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Sarah Helen Whitman: To Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Sonnet II
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1. Sarah Helen Whitman "To Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Sonnet II"
Sarah Helen Whitmana
1853
“Ad una vista
D’un gran palazzo Michol ammirava
Si come donna dispettosa e trista.”
(--Dante, Il Purgatorio (10.67-69) (The epigraph (“at the window of a
great palace, Michal looked on, like a woman vexed and
scornful”; trans. John D. Sinclair [London: John Lane The Bodley
Head, 1948]) implicitly compares EBB, judging events in Italy,
to Michal, wife of the scriptural David, scornfully witnessing
his dance in 2 Samuel 6.16.) )
Sometimes I see thee, pale with scorn and sorrow,
At a great palace window, looking forth,
To-day on plumèd Florentines, —to-morrow
Upon the hireling legions of the North:4
Sometimes o’er little children bending lowly,
To hear their cry, in the dark factories
drowned;6
Ah, then thy pitying brow grows sweet and holy,
With a saint’s aureole of sorrow crowned!
But most I love thee when that mystic glory—
Kindling at horrors that abhor the day—
Sheds a wild, stormy splendor o’er the story
Of the dark fugitive, who turned away
To death’s cold threshold, calm in death’s disdain,
From the “White Pilgrim’s Rock,” beside the western
main.14
Notes
a.
From Hours of Life and Other Poems (Providence, RI: G.H.
Whitney, 1853); first published in the New York Tribune (13 April 1853).
This is the second of three sonnets to EBB (see the supplementary website
for I & III) by Whitman (1803-78), an essayist, proponent of women’s
rights, and poet associated with the circle of Edgar Allan Poe. See Anne
Lohrli, “Sonnets to Mrs. Browning,” SBHC 6 (1978), 71-73.
↵4.
Alludes to CGW (1851),
in which EBB watches from her window, first, as Florentines
celebrated new political liberties, and later as Austrian troops
arrived to renew Italy’s oppression.
↵Sarah Helen Whitman. Date: 14-June-2011
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