“In Silence Like to Death”:Elizabeth Barrett’s Sonnet Turn
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“In Silence Like to Death”:
Elizabeth Barrett’s Sonnet Turn
AMY BILLONE
And then there it was, suddenly entire; she held it in her hands,
beautiful and reasonable, clear and complete, the essence sucked
out of life and held rounded here— the sonnet.
—Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse1
ALTHOUGH ELIZABETH BARRETT BEGAN PUBLISHING POETRY AS EARLY AS
1820, she did not print her first three sonnets until 1838. Her 1844
collection, on the other hand, included 28 sonnets, and in 1850 she
printed 50 sonnets. As I will demonstrate, this progressive turn toward
the sonnet—a highly compressed, constrained form—reflects Barrett’s
growing investment in silence both as inhibitor and sustainer of her art.
Devastated by speechlessness after her brother drowned in 1840,
convinced that “this long silence, embracing the most afflictive time of
[her] whole life” could be neither poetically verbalized nor transcended,
she began to question the redemptive model of lyric poetry to which she
had previously subscribed.2 The sonnet’s brevity and reticence lent “a
slow arm of sweet compression” to Barrett’s work, providing her with a
formal metaphor for silence and grief.3 With her turn to the sonnet in
1844, Barrett addressed both her unspeakable sadness and also the absence
of women’s voices in the British lyric tradition. To do so, she
responded to the sonnet tradition primarily in the context of two approaches:
the amatory model according to which poets drew from the
absence or unattainability of a beloved addressee a source of lyrical potency,
and, alternatively, the Wordsworthian version (itself a recasting of
Milton), whereby the unresponsiveness of nature or of a contemplated
other is converted into the mind’s encounter with the sublime.4
Becoming for her, as it did for almost every major poet of the nineteenth
century, a synecdoche for lyric poetry in general, the sonnet thus
put Barrett into dialogue with her most prolific Romantic precursor in
the field—a man who, perhaps not uncoincidentally, had lost his own
brother to drowning.5 The result was a collision between poetic modes.
Rather than adopting Wordsworth’s revisionary sonnet poetics as a means
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- Date Added
- April 29, 2015
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- Global Victorians, Spring 2015
- Item Type
- Document
- Citation
- AMY BILLONE, ““In Silence Like to Death”:Elizabeth Barrett’s Sonnet Turn,” SMU Student Research: Victorian Studies and Beyond, accessed November 7, 2024, https://globalvictorians.omeka.net/items/show/205.