Andrew's Wiki
Sonnets Portuguese

Content

• Gratuitous “I can read Greek”
• At a point in her life when she laments the melancholy turn of time, instead of Death, “Love” grasps her by her hair and pulls her back
  • Mastery erotics
  • Victorian hair fetish
• Violence of their “angels” sweeping past one another b/c he is beloved by all, an ornament of court, and she’s an old lowly singer
  • Artistic anxiety and competition
• Compares herself to ashes before his feet w/glimmer of red spark that could be put out or fanned into flame
  • Again, danger and violence attend love: “laurels” won’t protect him from her fire (hmm, laurels: does she say she will use her love to beat him in authoring?)
  • She’s worried her art will pale underneath his b/c she will no longer have individual life (a worry about independence: the sickness she nursed won’t keep her private anymore)
    • Even her art will savor of him, like the wine that tastes of the grapes it was made of
    • Even God will see him inside her, can’t see her alone anymore
• Feelings of unworthiness
  • Difference of age and temperament makes her think it’s not right (he’s too happy and young) (Oh my fears!...we are not peers”)
  • But feeling is more important than identity: God loves the lowly (who can love); there is an equality of feeling where each love is worth each other love
    • Her ability to love him is a “ruby” on her forehead that proves her “inner cost” and him loving her more will “enlarge my worth”
    • “The soul’s Rialto hath its merchandise / I barter curl for curl upon that mart”
      • Rialto: part of Venice famous for market and pretty bridge (retail, wholesale, slaughterhouse, finance capital ie banks insurance, taxes, luxury goods)
• Love = fire; transfiguration; rebirth; war (she says he conquered her to bring her “up”—“lifts from the bloody earth”—not low)
• Only love for love’s sake is eternal
• Compares her previous lack of awareness of love to atheism
• Wants him to stay I love you over and over and over
• Says that she’d rather stay on the imperfect earth than join the angels b/c the “contrary” moods of men and the fear of darkness and death in the world makes the space for lovers to meet one another (the lack of general love allows the romantic love)
  • She gives up her longing towards death (Heaven) for him just like other ladies give up their titles to marry untitled men
  • They’ll forget human strife (selfish!)
• Until love, she had her self, alone: “I lived with visions for my company / Instead of men and women”
  • But then “the world’s dust” tainted them, and then she welcomed him saving her by “meeting” her visions
• Struggle between love and what she makes of love
  • Says that her thoughts about him are like a vine creeping around him, a tree, until you can hardly see the tree for the vine
  • She says she won’t prefer these thoughts (the poems, presumably) become more to her than himself
  • Invites him to “burst” the vines that twine around him: to shatter her poetry, eh?
  • When she truly is with him, she doesn’t think, so can be no words to cover him up: EXPERIENCE VERSUS THOUGHT/POETRY
• Love makes her sad: she doubts, will it come again? is it a dream? did it come too fast to last? will his love for me make him lose anything?
  • Source of her doubt: she says it’s b/c her soul “recoiled” from the “sovereignty” of his love: that her doubt was akin to disbelief in a pure god… b/c he did have the patience and foresight to see the real her and trust that she’d respond to love and be happy eventually
  • “grief is love and grief besides:” perhaps mourning is stronger than love; and love that’s surrounded by mourning (her biography) isn’t to be trusted, and she can’t ever quite conquer the fear (“a still renewable fear”)
  • and more self-doubt, always couched within her linguistic ability (she’s “a worn-out viol”) (but realizes love will make her sing out perfectly as if her instrument weren’t damaged)
• Love is sexy: she spends 2 sonnets comparing her love for him to her childish love for her family and friends while innocently playing among the cowslips, but then saying “That no child’s food could run fast as this blood”
• As exchange: “If I leave all for thee, while thou exchange / And be all to me?” but that’s not a fair exchange!
  • She is referring to leaving the house she grew up in and the people there and the associations in it: doubting that love can replace it all

Style

• 44 love sonnets
• Meta is irony: says that silence is the mark of womanhood, yet she’s writing this sonnet cycle
• She seems to be moving backwards: the arguments about the entanglement of love with death and with violence and with the end of individualism were seen at their most complex at first; later on, we learn about the sources and growth of these complex feelings
  • By saving love is “as strong as Death,” we see that death is primary; that is truly is about God, even while she deifies Robert Browning
• Gratefulness: she’s stuck on it like a broken record, can’t get past it; can’t get past her feelings of unworthiness
• Right before the “How do I love thee? Let me count the ways” sonnet, she had ended the previous sonnet by seeming to cede the poet’s staff to Robert, asking him to stop reading her stuff and take up the song and write something for her. And yet she keeps writing! keeps making him read!
• Meta: like the flowers he brought for her room, she offers her sonnets to him: grown in the ground of her soul, they are picked for him yet still have their roots in her soul and connect them: writing coming out of your soul (use for a garden variety Victorian quote about nature of writing)