"'Our deep, dear silence": marriage and lyricism in the sonnets from the Portuguese

Williams, R. (2009) "'Our deep, dear silence": marriage and lyricism in the sonnets from the Portuguese. Victorian Literature and Culture, 37(1), pp. 85-102. (doi: 10.1017/S1060150309090068)

Abstract

Sonnet XLI of Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Sonnets from the Portuguese is candid about its ambition to write love poetry that will last:

— Oh, to shoot
My soul's full meaning into future years, —
That they should lend it utterance, and salute
Love that endures, with Life that disappears! –
(Barrett Browning 397)


This is a rare moment in the sequence of hope enunciated. Although littered with apparently unfettered exclamations of the newly loved and newly loving – “I seemed not one | For such man's love!” (XXXII), “Beloved, I only love thee!” (IX) – the rhetorical mode of the Sonnets from the Portuguese also feels reticent, provisional, even transient: “This said, ‘I am thine’ – and so, its ink has paled | With lying at my heart that beats too fast” (XXVIII). Yet the sequence's desire for endurance may be reconciled with its frequent return to moments of erasure – “My letters! – all dead paper, . . . mute and white! –” (XXVIII) – by attending to the generative effects of silence in this most ambivalent of sonnet performances. Indeed, the sequence appears to fall in with Daniel Barenboim's logic, which would dictate that if ensuing years are to produce, as the sonnet anticipates, “utterance” – to form sound – the sonnet itself must provide the pre-silence. If silence is the pulse of “Love that endures” (passing over from life to love), then the Sonnets from the Portuguese become, perhaps, an exercise in learning, in Derrida's terms, “how to be silent.” Despite such elevated investment, however, silence clearly troubles our reading of this sonnet sequence; not only does it threaten to undermine the efficacy of a sequence celebrated for the enunciation of love, but it also gestures at a broader Victorian discourse in which silence and “woman-love,” as sonnet XIII names it, are more frequently brought together as an effect of systemized suppression. But, I suggest that these sonnets are, in fact, pushing us to reconsider how we read silence; perhaps surprisingly, this is revealed by paying attention to the sequence's careful anticipation of marriage. Indeed, establishing a conjugal perspective on these poems reveals a radical dynamic in which silencing, in fact, gives way to finding, as Derrida asks, “how to say something.”

• Item Type: Articles
• Status: Published
• Refereed: Yes
• Glasgow Author(s) Enlighten ID: Williams, Dr Rhian
• Authors: Williams, R.
• Subjects: P Language and Literature > PR English literature
• College/School: College of Arts & Humanities > School of Critical Studies > English Literature
• Journal Name: Victorian Literature and Culture
• ISSN: 1060-1503