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Tag: Elizabeth Barrett Browning

September 12, 2012

XXl. Say Over Again, And Yet Once Over Again – Elizabeth Barrett Browning‏‏

from “Sonnets from the Portuguese“

XXl. Say Over Again, And Yet Once Over Again

Say over again, and yet once over again,
That thou dost love me. Though the word repeated
Should seem “a cuckoo-song,” as thou dost treat it,
Remember, never to the hill or plain,
Valley and wood, without her cuckoo-strain
Comes the fresh Spring in all her green completed.
Belovèd, I, amid the darkness greeted
By a doubtful spirit-voice, in that doubt’s pain
Cry, “Speak once more–thou lovest!” Who can fear
Too many stars, though each in heaven shall roll,
Too many flowers, though each shall crown the year?
Say thou dost love me, love me, love me–toll
The silver iterance!–only minding, Dear,
To love me also in silence with thy soul.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning

_________________________

though we might no longer be Romantics, it isn’t
easy to forego its ideals, to succumb to the pure
illusion of unfettered, even selfless, affection,
romance still burns, though like only maybe
embers, no less searing for being undisclosed,
in our more eclectic 21st-Century consciousness

repeat again and again that “thou dost love me”
she says, though it might seem silly to him like
a “cuckoo-song”, but these bursts of apparently
mere serendipity, she defends, are to the
contrary integral to spring, and not at all
unnecessary

and in her “darkness” these trivialities would
reassure her

as art itself incidentally, a triviality neither,
also does and is meant to do

and indeed even the innumerable stars in the
heavens, she continues, flowers in the fields,
are none of them irrelevant, superfluous,
“[t]oo many”

nor then would to say that “thou dost love me”,
“silver iterance” indeed, never forgetting
nonetheless to fit the feeling to the words

I always say “I love you” now, taking care to
ever include the feeling, upon taking leave of
those I love

maybe that’s an atavism

Richard

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September 9, 2012

Edward Hopper’s “11 A.M.,” 1926 – Joyce Carol Oates‏

Eleven A.M. - Edward Hopper

“Eleven A.M.” (1926)

Edward Hopper

___________

we’ve come a long way from Elizabeth Barrett Browning
in this contemporary poem – from the New Yorker, August
27, 2012 – we are no longer Romantics

Richard

_______________________

Edward Hopper’s “11 A.M.,” 1926

She’s naked yet wearing shoes.
Wants to think nude. And happy in her body.

Though it’s a fleshy aging body. And her posture
in the chair—leaning forward, arms on knees,
staring out the window—makes her belly bulge,
but what the hell.

What the hell, he isn’t here.

Lived in this damn drab apartment at Third Avenue,
Twenty-third Street, Manhattan, how many
damn years, has to be at least fifteen. Moved to the city
from Hackensack, needing to breathe.

She’d never looked back. Sure they called her selfish,
cruel. What the hell, the use they’d have made of her,
she’d be sucked dry like bone marrow.

First job was file clerk at Trinity Trust. Wasted
three years of her young life waiting
for R.B. to leave his wife and wouldn’t you think
a smart girl like her would know better?

Second job also file clerk but then she’d been promoted
to Mr. Castle’s secretarial staff at Lyman Typewriters. The
least the old bastard could do for her and she’d
have done a lot better except for fat-face Stella Czechi.

Third job, Tvek Realtors & Insurance and she’s
Mr. Tvek’s private secretary: What would I do
without you, my dear one?

As long as Tvek pays her decent. And he doesn’t
let her down like last Christmas, she’d wanted to die.

This damn room she hates. Dim-lit like a region of the soul
into which light doesn’t penetrate. Soft-shabby old furniture
and sagging mattress like those bodies in dreams we feel
but don’t see. But she keeps her bed made
every God-damned day, visitors or not.

He doesn’t like disorder. He’d told her how he’d learned
to make a proper bed in the U.S. Army in 1917.

The trick is, he says, you make the bed as soon as you get up.

Detaches himself from her as soon as it’s over. Sticky skin,
hairy legs, patches of scratchy hair on his shoulders, chest,
belly. She’d like him to hold her and they could drift into
sleep together but rarely this happens. Crazy wanting her, then
abruptly it’s over—he’s inside his head,
and she’s inside hers.

Now this morning she’s thinking God-damned bastard, this has
got to be the last time. Waiting for him to call to explain
Why he hadn’t come last night. And there’s the chance
he might come here before calling, which he has done more than once.
Couldn’t keep away. God, I’m crazy for you.

She’s thinking she will give the bastard ten more minutes.

She’s Jo Hopper with her plain redhead’s face stretched
on this fleshy female’s face and he’s the artist but also
the lover and last week he came to take her
out to Delmonico’s but in this dim-lit room they’d made love
in her bed and never got out until too late and she’d overheard
him on the phone explaining—there’s the sound of a man’s voice
explaining to a wife that is so callow, so craven, she’s sick
with contempt recalling. Yet he says he has left his family, he
loves her.

Runs his hands over her body like a blind man trying to see. And
the radiance in his face that’s pitted and scarred, he needs her in
the way a starving man needs food. Die without you. Don’t
leave me.

He’d told her it wasn’t what she thought. Wasn’t his family
that kept him from loving her all he could but his life
he’d never told anyone about in the war, in the infantry,
in France. What crept like paralysis through him.
Things that had happened to him, and things
that he’d witnessed, and things that he’d perpetrated himself
with his own hands. And she’d taken his hands and kissed them,
and brought them against her breasts that were aching like the
breasts of a young mother ravenous to give suck,
and sustenance. And she said No. That is your old life.
I am your new life.

She will give her new life five more minutes.

Joyce Carol Oates

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August 16, 2012

XX. Beloved, my beloved, when I think – Elizabeth Barrett Browning‏

from “Sonnets from the Portuguese“

XX. Beloved, my beloved, when I think

Beloved, my Beloved, when I think
That thou wast in the world a year ago,
What time I sat alone here in the snow
And saw no footprint, heard the silence sink
No moment at thy voice, but, link by link,
Went counting all my chains as if that so
They never could fall off at any blow
Struck by thy possible hand, – why, thus I drink
Of life’s great cup of wonder! Wonderful,
Never to feel thee thrill the day or night
With personal act or speech, – nor ever cull
Some prescience of thee with the blossoms white
Thou sawest growing! Atheists are as dull,
Who cannot guess God’s presence out of sight.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning

__________________________

even at her twentieth poem already about her love
Elizabeth doesn’t become insipid, mawkish, no longer
inspiring, but delivers a conclusion of substance and
insight and relevance, though the answer to her
question remains a question

despite having been hopeless in her earlier “silence …,
… counting all [her] chains”, never even having imagined
his “voice”, nor the possibility of those punishing irons
“fall[ing] off at any blow / Struck by [his] possible hand”,
never having ever had an inkling of him before his now
evident presence, she sees the flaw in the argument of
“Atheists”, who affirm the absence of light having only
known darkness, the absence of God or, it would
appear as in her own experience, the quite comparable
absence of love

it’s hard to resist such a persuasive argument, with its
shades of Plato‘s chained prisoners in his allegory of
the cave, where they can’t imagine the sun, standing
in for Knowledge, for never having been made aware
of it, beings with glimpses only of a perhaps
incandescent environment that some, including Plato
and now the appropriately anointed Elizabeth, would
have as the more searching Truth

Robert was on-again off-again in his professions of
faith until the very end, a not unRomantic position,
God had been irreversibly unsettled by then by
Science, during the earlier pre-Revolutionary days,
Humpty Dumpty had been, as it were, irrevocably
unseated from his once unimpeachable wall, never
to be so impregnable again

this poem is probably a bit of a playful connubial
dig by a nevertheless ardent still Christian

go girl

Richard

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August 10, 2012

Chopin “Études”, opus 25‏

if the Debussy, was a bit too fast a move from Chopin’s
Romanticism, his enchanting melodies wrought with
pressing and intent emotion to tug at your most
unresisting aural senses, into a 20th Century of
cynicism and machinery, speed, neurosis, world war,
it was probably too fast for those who actually lived
it as well, just as we think of our own world as out of
control, ultimately the swoons of Chopin would no
longer cut it alone as mileposts towards so unmoored
a future, a heretofore beyond mere private emotions,
other voices would come up responding to further
calamities, inconsistencies in the cultural argument,
where the poet no longer could stand prophetically
alone, there were others also to tend to, and nations
and even new ideologies burgeoning, social, sometimes
sinister even, experiments, Romanticism would have no
choice but to cede to the imperatives of a new, often
inclement, order

but that nevertheless choice still imprint is nowhere
near as definitive as Chopin before all that happened,
as people were still all celebrating and expressing
their newfound personal validity, freedom, worth,
fruit of the revolution not only of the political world
but of the cultural one as well

Elizabeth Barrett Browning is to my mind his only
literary equivalent, compare their equal ardour
and the likeness of their compelling muse

Daniil Trifonov, playing Chopin’s other set of
“Études”, opus 25, not only lives them, he’s
utterly possessed, he’s in Tel Aviv, it’s May, 2011

Richard

psst: the first Étude is called the “Aeolian Harp”,
the ninth the “Butterfly”, the second to last,
or eleventh, the “Winter Winds”, all of which
you might try to make out in passing, they are
not that difficult to identify, all the others are
named for their key

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July 16, 2012

XlX. The soul’s Rialto hath its merchandize – Elizabeth Barrett Browning

from “Sonnets from the Portuguese“

XlX The soul’s Rialto hath its merchandize

The soul’s Rialto hath its merchandize;
I barter curl for curl upon that mart,
And from my poet’s forehead to my heart
Receive this lock which outweighs argosies, –
As purply black, as erst to Pindar’s eyes
The dim purpureal tresses gloomed athwart
The nine white Muse-brows. For this counters part,…
The bay crown’s shade, Beloved, I surmise,
Still lingers on thy curl, it is so black!
Thus, with a fillet of smooth-kissing breath,
I tie the shadows safe from gliding back,
And lay the gift where nothing hindereth;
Here on my heart, as on thy brow, to lack
No natural heat till mine grows cold in death.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning

______________________

Elizabeth in the last poem has just given a
lock of her own hair to her “poet”, now
Robert returns his own tonsorial favour

this exchange, this particular instance of
“mechandiz[ing]”, would baffle merchants –
“counters”, she calls them, somewhat
derisively – would render deliberations
moot whereby a curl “outweighs” very
“argosies”, flotillas – see Jason and the
Argonauts, their golden cargo, for an
etymology

Pindar is one of the nine lyric poets of Greek
antiquity, whose brows were touched by the
nine Greek muses, Clio, Thalia, Erato, Euterpe,
Polyhymnia, Calliope, Terpsichore, Urania,
Melpomene, may they forever inspire

the “bay crown” is the laurel her victor still
may wear to honour his celebrated literary
achievements

“purpureal” is another word for purple

Elizabeth‘s love is unquestionably erudite,
perhaps a little indeed too “purple” were it
not for the beauty, and piercing sincerity, of
her vaunted sentiment

as it is she overcomes her own arcane even
references to deliver staunch and poignant,
I think, relevance, enough to be moved and
admire

long live Elizabeth

Richard

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July 14, 2012

XVlll. I never gave a lock of hair away – Elizabeth Barrett Browning

from “Sonnets from the Portuguese“

XVlll. I never gave a lock of hair away

I never gave a lock of hair away
To a man, Dearest, except this to thee,
Which now upon my fingers thoughtfully
I ring out to the full brown length and say
“Take it.” My day of youth went yesterday;
My hair no longer bounds to my foot’s glee,
Nor plant I it from rose- or myrtle-tree,
As girls do, any more: it only may
Now shade on two pale cheeks the mark of tears,
Taught drooping from the head that hangs aside
Through sorrow’s trick. I thought the funeral-shears
Would take this first, but Love is justified, –
Take it thou, – finding pure, from all those years,
The kiss my mother left here when she died.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning

_______________________________

with her one word, “this”, peremptory and indicative,
Elizabeth anchors us to a common present, making
us witness to the scene, a scene of the most tender
intimacies

these effortlessly transcend by their apparent
urgency and truth the usual meter of a sonnet,
leaving in the dust however always only perfect
rhymes, like wooden sentinels left twirling in too
strong a wind

enough of them however to constitute a poem

or what’s a poem

the same kind of thing happens in the history
of music, where notes skip deftly over a bar
without even the semblance of an
acknowledging curtsy, caught up in the more
compelling reality of their vivid and impetuous
imagination, like children who haven’t learned
quite all the rules yet

in Mozart, his piano sonata in D major, K576,
here for instance, the incorrigible child is
ever even present, even ever evident

both poets reflect a search for greater
authenticity, challenging established ideas
of beauty in its unending deliberation with
truth, see Keats on this irreducible dichotomy

Richard

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July 13, 2012

XVll. My poet, thou canst touch on all the notes – Elizabeth Barrett Browning

from “Sonnets from the Portuguese“

XVll. My poet, thou canst touch on all the notes

My poet, thou canst touch on all the notes
God set between His After and Before,
And strike up and strike off the general roar
Of the rushing worlds a melody that floats
In a serene air purely. Antidotes
Of medicated music, answering for
Mankind’s forlornest uses, thou canst pour
From thence into their ears. God’s will devotes
Thine to such ends, and mine to wait on thine.
How, Dearest, wilt thou have me for most use?
A hope, to sing by gladly? or a fine
Sad memory, with thy songs to interfuse?
A shade, in which to sing – of palm or pine?
A grave, on which to rest from singing? Choose.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning

______________________

it is to be remembered that Robert Browning at the
time was considered a poet of growing authority
though Elizabeth herself had not been of no
consequence, and her star was not to lose its
brilliance in the literary firmament throughout her
lifetime and beyond, but Robert was a man and
benefited therefore from greater consideration
than would’ve then a woman, a not unfamiliar
situation even now

the institutional role of women was pretty well
the one that Elizabeth naturally took on, when
women had no other recourse but to be
dependent, if not graced with comfortable
independent means, which in fact Elizabeth
was

with such an unmistakable gift as hers, however,
I can’t imagine that beyond the genuine love she
manifests for her husband throughout her poems
she would have been unaware of her own
considerable worth, ever granting that love can
be even ever so blind, my own love for instance
riding each morning for me preternaturally and
however improbably the very chariot of a
blinding, mesmerizing, sun

“Choose” though, she at the very last commands,
striking again a telling imperative

note the elision of the rhyme through several
verses in the poem giving the lines a momentum
that lets the poem fly, making the matter
compelling, urgent

compare Mozart soaring above the bar lines
when the piano is comparably unleashed, to
let the music make a similar irrepressible magic

prose is finding its way into poetry here, poetry
conversely into prose

Richard

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July 10, 2012

XVl. And yet, because thou overcomest so – Elizabeth Barrett Browning

from “Sonnets from the Portuguese“

XVl. And yet, because thou overcomest so

And yet, because thou overcomest so,
Because thou art more noble and like a king,
Thou canst prevail against my fears and fling
Thy purple round me, till my heart shall grow
Too close against thine heart henceforth to know
How it shook when alone. Why, conquering
May prove as lordly and complete a thing
In lifting upward, as in crushing low!
And as a vanquished soldier yields his sword
To one who lifts him from the bloody earth,
Even so, Beloved, I at last record,
Here ends my strife. If thou invite me forth,
I rise above abasement at the word.
Make thy love larger to enlarge my worth!

Elizabeth Barrett Browning

______________________

by the very fact of being king, she says, you elevate
me to the status of being queen, be I ever so humble

therefore I cede, and duly accept, however mightily
encumbered, thy proferred crown

long live, I say, Elizabeth

and, morally as well as aesthetically inspired, I
proclaim, wow

Richard

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July 8, 2012

XV. Accuse me not, beseech thee, that I wear – Elizabeth Barrett Browning‏

from “Sonnets from the Portuguese“

XV. Accuse me not, beseech thee, that I wear

Accuse me not, beseech thee, that I wear
Too calm and sad a face in front of thine;
For we two look two ways, and cannot shine
With the same sunlight on our brow and hair.
On me thou lookest with no doubting care,
As on a bee shut in a crystalline;
Since sorrow hath shut me safe in love’s divine,
And to spread wing and fly in the outer air
Were most impossible failure, if I strove
To fail so. But I look on thee – on thee –
Beholding, besides love, the end of love,
Hearing oblivion beyond memory;
As one who sits and gazes from above,
Over the rivers to the bitter sea.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning

________________

having been flung into the maelstrom of love Elizabeth
Barrett Browning has now conceded that her condition is
a fact, she might as well deal with it

and deal with it she does, in imperatives, “Accuse me not”,
she orders, after the many other stipulations she musters
in the last, her XIVth of these poems, where “… love me
for love’s sake”, she demands after a string of other, albeit
precautionary, edicts

there are parameters to this involvement, she insists, you
must love me for who I am if we are to share destinies too
profound, and too fraught, to squander

in this I suspect she will be a woman of steel

Richard

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July 7, 2012

XIV. If thou must love me, let it be for nought – Elizabeth Barrett Browning‏

from “Sonnets from the Portuguese“

XIV. If thou must love me, let it be for nought

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 pleasant ease on such a day” –
For these things in themselves, Beloved, 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 cheeks 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.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning

_____________________

with this poem Elizabeth has written her way, I think,
along with “love’s”, into her own immortality, not only
has she acknowledged her lover’s love, taken a practical
stance about it – straightforward, no circumlocutions –
but touches also upon a truth of love, one of its
inextricable conditions, love is, she affirms, as an
article of very faith, forever

compare Shakespeare on the subject, an interesting
juxtaposition I picked up from another astute observer
on the Internet

Sonnet CXVl

Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove:
O no! it is an ever-fixed mark
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wandering bark,
Whose worth’s unknown, although his height be taken.
Love’s not Time’s fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle’s compass come:
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.
If this be error and upon me proved,
I never writ, nor no man ever loved.

William Shakespeare

the implicit debt to Shakespeare in Barrett Browning
is worth noting, they sound very much alike, unlike
alone, it would at first appear, in gender

Richard

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