despotic father who strictly forbade any of his children to marry without asking his consent, Elizabeth had a mystical and romantic wedding with Robert on Sept.12, 1846. And the Brownings then secretly journeyed southward by way of France to Florence, Italy. They lived in Casa Guidi, Florence, their home in which Elizabeth spent the rest of her life in the blessing of Robert’s love and caring. Robert’s solicitous attention had miraculously helped improve Elizabeth’s health. She gradually regained strength and in 1849, at the age of 49, she gave birth to their only son, Robert Wiedeman Barrett Browning. She died quietly, without much anguish, in his arms on June 29, 1861 “with a smile on her face”.

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2. How Robert’s love has so profoundly influenced her life and her literary masterpiece Sonnets from the Portuguese

Her Sonnets from the Portuguese was virtually her private love letters written during their courtship and married life. It was named after her pet name as her husband often lovingly called her “my little Portuguese” because of her darkish complexion. The sonnets collected altogether 44 love sonnets. They were intrinsically linked because it was a gradual inner flow of her passionate feeling for Robert which could bear sound witness to their life together. No one would behold such melancholy and grave poems without feeling penetrated in his/her heart. Among which the most famous is the number 43, with its most heated and delicate diction, beginning with one of the most famous openings. Here I will select two poems, No.14 and No.43 to share with you.

Sonnet XIV

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, and certes brought
A sense of ease on such a day--
For these things in themselves, Belovèd, may
Be changed, or change for thee,--and love, so wrought,
May be unwrought so. Neither love me for
Thine own dear pity's wiping my cheek dry,--
A creature might forget to weep, who bore
Thy comfort long, and lose thy love thereby!
But love me for love's sake, that evermore
Thou may'st love on, through love's eternity.

Sonnet XLIII

How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.
I love thee to the depth and breadth and height
My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight
For the ends of Being and ideal Grace.
I love thee to the level of everyday's
Most quiet need, by sun and candle-light.
I love thee freely, as men strive for Right;
I love thee purely, as they turn from Praise.
I love thee with the passion put to use
In my old griefs, and with my childhood's faith.
I love thee with a love I seemed to lose
With my lost saints, -I love thee with the breath,
Smiles, tears, of all my life! - and, if God choose,
I shall but love thee better after death.

Her lifelong physical sufferings have compelled her to give up any hope of ever living a life of normality. Overwhelmed with pains coming from nervous disorder and constant ailments and discomfort linked to her lung, she didn’t quit her literary pursuit. She might quite feel herself immersed in her own spiritual world with perhaps pleasures and joys derived from her voracious reading of Greek, Latin and Hebrew works. However, in 1845, when her contemporary, Robert Browning slipped a letter in which was written “I do as I say, love these books with all my heart and I love you too.”, Browning’s life has a new chapter opened. Her later married life of unalloyed happiness contributed not only to the improvement of her delicate health but to her literary composition. After settled in Casa Guidi, Florence, her literary enjoyed another successful summit with the publication of Sonnets from the Portuguese in 1850, Casa Guidi Windows in 1851 which was considered her strongest work inspired by the Tuscan struggle for liberty, Aurora Leigh, her largest, and perhaps the most popular of her longer poems, in 1856 and other works.

Browning’s poems are bold and extravagant in the diction of words. It is mostly due to her unhappy life before meeting Robert. As in the above two sonnets, we could trace an overall tone of paced concerning and melancholy. She was inquiring her lover and demanding her love of immediate and positive answer. Such as in Sonnet XIV, the first and the second line---“I thou must love me, let it be for nought/ Expect for love’s sake only”, conveyed to us her deepest passion. In Sonnet XLIII the fifth and the sixth line---“I love thee to the level of everyday’s/ Most quiet need, by sun and candlelight”, was a declaration of her own understanding of what love should be. Never ever before has anyone given a better definition for love. All this touching lines were attributable to her own depth of profound intellectual thought and to the unfailing love Robert had for her. So here we can say love conquers all obstacles and misfortunes in Browning’s life and has her redeemed from the brink of despair and miseries.

3. Her faith revealed in her literary works and how it saw her through when she was “completely dead to hope of any kind”

Another characteristic of her poems, together with her other works, is that there is an omnipresent God which can be found in almost every piece of her works.

Actually, her parents were both pious Christians. The family attended services at their local church regularly and Browning, under this influence, was another Christian both inherited and convicted. Her intellectual fascination with the classics and metaphysics was balanced by a religious obsession which she later described as "not the deep persuasion of the mild Christian but the wild visions of an enthusiast.” In her early years, her great appetite for knowledge has directed her to read the Old Testament in Hebrew from the cover to the back. In every piece of her works was dotted with almighty God. Like Browning, Robert was also a convicted Christian from a very early age. In present western countries, a happy and perfect marriage takes three, which is God, the husband and the wife. Literarily speaking, throughout the history of western literature, Christianity was a dominant and indispensable element in the composition of any prized works. Like John Milton’s Paradise Lost and Paradise Regain’d, John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Process, all were written according to the Holy Bible or . In ancient Greek and Latin literature, there was a great portion of mythology which was systematized by a set of gods and goddesses with different realm of power. The examples are numerous. And Browning was no exception. So a strong belief in God and His promise for her prayers could be said to have helped Browning survive those unbearable solitude and agony. The power of faith is great when you are strongly convicted of it.

4. Conclusion: Love and faith have magically revitalized her and promoted her literary status.

Browning is generally regarded as the greatest of English poetesses. No female of her age has been held in such respect and prominence in her age. Her life is a legendary one which no one could have ever relived. From what has been elaborated above, we can safely arrive at the conclusion that Robert’s love has delivered her from the abyss of her piled-up pains and despair and that her faith in that unseen, omnipresent and almighty God has dominated her life and played a vital role in her steadfast literary composition. The power of both love and faith is amazingly great when one is under certain circumstances and it has been generating generations of great literary masters through the world.