Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s “Sonnet 28” from Sonnets from the Portuguese dramatizes the speaker’s simple act of taking a bundle of love letters, loosening the string that holds them, and then reporting hints from each letter. Each one on which she chooses to report reveals a step in the growing closeness of the two lovers from friendship to soul-mates.
First Quatrain: “My letters! all dead paper, mute and white!”
The speaker exclaims, “My letters!” She has taken her bundle of letters in her hands and begins to report her reaction to their very existence. She avers that they are, in fact, nothing more than “dead paper, mute and white!”
But because she knows the history they hold, she announces that they appear “alive and quivering.” Of course, it is her trembling hands that make them “quiver,” and she has untied the string that holds the letters together in a bundle; her “tremulous hands” then allow those letter to “drop down on her knee.”
Second Quatrain: “This said,—he wished to have me in his sight”
In the second quatrain, the speaker begins to report what each letter says. The first one she selects tells her that her lover “wished to have me in his sight / Once, as a friend.” Thus, in the beginning, the two experienced friendship, and she was delighted that he simply wanted to see her.
In the next letter she selects, he tells her that he wants to come and “touch [her] hand,” and this day was “in spring.” The romance of these image choices are rife with possibility, but she deems the situation, “a simple thing.” On the other hand, simple though it might be, it made her weep.
First Tercet: “Said, Dear, I love thee; and I sank and quailed”
The next letter, whose paper is “light,” tells her, “Dear, I love thee,” to which she has a tremendously passionate reaction: “I sank and quailed / As if God’s future thundered on my past.”
As the sonnet sequence has revealed, this speaker has lived a solitary, sorrowful life. Her past now is being adjudicated by God, Who is pronouncing that her future will be the opposite of her past.
Second Tercet: “With lying at my heart that beat too fast”
And the next letter told her that he was hers. She has treasured this one so dearly that she claims “its ink has paled / with lying at my heart that beat too fast.” Figuratively, she has kept this letter next to her beating heart, which has metaphorically lightened the ink.
The final letter excites her so much that she cannot bring herself to repeat any part of it or even report a hint of what it says.
The overall progression of the sonnet leaves the reader perfectly satisfied with the conclusion, despite the fact that she says not a word about what the letter held.
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Linda Sue Grimes - As a writer, researcher, and SRF devotee, Linda Sue Grimes has studied poetry and practiced Kriya Yoga for over thirty years..
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