- Elizabeth Barrett Browning - Wikimedia Commons
Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s “Sonnet 30” from Sonnets from the Portuguese dramatizes the regression of the speaker as she wonders if she has merely created dreamlike the love of her belovèd.
First Quatrain: “I see thine image through my tears to-night”
The speaker addresses her beloved in absentia, whom she had seen earlier in the day. She remarks that she is shedding tears as she appears to be looking at his picture or perhaps just visualizing him as in a dream.
She ponders the cause of her tears: “How / Refer the cause?” She asks him if she is the cause of her sadness or “is it thou?” The speaker then begins to imagine a ceremony, perhaps, the wedding of her belovèd and herself.
Second Quatrain: “Amid the chanted joy and thankful rite”
In her dream-state, she visualizes an attendant to the service, and “the acolyte” stumbles and falls “flat” “On the altar-stair.” Such an unexpected accident provides not only a comic outrage but also a farcical intrusion into such the solemn occasion.
The speaker’s imagination is allowing her to hallucinate; no doubt such a nightmare comes from the hypersensitive nature of the speaker. The reader is aware of the intensity of this speaker’s emotions as she has gone from a nearly complete recluse with feelings of abandonment to the betrothed of a lover whom she deems much above her station.
She then asserts that she “hear[s his] voice and vow.” But his voice and vow are “perplexed” and “uncertain.” And he is “out of sight.” Again, the reader detects those old feelings of doubt that the speaker has suffered since the beginning of adventures in romance.
First Tercet: “As he, in his swooning ears, the choir’s Amen”
The speaker wonders if the stumbling attendant has been overwhelmed by “the choir’s Amen.” And then she contemplates the possibility that she is dreaming this love that has become so important to her, and thus she questions, “Belovèd, dost thou love?”
Or perhaps, she has, in fact, dreamed it all, for she wonders, “did I see all / The glory as I dreamed?” If it is nothing but a dream, it would be quite natural for her to stumble and fall; thus, it was not an assistant but the speaker herself who has stumbled and fallen upon those altar steps.
Second Tercet: “Too vehement light dilated my ideal”
The speaker considers the possibility that again she has allowed herself to believe in the good fortune of finding a lover as brilliant as her belovèd seems to be, and now the fact may be that it was all a fantasy; perhaps, “[t]oo vehement light dilated my ideal.”
She cannot help but wonder and therefore she puts to him the question, “Will that light come again?” And she compares that urgency to “these tears” that she now emphasizes are “falling hot and real?”
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