- Elizabeth Barrett Browning - Wikimedia Commons
Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s “Sonnet 36” from Sonnets from the Portuguese reveals the speaker’s apprehension that the first moments of a new love might prove to be illusive; thus she refuses to believe unwaveringly in the possibility that love had arrived.
First Quatrain: “When we met first and loved, I did not build”
The speaker says that when she and her belovèd first met and love began to flower, she did not readily accept that the feelings were genuine; she refused “to build / Upon the event with marble.” She questions whether love could endure for her “between / Sorrow and sorrow.”
The reader is by now quite familiar with the sadness, pain, and grief the speaker has suffered in her life and that she continues to suffer these maladies. For her to accept the balm of love is very difficult. Her doubts and fears remain more real to her than the most cherished feelings of love and affection.
Second Quatrain: “Distrusting every light that seemed to gild”
Answering her own question in the negative, she asserts that she preferred to remain “Distrusting every light that seemed to gild” the progression toward the loving relationship. Her fears kept her holding back her heart, because she “feared to overlean / A finger even.”
Quite uncharacteristically, the speaker admits that since that early time at the very beginning of this love relationship, she has, indeed, “grown serene / And strong.” Such an admission is difficult for her personality, but she must come to terms with her evolving growth.
First Tercet: “A still renewable fear … O love, O troth …”
Still, even though she is aware of her growth in terms of serenity and strength, she believes that God has instilled in her the ability to remain somewhat skeptical in order to protect herself from certain torture at having been wrong about the relationship.
She knows that if “these enclaspèd hands should never hold,” she would be devastated if she had not protected her heart with those doubts. If the “mutual kiss” should “drop between us both,” she is sure her life would be filled with even more grief and sorrow.
Second Tercet: “As an unowned thing, once the lips being cold”
She spreads across the border of the tercets the wrenching feeling that her words are causing her. She must utter them, but she knows that they will cause pain, even to her belovèd. But if “Love, be false,” then she simply must acknowledge the possibility for both their sakes.
She anticipates the likelihood that she might have to “lose one joy” which may already be written in her stars, and not knowing which joy that might be, she must remain watchful that it might be the very love she is striving so mightily to protect.
Linda Sue Grimes - As a writer, researcher, and SRF devotee, Linda Sue Grimes has studied poetry and practiced Kriya Yoga for over thirty years..
