Sonnet Six from Sonnets from the Portuguese
Go from me. Yet I feel that I shall stand
Henceforward in thy shadow. Nevermore
Alone upon the threshold of my door
Of individual life, I shall command
The uses of my soul, nor lift my hand
Serenely in the sunshine as before,
Without the sense of that which I forbore –
Thy touch upon the palm. The widest land
Doom takes to part us, leaves thy heart in mine
With pulses that beat double. What I do
And what I dream include thee, as the wine
Must taste of its own grapes. And when I sue
God for myself, He hears that name of thine,
And sees within my eyes the tears of two.
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Elizabeth Barrett Browning was already an accomplished poet when she dedicated the Sonnets from the Portuguese, written between 1845 and 1846, to her future husband, Robert Browning. His response was not perhaps entirely impartial: he considered them to be the best work in sonnet form since Shakespeare. He insisted on their publication, and suggested the title as a means of disguising them as translation. Apparently, his first idea was that they should be called Sonnets from the Bosnian.
Having discussed on a previous occasion the most famous of the 44 sonnets, number 43, I decided to turn this week to one of the lesser known, number six.
Sonnet six has the most surprising of beginnings. It raises an expectation of a lovers’ quarrel, one appearing at an ominously early stage of the narrative. However, this interpretation depends on reading “Go from me” as a command, or at least as the response to a threat from the lover to leave. The latter seems hardly less unlikely. In the most convincing reading, Barrett Browning is evoking an imagined worst-case scenario, physical separation from her beloved, and illustrating her defiance. Absence defied by imagination is a subject that fits aptly with the Petrarchan tradition, but Barrett Browning makes the form into an instrument for building certainty rather than inviting internal argument.
The qualifier opening the next sentence in the first line, “Yet”, begins demolishing the possibility of separation. Already, the speaker’s response is clear. There will be no consciousness for her of the beloved’s absence. “Yet I feel that I shall stand / Henceforward in thy shadow.”
Fortunately, there’s rather more to the poet’s position than is suggested by the image of a woman standing in a man’s shadow. At first, the sight of the solitary poet at her “door / Of individual life” suggests stasis, as if she will be unable to step outside and act as an independent being, but as we pursue the sentence, despite that theatrically doom-ridden “Nevermore”, we realise the figure has not been frozen by the lover’s absence. It’s simply that her consciousness is in a state of double occupancy: she will still possess the imaginative presence. Her tranquillity is preserved; in fact, the serenity she attaches to the gesture of raising her hand “in the sunshine” may be guaranteed by the memory of the lover’s touch on her palm – though memory seems a feeble word for this re-enactment.
So it’s tempting to read a certain staking out of poetic territory inside the superficially romantic declarations. For the speaker, the imagined presence is active, or at least included, in “What I do / And what I dream”. In a further strange transformation, the poet compares herself to wine, her beloved to the grapes from which it was produced. The grapes are still recognisably present as flavour, and the wine would not exist without them, but as an analogy this might suggest a process in which the lover becomes the mere ingredients of his partner’s achievement.
Barrett Browning handles the form as an integrated whole, but there’s still a further dramatic development in the closing lines, where God himself has double vision when she confronts him in the afterlife. And now “the tears of two” visible in the speaker’s eyes proclaim that the partner is currently sharing the grief of separation, with observable bodily effect. By this time, it’s clear that the sonnet, as a love poem, has a double edge. A male poet and now a male God have both been required to acknowledge the power of a female artist’s imagination.