Sonnets from the Portuguese by Elizabeth Barrett Browning: Free EPUB, AZW3 & KEPUB Download

Free edition · Sonnets from the Portuguese · 1850

Sonnets from the Portuguese

By Elizabeth Barrett Browning — London: Chapman & Hall, 1850 — (Published 1850) · All Elizabeth Barrett Browning books

Word Count 5,700 words

Reading Time 19 min

Copyright Status Public Domain in the US; check local laws

Source Project Gutenberg #2002

Source Edition Standard Ebooks edition, based on Project Gutenberg #2002

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Sonnets I, II and III, from the shadow to the chrism and the dew

I thought once how Theocritus had sung Of the sweet years, the dear and wished-for years, Who each one in a gracious hand appears To bear a gift for mortals, old or young; And, as I mused it in his antique tongue, I saw, in gradual vision through my tears, The sweet, sad years, the melancholy years, Those of my own life, who by turns had flung A shadow across me. Straightway I was ’ware, So weeping, how a mystic Shape did move Behind me, and drew me backward by the hair; And a voice said in mastery, while I strove: “Guess now who holds thee!”—“Death!” I said. But there, The silver answer rang: “Not Death, but Love.”

But only three in all God’s universe Have heard this word thou hast said—Himself, beside Thee speaking, and me listening! and replied One of us—that was God!—and laid the curse So darkly on my eyelids, as to amerce My sight from seeing thee—that if I had died, The deathweights placed there would have signified Less absolute exclusion. “Nay” is worse From God than from all others, O my friend! Men could not part us with their worldly jars, Nor the seas change us, nor the tempests bend: Our hands would touch for all the mountain-bars— And, heaven being rolled between us at the end, We should but vow the faster for the stars.

Unlike are we, unlike, O princely Heart! Unlike our uses and our destinies. Our ministering two angels look surprise On one another, as they strike athwart Their wings in passing. Thou, bethink thee, art A guest for queens to social pageantries, With gazes from a hundred brighter eyes Than tears even can make mine, to play thy part Of chief musician. What hast thou to do With looking from the lattice-lights at me, A poor, tired, wandering singer, singing through The dark, and leaning up a cypress tree? The chrism is on thine head—on mine, the dew— And Death must dig the level where these agree.

The excerpt runs from the first line of Sonnet I to the last line of Sonnet III. It stops where the third sonnet closes, with the chrism on his head and the dew on hers, and Death left to dig the level where the two agree.

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Further Reading

Read next: Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, and Gibran’s The Prophet

Free edition

Leaves of Grass

By Walt Whitman · Five years later, another poet turns private life into public verse

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The Prophet

By Kahlil Gibran · Love and grief in short numbered sections, seventy years on

Sonnets from the Portuguese by Elizabeth Barrett Browning: Summary, Voices & Forms

This page gives a summary and analysis of Sonnets from the Portuguese, with the forty-four sonnets set out in ten movements, the argument of each described, and the voices and forms that carry it: the Petrarchan octave and sestet, the direct address, the death-and-love vocabulary that runs from the first sonnet to the last. Elizabeth Barrett Browning published the sequence in 1850. The text printed here is the Standard Ebooks edition, which gives the forty-four sonnets and nothing else, with no preface, notes or translator’s name. The movements are ours; the numbering is the book’s.

The first four sonnets set the terms. Sonnet I begins with Theocritus and the sweet years, then turns to the shadow those years flung across the speaker’s own life, and to the Shape that takes her by the hair and gives the answer the rest of the book must live with: not Death, but Love. II narrows the hearers to three, God, the speaker and the beloved, and finds in God’s refusal a worse exclusion than any human parting. III and IV put the two lives side by side and find them unlike: he is a guest for palace-floors, while she keeps a house whose casement is broken in, with bats and owls in the roof. The text described here is the Standard Ebooks edition, and a complete reading text also sits at Project Gutenberg #2002.

Sonnets V to XVI are the argument about worth. V overturns Electra’s urn at the beloved’s feet and tells him to stand further off; VI lets him go and finds the shadow and the double pulse still there. VII says the world’s face has changed since she heard his soul’s footsteps, and VIII asks what can be given back to a giver who has laid the gold and purple of his heart outside her wall. IX and X turn the question round: if love is fire, it is beautiful in itself, and to say I love thee transfigures the speaker. XI, XIII and XIV take it back, with a blessing that renounces, a refusal of speech, and a plea to be loved for love’s sake only.

From XVII the sequence becomes an exchange. XVII asks the poet what use she can be, a hope, a memory, a shade or a grave, and leaves the choice with him. XVIII and XIX trade a lock of hair for a lock of his, the one her mother’s kiss last touched, the other dark enough to carry the bay-crown’s shade. XX looks back to a year when he was in the world and she sat alone in the snow. Then the letters arrive, and XXVIII reads them as dead paper that still speaks. XXIX to XXXVII keep the beloved present and the doubt alive, through vines of thought, an image seen in tears, a pet name, and a fear that renews itself. Leaves of Grass, five years later, took the same first person outward.

The last movement is the return. XXXVIII counts three kisses, on the fingers, the forehead and the lips, and ends with the speaker saying my love, my own. XXXIX thanks him for seeing behind the mask, XL sets his patience against the world’s quick loves, and XLI thanks everyone who ever loved her. XLII refuses to copy the past and asks for a new epigraph; XLIII counts the ways and promises to love better after death; XLIV takes the flowers he brought and gives back these thoughts, with their roots left in her. The Prophet keeps that habit of short numbered sections about love and grief, and the rest of the Poetry & Epics shelf is free too.

Historical Context

The sequence appeared in London in 1850, from Chapman and Hall, when the sonnet was being revived as a form for sustained argument. Petrarch’s canzoniere had given English poets the sequence: each poem complete in itself, all of them making one story. Sidney’s Astrophil and Stella and Shakespeare’s sonnets followed that model, and by the 1840s the form was again in use for private experience. The same year as this book saw Tennyson’s In Memoriam, a sequence of shorter lyrics on love, death and recovery. Two books, one year, both built out of short poems that must be read in order.

The title is the book’s one piece of stagecraft. Sonnets from the Portuguese announces a translation, and the edition gives no translator, no source text and no note of origin; the poems are English, in the first person, and addressed to someone present rather than distant. The mask did two things at once: it let the first person be read as a borrowed voice, and it kept the beloved at the distance a translator’s selection implies. It also set a condition on reading. What follows is one woman speaking across forty-four poems, not a translator’s samples, and the sonnets carry no titles, only numbers.

Each sonnet is fourteen lines in two unequal halves, an octave and a sestet, with a turn between them. English sonneteers had used the shape for epigram and for argument; here the octave usually sets out a scene or lays down a proposition and the sestet answers it, often by conceding the opposite. The sequence holds together by repetition rather than plot, and repeats on purpose: say over again, with the same heart, how do I love thee. Whole words return across the forty-four, grave, gift, purple, level, roots, dew, and each return shifts the word a little.

Voices & Forms

• The speaker: The first person of all forty-four sonnets, a woman who measures herself against the beloved and finds the account short. Her voice is self-accusing, exact, and given to the figures of law and trade: gift, desert, worth, debt, barter. She speaks from one room in the house and never steps outside it.
• The beloved: Addressed as Beloved, Dearest, my poet, princely Heart and liberal giver. He is never named and never described in body. We are given his voice, his patience and his calling to palace-floors, and no age, no face, no history. He exists in the book as the second person, the ear the poems are spoken into.
• The mystic Shape: The figure of Sonnet I, which moves behind the speaker, draws her backward by the hair and speaks in mastery. It is the sequence’s one supernatural agent, and its answer, not Death but Love, sets the terms for the forty-three sonnets that follow. It never returns in that form, but its voice is what the book argues with.
• The Petrarchan octave and sestet: Fourteen lines in two unequal halves. The octave carries a scene or a proposition to its full weight, and the sestet turns it, sometimes by answering, sometimes by refusing. The shape suits a book that argues with itself: statement, objection, and a concession that is never quite a surrender.
• The death-and-love vocabulary: Grave, urn, ashes, deathweights, funeral shears, the death-hour, and at the centre of it Love as strong as Death. The same words keep returning, and their value changes as they go: what begins as a threat in the first sonnet is a promise in the last, where the speaker will love better after death.
• Direct address: The vocative is the engine of the sequence. Almost every sonnet speaks to thou, and the speech acts vary: question, plea, bargain, refusal, thanks. Because the poems are addressed rather than described, the reader overhears an argument in progress and has to supply the beloved’s side of it.

Core Themes

• Death answered by love: The book begins with a riddle and an answer. Musing on Theocritus and the sweet years, the speaker sees the shadow of her own life, is taken by the hair from behind, guesses Death, and is told Love. Everything after that works out the correction. Death stays in the vocabulary — the urn, the ashes, the shears, the grave she is willing to yield — but it stops being the end of the argument. In XXVII love retrieves as well as death takes; in XLIII the speaker will love better after death. The sequence does not deny the grave; it puts love on the other side of it.
• Worth, gift and the refusal of pity: The middle of the book is a long negotiation about whether such a love may be given or received. The speaker calls herself poor, out of tune, a worn viol, a heap of ashes; she will not soil his purple with her dust. What she refuses, more firmly, is pity. Sonnet XIV asks to be loved for love’s sake only, not for her smile, her way of speaking, or the wiping of her cheeks, since a creature might stop weeping and lose the love with the tears. A love founded on her need would be a claim on his charity, and charity can be withdrawn.
• The fear that returns: Each assurance is followed by a fresh doubt, and the pattern is the plot. VI keeps his shadow after he has gone; XV looks past love to the bitter sea; XXIII asks whether he would miss her life; XXX sees his image through tears on the day she saw him smile; XXXVI confesses a still renewable fear that the clasped hands may never hold. The fear is not disbelief in him. It is the memory of a life lived without him, returning when the happiness is greatest.
• Speech and silence: The sonnets are about the difficulty of saying it, and they say it anyway. XIII will not fashion love into speech and drops the torch, offering the silence of her womanhood instead. XXI asks him to say it over again, and then to love her also in silence with his soul. XXVIII reads his letters as dead paper that still speaks; XXXIII asks to be called by her pet name; XLI cannot find words to thank him. The book is the answer to its own worry.
• The gift returned: The sequence is built on things given, and it ends by giving them back. A lock of hair in XVIII and XIX, a curl for a curl on the soul’s Rialto; three kisses in XXXVIII; and in XLIV the flowers he brought all summer, returned as these thoughts, with the instruction to keep them where they shall not pine. The last sonnet makes the book itself the gift, and the claim that its roots are left in her is the sequence’s account of what a poem is: something taken from a life and handed over.

Why Download Our Custom E-Reader Edition of Sonnets from the Portuguese?

The download is the whole sequence: forty-four sonnets, numbered I to XLIV, from the Theocritus of the first to the flowers of the last, with no preface added and no poem cut. Nothing is summarised in place of itself. The text is the Standard Ebooks edition, set from the Project Gutenberg transcription, and the numbering is printed as the edition prints it.

Around the poems there is what a sequence of bare sonnets needs: ten movements that follow the argument in order, six notes on the voices and forms that carry it, five themes that cross the whole book, and a short account of the year and the title. The movements are ours; the numbering and the text are the edition’s, so any sonnet can be looked up elsewhere by number alone.

The files come in three formats with the same text and the same breaks. The EPUB opens in Apple Books, Calibre and most Android readers; the AZW3 is the file for a Kindle, by cable or through Send to Kindle; the KEPUB is the one Kobo devices read best. No account is needed, and nothing is locked, watermarked or time limited.

• Based on the Standard Ebooks Edition, via Standard Ebooks, whose text of Sonnets from the Portuguese is set from a Project Gutenberg transcription and prints the forty-four sonnets numbered I to XLIV, with no preface or notes of its own.
• All forty-four sonnets in the edition’s order The whole sequence from I to XLIV, unbroken, with the numbering printed as the edition prints it, so a line quoted anywhere can be found here by number.
• Ten movements in place of a table of contents The sonnets have no titles, so the movements take their place: each covers a run of consecutive numbers, follows the argument and stops where the next begins.
• EPUB, AZW3 and KEPUB files The same text in three formats, for Apple Books, Kindle and Kobo, with the numbering and the sonnet breaks intact and no account needed.

Part of: Poetry & Epics · 1850s