They register the surprise-the constantly defeated skepticism-that he should love her, and that she should be able to count on his love. This is often couched in terms of a kind of astonishment: Given how much I love you, why don’t you love me back? But Sonnets from the Portuguese displays an opposite attitude: astonishment that someone like Robert Browning does love her. The standard sequence, from the 14th-century poet Petrarch in Italian and from the 16th-century poets Sir Thomas Wyatt and Sir Philip Sidney in English (and William Shakespeare preeminently) is one of complaint that the beloved does nor reciprocate the sonneteer’s love. What is striking about the sonnets is the difference in attitude they take from most sonnet sequences. She had been an invalid for years, and unexpectedly she had found passionate love. The sonnets are striking, then, as a kind of poetic autobiography of Elizabeth’s feeling for Robert in his insistent and passionate courtship. (As in her poem, in which she follows a story whereby Catarina gives a ribbon from her hair to Camoens, Elizabeth describes giving a lock of her own hair to Robert in sonnet 18.) The obscurity of the title helps to maintain some deniability that the sonnets describe her relationship to Robert, but that is just what they do describe. She would therefore be the Portuguese, the woman writing these sonnets for the poet she loved and admired, and who loved and admired her in turn. Robert’s admiration for the poem made Elizabeth frame herself as Catarina (who also sang), filled with admiration and love for the Camoens of her day, Robert. Their relationship was broken up, and she died in 1556. Robert loved Elizabeth’s 1844 poem “Catarina to Camoens,” which is a fictional farewell, spoken when she is dying, by the real lady Catherina de Athaide to the great Portuguese poet Luis Vaz de Camoens (1524–80), who had made her the lady of some of his love poems. Although the title is intentionally misleading, the mistake it fosters has an element of truth in it. The title is often mistaken as suggesting that the poems are translations of some Portuguese collection of sonnets (like their friend Edward FitzGerald’s The Rubáiyát of Omar khayyám, from the Persian). She only showed him the poems in 1849, three years after their marriage and elopement, and published them, at his insistence, in her 1850 collection of Poems. Analysis of Barrett Browning’s Sonnets from the Portugueseīy NASRULLAH MAMBROL on FebruĮlizabeth Barrett Browning wrote this wildly popular sonnet sequence, most famous for its penultimate sonnet- “How do I love thee? Let me count the ways” (sonnet 43)-during Robert Browning’s courtship of her in 18.
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