First Quatrain: “Can it be right to give what I can give?”
In Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s “Sonnet 9” in Sonnets from the Portuguese, the speaker begins with a question, “Can it be right to give what I can give?” She then explains what she “can give”; through a bit of exaggeration, she contends that all she has to offer is her sorrow.
If her suitor continues with her, he will have to “sit beneath the fall of tears.” And he will have to listen to her sighs again and again. Her “lips” are like a renunciant, who has given up all desire for worldly gain and material achievement.
Second Quatrain: “Through those infrequent smiles which fail to live”
The speaker’s lips have seldom smiled, and they even now seem incapable of acquiring the smiling habit, despite the attentions she is now receiving from her suitor. She is afraid that such an unbalanced situation is unfair to her lover; thus she laments, “this can scare be right!” Continuing she exclaims, “We are not peers,” and this situation dominates her rhetoric and her concerns.
Because they are “not peers,” she cannot fathom how they can be lovers, yet it seems that such is the nature of their maturing relationship. She feels that she must confess that the gap between them continues to taunt her and cause her to “grieve.”
First Tercet: “That givers of such gifts as mine are, must”
The speaker spells out her concern that by giving him such gifts as copious tears and unsmiling lips she has to be “counted with the ungenerous.” She wishes it were otherwise; she would like to give gifts as rich as the ones she receives.
But because she is incapable of returning equal treasure, she again insists that her lover leave her; she cries, “Out, alas!” Again, elevating her lover to the status of royalty, she insists, “I will not soil they purple with my dust.”
Second Tercet: “Nor breathe my poison on thy Venice-glass”
Neither will she “breathe [her] poison on [his] Venice-glass.” She will not allow her lowly station to sully his higher class. But then she goes much too far, saying, “[n]or give thee any love.” She immediately reverses herself, averring that she was wrong in making such a statement.
Thus she asserts, “Belovèd, I love only thee! let it pass.” She finally admits without reservation that she loves him and asks him to forget the protestations she has made. She asks him to “let it pass,” or forget that she has made such suggestions that he should leave her; she wants nothing more than that he stay.
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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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