Sonnets from the Portuguese by Elizabeth Barrett Browning

Browning’s use of enjambment here creates the lingering effect of prolongment and technical difficulty, indicative of the very arduous task that it describes: that of having to “hold the torch out, while the winds are rough.” Conventional tropes of love poetry are thus twisted for use in a different context: it’s not love itself that is being compared to fire or stormy weather, but the exacting articulation of it. The first quatrain of Sonnet 13 consists of a single question, enjambed across four lines. Browning’s exercise in poetic variation and virtuosity, then, can be viewed as an apt reflection both of the paradox and the power that arises from the intertwining of these differing identities. Following the turn that occurs in its final sestet, Sonnet 13 ultimately concludes on a note of possibility and empowering self-introspection: while the sonnet revolves around the complicated relationship between Browning and her future husband, it is the poet herself who emerges in the final lines of the poem, self-conscious of her roles as sonneteer, invalid, and woman in love. Although laden with allusions to suffering not as an archetypal symptom of Petrarchan romance but as something that disables the rites of courtship and delays the admission of love, the poem does not present a wholly hopeless and futile situation for the two lovers. The poem’s variations in syntactic structure, rhyme scheme, and diction all contribute to developing the theme of detachment and impossibility that pervades the first two quatrains.

In Sonnet 13 of Sonnets from the Portuguese, Elizabeth Barrett Browning skillfully manipulates the sonnet form to construct what is essentially a love poem, albeit an unusual one that paradoxically eschews the rote sentimentality associated with these works and emphasizes separation rather than blissful union.

Sonnets from the Portuguese by Elizabeth Barrett Browning