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Appendix B: Poetic Tributes

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1. Dinah Maria Mulock Craik "To Elizabeth Barrett Browning on Here Later Sonnets"

Dinah Maria Mulock CraikCraik01
1851
I know not if the cycle of strange years
Will ever bring thy human face to me,
Sister!—I say this, not as of thy peers,
But like as those who their own grief can see
In the large mirror of another’s tears.
Comforter! many a time thy soul’s white feet
Stole on the silent darkness where I lay
With voice of distant singing—solemn sweet—
“Be of good cheer, I too, have trod that way;”
And I rose up and walked in strength complete.
Oft, as amidst the furnace of fierce woe
My own will lit, I writhing stood, yet calm,
I saw thee moving near me, meek and slow,
Speaking not, —but still chaunting the same psalm,
“God’s love suffices when all world-loves go.”
Year after year have I, in passion strong,
Clung to thy garments when my soul was faint, —
Touching thee, all unseen amid the throng;
But now, thou risest to joy’s heaven—my saint!
And I look up—and cannot hear thy song,
--Or hearing, understand not; save as those
Who from without list to the bridegroom-strains
They might have sung—but that the dull gates close,—
And so they smile a blessing through their pains,
Then, turning, lie and sleep among the snows.
So, go thou in, saint—sister—comforter!
Of this, thy house of joy, heaven keep the doors!
And sometimes through the music and the stir
Set thy lamp shining from the upper floors,
That we without may say—“Bless God and her!”

2. Bessie Rayner Parkes "To Elizabeth Barrett Browning"

Bessie Rayner Parkes2
1852
I was a child when first I read your books,
And lov’d you dearly, so far as I could see
Your obvious meanings, your more subtle depths
Being then (as still, perhaps,) a mystery.
I had no awe of you, so much does love,
In simple daring, all shy fears transcend;
And when they told me, “You shall travel south,”
I chiefly thought, “In Florence dwells my friend!”
In those first days I seldom heard your name,
You seem’d in my strange fancy all my own,
Or else as if you were some saint in Heaven
Whose image took my bookcase for a throne.
As time went on, your words flew far and wide,
I heard them quoted, critically scann’d
With grave intentness, learnt, half mournfully,
That you were a great Poet in the land,
So far, so far from me, who lov’d you so,
And never might one human blessing claim;
Yet oh! how I rejoic’d that you were great,
And all my heart exulted in your fame;
A woman’s fame, and yours! I use no words
Of any careful beauty, being plain
As earnestness, and quiet as that Truth
Which shrinks from any flattering speech with pain.
Indeed, I should not dare—but that this love,
Long nurs’d, demands expression, and alone
Seeks by love’s dear strength—to approach near you
In words so weak and poor beside your own.

3. Sarah Helen Whitman "To Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Sonnet II"

Sarah Helen Whitman2
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:6
Sometimes o’er little children bending lowly,
To hear their cry, in the dark factories drowned;7
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.8

4. James Thomson "E.B.B."

James Thomson2
1861
The white-rose garland at her feet,
The crown of laurel at her head,10
Her noble life on earth complete,
Lay her in the last low bed
For the slumber calm and deep:
“He giveth His beloved sleep.”11
Soldiers find their fittest grave
In the field whereon they died;
So her spirit pure and brave
Leaves the clay it glorified
To the land for which she fought
With such grand impassioned thought.
Keats and Shelley sleep at Rome,12
She in well-loved Tuscan earth;
Finding all their death’s long home
Far from their old home of birth.
Italy, you hold in trust
Very sacred English dust.
Therefore this one prayer I breathe,--
That you yet may worthy prove
Of the heirlooms they bequeath
Who have loved you with such love:
Fairest land while land of slaves
Yields their free souls no fit graves.

5. Emily Dickinson "312"

Emily Dickinson2
written c. 1862, published 1914
Her – “last Poems” –14
Poets – ended –
Silver – perished – with her Tongue –
Not on Record – bubbled other,
Flute – or Woman –
So divine –
Not unto its Summer – Morning
Robin – uttered Half the Tune –
Gushed too free for the Adoring –
From the Anglo-Florentine –
Late – the Praise –
‘Tis dull – conferring
On the Head too High to Crown –
Diadem – or Ducal Showing –
Be its Grave – sufficient sign –
Nought – that We – No Poet’s Kinsman –
Suffocate – with easy woe –
What, and if, Ourself a Bridegroom –
Put Her down – in Italy?

6. Emily Dickinson "593"

Emily Dickinson2
written c. 1862, published 1929
I think I was enchanted
When first a somber Girl –
I read that Foreign Lady –
The Dark – felt beautiful –
And whether it was noon at night –
Or only Heaven – at Noon –
For every Lunacy of Light
I had not power to tell –
The Bees – became as Butterflies –
The Butterflies – as Swans –
Approached – and spurned the narrow Grass –
And just the meanest Tunes
That Nature murmured to herself
To keep herself in Cheer –
I took for Giants – practising
Titanic Opera –
The Days – to Mighty Metres stept –
The Homeliest – adorned
As if unto a Jubilee
‘Twere suddenly confirmed –
I could not have defined the change –
Conversion of the Mind
Like Sanctifying in the Soul –
Is witnessed – not explained –
‘Twas a Divine Insanity –
The Danger to be Sane
Should I again experience –
‘Tis Antidote to turn –
To Tomes of solid Witchcraft –
Magicians be asleep –
But Magic – hath an Element
Like Deity – to keep –
The Battle fought between the Soul
And No Man – is the One
Of all the Battles prevalent –
By far the Greater One –
No News of it is had abroad –
Its Bodiless Campaign
Establishes, and terminates –
Invisible – Unknown –
Nor History – record it –
As Legions of a Night
The Sunrise scatters – These endure –
Enact – and terminate –

7. Isa Blagden "from To George Sand on Her Interview with Elizabeth Barrett Browning"

Isa Blagden2
published 1873
The late repentance, and the long despair,
The sin-bound soul’s fierce struggle to be free,
A fettered maniac raging in her lair
Are thine!
A life all musical with happy love,
An angel child who sings beside her knee,
Pulses which true to heavenly rhythms move,
Are hers!
Dark hair strained backwards from a forehead broad,
Dark eyes, in whose chill light strange secrets live,
As in the deep grim monsters watch and ward,
Are thine!
Soft curls which droop around an oval cheek,
Calm brows where holy thought has power to give
Transfigured glory to a woman meek,
Are hers!
Her childhood smileth still around her mouth –
O’er thy white gleaming teeth, thy full lips part –
Eager for joys which may renew thy youth;
Some brief wild rapture which may cheat, yet warm,
Kindling the languor of a hopeless heart.
With thee life stagnates, or is flashing storm.
To shapeless horrors thou hast given name,
And woes, ‘neath which poor tortured hearts had bowed
And borne till now in trembling patient shame,
Rose at thy call, and spoke their loud despair,
And women’s wrongs, like opened graves, avowed
Their stark foul secrets to the startled air!
….
Thou, ‘mid the dreary wilderness of life,
With bleeding feet and burning soul didst go,
And flung thyself into th’arena’s strife.
….
And therefore wears thy brow its sullen scorn,
And therefore glooms thy large prophetic eye,
And in thy song are cadences forlorn,
Which blend their sighs with lingering echoes fine
Of thrilling sweetness, yet of agony –
Grand revelations, utterances divine.
Not thus her song. The seraph chorus bowed
And leant entranced from jasper thrones to hear
A mortal’s voice so nigh the throne of God.
Its rich Hellenic harmonies had power
Of wide reverberation far and near.
A woman’s witness to her God they bore!
Amid the world’s wild roar, that tender song,
Throughout its jarring discords heard between,
Rung out heroic protest against wrong.
Where coward souls had recklessly despaired,
That dove-like heart with fortitude serene
Through Sorrow’s whelming flood victorious dared,
And won Faith’s vernal promise; glowing words
Revealed eternal hopes, and music fraught
Ravished the silences with sweet accords.
Upon her lips the altar’s living coal
With cherub glories circled mortal thought,
And birth consummate stirred within her soul.
….
Thy genius to her stainless genius knelt,
And with pathetic reverential awe
The holiness of womanhood was felt
Deep in thy soul; to thee, she was a shrine
Of sanctuary – inexorable law –
The earthly human won to God’s divine!
Ah! by that healing kiss, be thou assoiled!
The radiant Twins whose joys in Heaven are shown
(The Mortal and Immortal), thus uncoiled
The death-doom which was long the curse of One.
She, by that love which pressed to thine embrace,
By her own star-crowned soul has claimed thy place.

8. Christina Rossetti "Preface to Monna Innominata. A Sonnet of Sonnets"16

Christina Rossetti2
1881

Beatrice, immortalized by “altissimo poeta … cotanto amante”; Laura, celebrated by a great tho’ an inferior bard,--17 have alike paid the exceptional penalty of exceptional honour, and have come down to us resplendent with charms, but (at least, to my apprehension) scant of attractiveness.

These heroines of world-wide fame were preceded by a bevy of unnamed ladies “donne innominate” sung by a school of less conspicuous poets; and in that land and that period which gave simultaneous birth to Catholics, to Albigenses, and to Troubadours,18 one can imagine many a lady as sharing her lover’s poetic aptitude, while the barrier between them might be one held sacred by both, yet not such as to render mutual love incompatible with mutual honour.

Had such a lady spoken for herself, the portrait left us might have appeared more tender, if less dignified, than any drawn even by a devoted friend. Or had the Great Poetess of our own day and nation only been unhappy instead of happy, her circumstances would have invited her to bequeath us, in lieu of the “Portuguese Sonnets,” an inimitable “donna innominata” drawn not from fancy but from feeling, and worthy to occupy a niche beside Beatrice and Laura.

9. Amy Lowell "from The Sisters"20

Amy Lowell2
1925
And she is Sapho—Sapho—not Miss or Mrs.,
A leaping fire we call so for convenience;
But Mrs. Browning—who would ever think
Of such presumption as to call her “Ba.”21
Which draws the perfect line between sea-cliffs22
And a close-shuttered room in Wimpole Street.
Sapho could fly her impulses like bright
Balloons tip-tilting to a morning air
And write about it. Mrs. Browning’s heart
Was squeezed in stiff conventions. So she lay
Stretched out upon a sofa, reading Greek
And speculating, as I must suppose,
In just this way on Sapho; all the need,
The huge, imperious need of loving, crushed
Within the body she believed so sick.
And it was sick, poor lady, because words
Are merely simulacra after deeds
Have wrought a pattern; when they take the place
Of actions they breed a poisonous miasma
Which, though it leave the brain, eats up the body.
So Mrs. Browning, aloof and delicate,
Lay still upon her sofa, all her strength
Going to uphold her over-topping brain.
It seems miraculous, but she escaped
To freedom and another motherhood
Than that of poems. She was a very woman
And needed both.
If I had gone to call,
Would Wimpole Street have been the kindlier place,
Or Casa Guidi,23 in which to have met her?
I am a little doubtful of that meeting,
For Queen Victoria was very young and strong
And all-pervading in her apogee
At just that time. If we had stuck to poetry,
Sternly refusing to be drawn off by mesmerism24
Or Roman revolutions,25 it might have done.
For, after all, she is another sister,
But always, I rather think, an older sister
And not herself so curious a technician
As to admit newfangled modes of writing—
“Except, of course, in Robert, and that is neither
Here nor there for Robert is a genius.”
I do not like the turn this dream is taking,
Since I am very fond of Mrs. Browning
And very much indeed should like to hear her
Graciously asking me to call her “Ba.”
But then the Devil of Verisimilitude
Creeps in and forces me to know she wouldn’t.
Convention again, and how it chafes my nerves,
For we are such a little family
Of singing sisters, and as if I didn’t know
What those years felt like tied down to the sofa.
Confound Victoria, and the slimy inhibitions
She loosed on all us Anglo-Saxon creatures!
Suppose there hadn’t been a Robert Browning,
No “Sonnets from the Portuguese” would have been written.
They are the first of all her poems to be,
One might say, fertilized. For, after all,
A poet is flesh and blood as well as brain
And Mrs. Browning, as I said before,
Was very, very woman. Well, there are two
Of us, and vastly unlike that’s for certain.
Unlike at least until we tear the veils
Away which commonly gird souls. I scarcely think
Mrs. Browning would have approved the process
In spite of what had surely been relief;
For speaking souls must always want to speak
Even when bat-eyed, narrow-minded Queens
Set prudishness to keep the keys of impulse.
Then do the frowning Gods invent new banes
And make the need of sofas. But Sapho was dead
And I, and others, not yet peeped above
The edge of possibility. So that’s an end
To speculating over tea-time talks
Beyond the movement of pentameters
With Mrs. Browning….

10. Explanatory Notes

Notes
Craik01.
This poem appeared anonymously in The Athenæum, no. 1216 (15 February 1851), 191; later collected, with minor revisions, in Craik’s Thirty Years, Being Poems New and Old (London: Macmillan, 1880), 211-12. A journalist, poet, popular novelist, and children’s writer, Craik (1826-87) is today best known for the novel John Halifax,Gentleman (1857) and A Woman’s Thoughts about Women (1858). In February 1852 EBB received an inscribed copy of the novel The Head of the Family (1852), which Mulock had dedicated to her: “to one who has for years been the good influence of my life….a woman, the mere naming of whom includes and transcends all praise” (see LTA 1:460-61n26 and R A1687).
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2.
From Poems (London: John Chapman, 1852), 93, where it is entitled “To *****.” Bessie Rayner Parkes (later Belloc; 1829-1925), writer and editor, is chiefly remembered as a key organizer of the mid-Victorian women’s rights movement. EBB identified with Parkes’s feminist opposition to the conservative views of women expressed by poet and essayist Coventry Patmore: “she & the rest of us militant, foam with rage” (letter of 1856, qtd. in AL [Ohio], 18).
↵
2.
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.
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6.
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. >
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7.
Refers to “The Cry of the Children” (1843).
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8.
Refers to “The Runaway Slave at Pilgrim’s Point” (pub. 1847, dated 1848).
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2.
From The Poetical Works of James Thomson, ed. Bertram Dobell (London: Reeves & Turner, 1895), 1:251-52. Thomson (1834-82), a poet, journalist, essayist, and social critic, is best known for his poem “The City of Dreadful Night.” Thomson wrote a “prequel” to EBB’s “Lady Geraldine’s Courtship” (1844) entitled “Bertram to the Most Noble and Beautiful Lady Geraldine” (1857; see Thomson’s Poetical Works 2:337-50). For discussion of this tribute and those by late Victorian poets Alfred Austin and H.D. Rawnsley (available on the supplementary website), see Samantha Matthews, “Entombing the Woman Poet: Tributes to Elizabeth Barrett Browning,” SBHC 24 (2001), 31-53.
↵
10.
William Wetmore Story (1819-95), American sculptor, author, and good friend of the Brownings from 1853, placed wreathes of white roses and of bay (laurel, the traditional crown of poets) on EBB’s coffin. See Henry James, William Wetmore Story and His Friends (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1903), 2:66.
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11.
Quotes Psalms 127.2 and EBB’s 1838 poem “The Sleep,” which quotes Psalms as an epigraph and uses variations of this line as a refrain.
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12.
Keats and Shelley are interred in the Protestant cemetery in Rome.
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2.
From The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson, ed. Thomas H. Johnson (Boston: Little, Brown, 1997). Like most of her work, these tributes to EBB were published only after the death of American poet Dickinson (1830-86). For a third poem on EBB (#363), see the supplementary website. Gary Lee Stonum argues that a fourth poem by Dickinson, # 631 (“Ourselves were wed one summer”), also pays tribute to EBB, and reports that in the twelve to eighteen months following EBB’s death, Dickinson had received three pictures of EBB and referred to her in five letters, once asking a friend traveling in Europe, “Should anybody where you go, talk of Mrs. Browning, you must hear for us—and if you touch her Grave, put one hand on the Head for me—her unmentioned Mourner” (Stonum, The Dickinson Sublime [Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1990], 40-41). See Bogus (1984) and Swyderski (2000, 200! 3), documenting the extent of EBB’s influence on the imagery and form of Dickinson’s poems, as well as on the organization of her manuscript sequences.
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14.
Last Poems (1862) was the title of the posthumous volume of EBB’s poems published by RB.
↵
2.
From The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson, ed. Thomas H. Johnson (Boston: Little, Brown, 1997).
↵
2.
From 1850, novelist and poet Isa (Isabella) Blagden (1816?-73) was an intimate friend of the Brownings in Florence. This poem was collected in Poems by the Late Isa Blagden (Edinburgh & London: William Blackwood and Sons, 1873), 106-11. For the complete poem, see the supplementary website. On EBB and French novelist Georges Sand, whom the Brownings met in Paris in 1852, see the “Introduction,” pp. **, and the headnote to EBB’s two sonnets “To George Sand.”
↵
16.
A sonnet sequence published in A Pageant and Other Poems (London: Macmillan, 1881). Although Christina Rossetti, a major poet of the generation following EBB, had been admonished by her brother, poet / painter Dante Gabriel Rossetti, to avoid the “falsetto muscularity” of EBB’s style (William Micheal Rossetti, ed., Dante Gabriel Rossetti: His Family Letters, with a Memoir [London: Ellis, 1895], 2:323), she considered writing a biography of EBB, of whom she observed: “I doubt whether the woman is born, or for many a long day, if ever, will be born, who will balance not to say outweigh Mrs. Browning” (MackenzieBell, Christina Rossetti: A Biographical and Critical Study [London: Thomas Burleigh, 1898], 90-91, 93). On Rossetti’s complex relationship to EBB, see Harrison (1990) and Stone (1999).
↵
2.
↵
17.
Translation of the Italian: “the highest poet … as well as lover” (Dante, Inferno 4.80, 5.134). Beatrice and Laura were the idealized muses of early Italian innovators in the love sonnet tradition, Dante Alighieri and Francesco Petrarch, respectively. For discussion of Petrarch’s Laura and the conventions of early love sonnets, see the headnote to Sonnets from the Portuguese.
↵
18.
Woman worship was prominent among the Albigensian sect, which replaced the Holy Spirit with Mary, and also in the love poetry of the troubadours, medieval poets and singers who wrote for court audiences in southern France.
↵
20.
From the Pulitzer Prize-winning collection, What’s O’Clock (Boston & NY: Houghton Mifflin, 1925), 127-37. In “The Sisters” Lowell explores the “queer lot” of “women who write poetry,” emphasizing how few in numbers such women are, much as EBB herself had done in her search for poetic “grandmothers” (see the “Introduction,” p. **). The poem muses about three poets who “scribble down, man-wise … fragments” of themselves: Sapho (Lowell’s spelling), EBB, and Emily Dickinson.
↵
2.
An influential modernist poet and critic, Amy Lowell (1874-1925) was a leading figure in the “Imagist” movement in poetry associated with Ezra Pound, H.D. (Hilda Doolitte), and other writers.
↵
21.
EBB’s nickname among her family and intimate friends; see the “Introduction,” pp. **.
↵
22.
An allusion to the legend of Sappho’s leaping to her death from the sea-cliffs of Lesbos.
↵
23.
Upon marrying RB, EBB left her family home at 50 Wimpole Street in London; in Florence they made Casa Guidi their principal home; see the “Introduction,” pp. **.
↵
24.
EBB took a skeptical interest in the experiments with mesmerism (hypnotism) and “magnetism” that proliferated in the 1840s, especially given her correspondence with the leading author Harriet Martineau (1802-76) who recorded the apparent healing by mesmerism of a tumor that afflicted her; see “Mesmerism/Magnetism” (BC 9:416). Lowell seems to use mesmerism here to refer more broadly to spiritualism. On EBB and spiritualism, see the Introduction, p. ** and Katherine A. Porter, Through a Glass Darkly: Spiritualism in the Browning Circle (NY: Octagon P, 1972).
↵
25.
Alluding to EBB’s engagement with the Italian Risorgimento (see the “Introduction,” pp. ).
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