Elizabeth Barrett Browning - Poems
Jul 27th, 2007 by Bauman
“The Sonnets from the Portuguese… are the deepest and at times the darkest thoughts of a woman of genius, in grave health, who finds in middle life not the death she waits for but the love she never expected” (Markus, 13).
When Elizabeth Barrett met Robert Browning she was a widely read and critically esteemed poet who has already published her collected Poems in two volumes. She was also suffering from a mysterious, debilitating illness that confined her to her rooms and believed that death was imminent.
Inspired by Browning, she wrote a sequence of 44 sonnets, a private and personal expression of her thrill at finding love and her despair of its seeming impossibility. For five years she showed these poems, arguably the finest she had ever written, to no one, not even to Robert, not even after he became her husband.
Finally in 1849, her health much improved by a move to Italy, and with her husband going through his own period of despair, she pushed the sheaf of papers under his arm and rushed from the room. “When Robert saw them he was much touched & pleased,” she wrote later. “Thinking highly of the poetry he could not consent, he said, that they should be lost to my volumes [the second edition of her Poems that was to come out the following year] & so we agreed to slip them in under some sort of veil.”
Robert had always associated Elizabeth with the Portuguese Catarina of her poem “Catarina to Camoens.” They decided on the ambiguous title Sonnets from the Portuguese, implying that they were a work of translation, and placed them directly after “Catarina to Camoens” in the 1850 second edition of her Poems, the first time they appeared in print. We are pleased to offer an excellent copy of this important second edition.