Elizabeth Barrett Browning – A Victorian writer. I do NOT feel at sync with this type of poetry. I can basically get the rhythm of it, but it takes effort to get into it. There were a couple of phrases that hit me, and there were some places where she used weird words and rants that I just got annoyed with. My ears are tuned to a different rhetoric, or humor. Timing is key!
A memorized sonnet from Laura: The Wind Hoverer? Written by a priest. Pits accents against syllables.
EB Browning. Her mother died when she was about 20. She published her first book of poetry when she was 22, in 1828. She was so famous as a poet she was almost poet Laurette. Very politically radical, she wrote a poem against children oppression in the industrial revolution. Her father was a personality, he dwarfed his children, kept them around him and didn’t want any of his kids to marry. She became an invalid and became dependent on morphine (actually, most women of the time were addicted, as it was used for childbearing)
In 1846, she met Robert Brown via letter. She hid their relationship from her father, and then they eloped! She became this bohemian, radicalized woman living in Italy. She wrote some of the most famous love poetry. Ever, apparently. “How do I love thee? let me count the ways?” Aha! Maybe I do know her.
Aurora Leigh: Born in Italy, her mother dies when she is 4, her father dies when she is 13. Her father was rich and had land in England, was getting older and not expected to marry. When he went to Italy he met Aurora Leigh’s mother in Florence, in a confirmation parade. He marries her, and they love each other. He is the kind of man who became uncommon as he suddenly jumped out of the role of the English Lord, prim and proper, and throws off his duties in England for love. He becomes melanchology when his wife dies. He teaches Aurora.
Aurora Leigh – the third greatest poem written in Enlgish. Beaten by: Paradise Lost by Milton and Wordworths The Prelude (the growth of a poets mind)
Aurora Leigh is a coming of age, further as a woman poet.
Barrett disagrees with Locke’s theory of Association of Ideas, she thinks people are a Palimpsest, which is a piece of parchment or papyrus. It has many layers of text on it, since it was so h
ard to make paper. What is already on/in us? Phylogeny? Do we have the knowledge of our ancestors in our genes, or the knowledge of humanity? It could be God, our parents…who has written on our phylogeny?
She speaks about acculturation, when traveling inland. When you listen to the divine or infinite, to eternity. A sense of the outer infinite, see the pose saints are painted in. God is the outer infinite?
Aurora says her mother died because she loved having the child so much. Her mother absolutely adored her.
She looks and hungers for the world, feeling a “mother want.” She feels shut out from the world.
I, Aurora Leigh, was born To make my father sadder, and myself Not over-joyous, truly.
Wow, what a statement about your life! Kissing full sense into empty words: through her love she pulls him into a cultural understanding of the language that we all have to learn. Streaming pretty words together that make no sense: Think nursery rhymes! They make no sense, some are horrible and barbaric, but from mother to child and what the child hears, it’s all just sweet words.
And kissing full sense into empty words; Which things are corals to cut life upon,
^^ What a line, Laura says. I should explore this more. This is very different than the step sisters amputating or cutting themselves so they can fit in the glass slipper, in the culture that they want. This is different than cutting with a knife, Browning says cutting with coral! Coral is beautiful, is it not?
There are two uses of the words “live here.” To be alive in spirit and physically, where she lives and really comes alive and discovers poetry.
