Sonnets from the Portuguese

By Elizabeth Barrett Browning

Elizabeth Barrett Browning was a prominent British poet during the Victorian era.  Elizabeth’s classic poetical works include Sonnets from the Portuguese and Aurora Leigh.  This edition of Sonnets from the Portuguese includes a table of contents.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Charles River Editors
• Release date: Mar 22, 2018
• ISBN: 9781508018582

Elizabeth Barrett Browning

Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806-1861) was an English poet. The daughter of a wealthy family—her father made his fortune as a slave owner in Jamaica, while her mother’s family owned and operated sugar plantations, mills, and ships—Browning eventually became an abolitionist and advocate for child labor laws. Her marriage to the prominent Victorian poet Robert Browning caused the final break between Browning and her family, after which she moved to Italy and lived there with Robert for the rest of her life. She began writing poems at a young age, finding success with the 1844 publication of Poems. Browning went on to be recognized as one of the foremost poets of early Victorian England, influencing such writers as Edgar Allen Poe and Emily Dickinson. She is most famous for her Sonnets from the Portuguese, a collection of 44 love poems published in 1850, and Aurora Leigh, an 1856 epic poem described by leading Victorian critic John Ruskin as the greatest long poem written in the nineteenth century. Browning suffered from numerous illnesses throughout her life, eventually succumbing in Florence at the age of 55.

Book preview

SONNETS FROM THE PORTUGUESE

Elizabeth Barrett Browning

KYPROS PRESS

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This book is a work of poetry; its contents are wholly imagined.

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Copyright © 2015 by Elizabeth Barrett Browning

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Sonnets from the Portuguese

Sonnets from the Portuguese

By

Elizabeth Barrett Browning

SONNETS FROM THE PORTUGUESE

~

I

I thought once how Theocritus had sung

Of the sweet years, the dear and wished-for years,

Who each one in a gracious hand appears

To bear a gift for mortals, old or young:

And, as I mused it in his antique tongue,

I saw, in gradual vision through my tears,

The sweet, sad years, the melancholy years,

Those of my own life, who by turns had flung

A shadow across me. Straightway I was ’ware,

So weeping, how a mystic Shape did move

Behind me, and drew me backward by the hair;

And a voice said in mastery, while I strove,—

Guess now who holds thee!—Death, I said, But, there,

The silver answer rang, Not Death, but Love.

II

But only three in all God’s universe

Have heard this word thou hast said,—Himself, beside

Thee speaking, and me