Today’s Poem: My Letters! All Dead Paper
Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s relived passion
My Letters! All Dead Paper
by Elizabeth Barrett Browning
My letters! all dead paper, . . . mute and white ! — And yet they seem alive and quivering Against my tremulous hands which loose the string And let them drop down on my knee to-night. This said, . . . he wished to have me in his sight Once, as a friend: this fixed a day in spring To come and touch my hand . . . a simple thing, Yet I wept for it! — this, . . . the paper’s light . . . Said, Dear, I love thee; and I sank and quailed As if God’s future thundered on my past. This said, I am thine — and so its ink has paled With lying at my heart that beat too fast. And this . . . O Love, thy words have ill availed, If, what this said, I dared repeat at last! ═══════════════════════
Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806–1861), whose droll “A Man’s Requirements” ran as our comic Wednesday poem on March 6, was widely assumed to be a serious contender for the post of British poet laureate following the death of William Wordsworth in 1850. The post went instead to Alfred, Lord Tennyson; nevertheless, Barrett Browning’s Sonnets from the Portuguese, published that same year, met with a level of transatlantic acclaim that readers today might struggle to imagine as a response to poetry. In the summer of 1862, at home in Amherst, Massachusetts, Emily Dickinson wrote to a friend sojourning in England with an exhortation to “hear for us” any mention of the recently deceased “Mrs. Browning,” and “if you touch her Grave, put one hand on the Head for me, her unmentioned Mourner.”
The Sonnets from the Portuguese masquerade as translations, but are in truth their author’s own inventions. This artifice permits the risk of extreme self-revelation, while the poet says, implicitly, “I’m not really this naked I you think you see.” The sonnet form itself might be said to accomplish the same end.
Certainly it’s possible, as Edna St. Vincent Millay has demonstrated in “I, Being Born a Woman and Distressed” — also a Petrarchan sonnet, with the same rhyme scheme in the sestet — to write a completely ironic sonnet, in which the self wears a mask from beginning to end. But it is also true that the demands of a strict form can trick the writer’s mind into unexpected epiphanies and confessions. While the poet casts about for another a-rhyme, some more subterranean area of the brain goes and spills its secrets.
In this Petrarchan sonnet — twenty-eighth of the forty-four Sonnets from the Portuguese — the “dead paper,” the medium for a sequence of love letters, is animated and illuminated by the words inscribed on it, even as the speaker herself is brought to life by reliving those words. As the poem progresses, the emotion the letters convey intensifies, from liking to love to self-offering: “I am thine.” The sonnet’s volta falls conventionally, but effectively, in the transition from the last line of the octave to the first line of the sestet, when the lover stops hinting and allows his feelings to step into the open.
For the recipient of these letters, the declaration is tantamount to a conversion: “As if God’s future thundered on my past.” The turn in the poem, that instant of realization that she is beloved and desired, is the turn that changes everything. She relives this turn with every rereading of the letters. In lines 10 and 11, the very ink seems to drain like blood from the page, to feed her fast-beating heart, almost vampiric in its hunger for a lover whose words signify not only his feelings, but his body itself. From there, all that’s left to say is that at some point, words fail.
I confess I read the ending of this poem as suggesting the opposite of how Sally reads it. The "ill-availed" makes me think the poem's speaker did not reply to the man's profession of love, and this obsessive rereading of his letters is her tear-filled imagining of what might have been but wasn't.
‘Letter’ can mean: epistle, a written note put in an envelope and posted; but it can mean ‘letter of the alphabet’, the stuff out of which words, like the words in this poem, are made. I’m not sure how seriously to take EBB’s ‘Portuguese’ conceit, but I note that in Portuguese (as in most European languages) these things are different words: the first is ‘carta’, the second ‘letra’. But English plays with the ambiguity: letters are made out of letters, and poems are both made out of letters and, in this case, made out of letters. The poem is clearly about a woman reading letters-as-epistles and reviewing being courted by a man, but it’s also about writing, I think: the eye that is seen and sees, the hand that is touched which is also the hand that writes including writing the poem, the heart that informs the poem.