CASA GUIDI & SONNETS FROM THE PORTUGUESE

Well, this is the first combination of orals reading & sightseeing that has made any sense at all: today I read Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Sonnets from the Portuguese, and I went to her apartment in Florence. It would have been more appropriate to read Aurora Leigh, or "Casa Guidi Windows," perhaps, but I'd never read Sonnets from the Portuguese and I figured now was as good a time as any. It's a sonnet sequence written by EBB during her courtship with her future husband, Robert Browning. EBB (then just Elizabeth Barrett) was a famous invalid poetess living at home with her autocratic dad when Robert Browning, a younger, up-and-coming poet, wrote her a fan letter and asked to meet her. They had a secret courtship and then snuck her out of her dad's house to have a secret marriage! I think she snuck right back home after, but then they both snuck away to Italy. She was nervous about publishing such personal poems, so she called them "Sonnets from the Portuguese" so people would think they were translations. BUT her husband's pet name for her was "my little Portuguese" or something, so the title is a hilarious inside joke. Like if I published a book of love poems to Paul and called it "Sonnets from the Keepsnake" or something. I find it very funny to think of the sonnets as a bunch of notes sent to Robert Browning from The Portuguese.

First of all, I don't think reading poetry on the Kindle makes a lot of sense. I knew it wouldn't work for a lot of visually-oriented poetry: the Kindle wouldn't know what to do with Herbert's "Easter Wings" or those calligrammes by Apollinaire (?) or twentieth-century poetry that uses composition by field. But I thought reading those old-fashioned blocks of sonnets or blank verse would make sense. While the sonnets are certainly intelligible--I have to make the font pretty small to keep the integrity of the line breaks, but I can read them--I'm realizing my reading practices for poetry are pretty different from my reading practices for fiction.

The Kindle encourages a more passive, absorptive reading experience: you can highlight some interesting passages, you can make some notes, but it's best for situations where you want to get swept up in the story; and even though I'm supposed to be reading the novels on my list carefully and critically, they're so long and so _narrative_ that they encourage you to read quickly, taking in big blocks of text, following the plot. You mark a passage (or two hundred) for close reading, but you literally don't have time to do close readings of every sentence--and almost no one expects you to. The novelists themselves, even the ones who are considered great stylists, weren't necessarily worrying for hours over the mot juste--according to the old saw, they're often getting paid by the word, and whether or not that's true they're often working under a deadline.

Victorian poets may have composed as rapidly and carelessly as novelists for all I know, and their audiences may have read poetry with the same absorption as novels. But they probably didn't; and I can't. Lyric poetry doesn't reward Kindle-style reading; I find that I need to have a pen in hand when I'm reading poems "for school," because it's easy to get caught up in rhythms and images and to come away with nothing but a vague impression--not something you can write or talk about. I tend to read poems very "actively" and mark them up pretty heavily, and that's hard to do on the Kindle.

So with Sonnets from the Portuguese I found myself often drifting off, not able to focus on the poems or identify the ways in which the sonnet sequence was developing. I'll probably have to re-read it at home in a Real Book, when I re-read Aurora Leigh & other works by EBB. But here's what I did get out of it:

* I'd read somewhere that most of the love sonnets EBB wrote to Robert Browning were somewhat resistant: that she was telling him their love was impossible, etc., playing the role of the traditional female addressee of the sonnet sequence, one who rejects the poet's advances, but giving that addressee a voice. Maybe I'm confusing these sonnets with "Monna Innomiata" by Christina Rossetti, but I'm pretty sure I've read references to EBB playing this role in her sonnets.

She does start off claiming that (for some reason) their love is forbidden by God: in the second sonnet God "laid the curse/So darkly on my eyelids, so as to amerce/My sight from seeing thee." "Amerce" is a pretty crazy word! which seems to mean "be at the mercy of," so I don't know how you can amerce someone from something. But anyway: God blinded her to Robert Browning? Or he just isn't around? Or her dad is keeping them apart? No, it's God: "'Nay' is worse/From God than from all others, O my friend! Men never could part us with their worldly jars . . ." The sonnet ends with a very lovely image: "heaven being rolled between us at the end,/We should but vow the faster for the stars." Beautiful, but interesting that "heaven" is part of the earthly impediments that they can totally deal with, rather than the divine impediment that they can't. I guess it could be a clever way of implying that they can get around even this God-imposed barrier, since the sonnets become pretty almost-blasphemous once these two crazy kids actually get together.

But why does God not want them to get together? And what happened to her eyelids? The next sonnet suggests that maybe God said no because they are too different. "Unlike are we, unlike, O princely Heart!/Unlike our uses and our destinies./Our ministering two angels look surprise/On one another, as they strike athwart/Their wings in passing." I like those angel wings striking athwart. It's just going to be awkward! They had better give it up now. The difference is that Robert Browning is a sophisticated, urbane socialite and Elizabeth Barrett is basically a little squirrel out in the dirt. "Thou . . . art/A guest for queens in social pageantries . . . What hast thou to do/With looking from the lattice-lights at me,/A poor,tired, wandering singer, singing through/The dark, and leaning up a cypress tree?" She uses this comparison a lot; it's an assertion of her own lowliness, which allows her to play the traditional sonneteer role of the lover who's unworthy to kiss the hem of his beloved's garment. But it also allows her to assert herself as maybe more authentic, less artificial than Browning, so she gets something out of it.

I'll stop going through the sonnets one by one, but I love Sonnet IV, where she contrasts her beloved's "calling to some palace-floor" with her own "poor" house:

Look up and see the casement broken in,
The bats and owlets builders in the roof!
My cricket chirps against thy mandolin.

I love that he has a mandolin and she has a cricket! Cute. But in the last line the loneliness of both singers becomes an equalizer: the speaker's voice "weeps . . . as thou must sing . . . alone, alone!"

OK, I guess she rejects him a lot in these early sonnets: she insists that he has to sing alone, she warns him in sonnet V that her grief will burn him up ("Stand further off then! go!"). And I guess that saying your lowliness means you & the beloved can't be together allows her both to take on that traditional sonneteer stance (I'm not worthy) AND to give a voice to the normally silent, rejecting beloved. If you're a girl and you want to write love sonnets to a guy, you're in a tough situation. You can't pursue the guy and go on about how handsome he is and why won't he love you. That is slutty and pathetic! We learned that from "Jean and Johnny" by Beverley Cleary. You can't act, so you react: you have to situate yourself as the pursued beloved, and you respond to all the lover's advances. I guess this kind of sonnet sequence is ONLY possible if you are two poets in love, huh? But anyway, something interesting in asserting agency not only through passive resistance, but through passive resistance based on your own unworthiness. Like Pamela or something, except without being kidnapped and bed-tricked over and over again?

Anyway, she finally gives up (EBB, not Pamela.) She tells him to go away--"Yet I feel that I shall stand/Henceforward in thy shadow." Now they're in a relationship of some kind, whether she likes it or not! That's the way to get 'em. This sonnet, #6, seems to be an important turning point, because after that she keeps going with the "I'm not worthy," but she lets go of the "Go away" stuff. There's some interesting stuff with perspective: writing a sonnet sequence to another poet might make you think more about how your beloved is always seeing something different than you are. Like when my friend in high school was really drunk and started freaking out and telling her boyfriend, "You always see MY face, you always see MY face." I didn't really understand that until I was in a relationship myself; it's weird to think that all these eleven years my own husband has been seeing a TOTALLY DIFFERENT FACE from the one I've been seeing every day. I'm not sure that's what EBB was going for with "For we look two ways, and cannot shine/With the same sunlight on our brow and hair"--she's probably going for some more angel wings striking athwart. But it made me think of these POV questions, and the horrible song "The Way You Love Me": "It's not right, and it's not fair/What you're missing over there." (the problem with this song is she's like, "If only you could see the way you kiss me," and you're like, YOU can't see that, you weirdo." OK actually I think there is a sonnet in this sequence where EBB says she can't think about him when she's absorbed in him, so she would agree with me, right? Great.)

Sometimes she makes herself into a muse figure--she says "How, dearest, wilt thou have me for most use?" (XVII) and compares herself to "an out-of-tune/Worn viol" that a really good musician can get good music out of (XXXII). That last one's interesting, because is the muse ever the instrument? Maybe he's her muse in that case; but he's the active artist & she the passive instrument. I am SUPER interested in muses right now, particularly in the male muse for the female writer: can he exist? Or is he always a creepy Svengali? Rachel Blau DuPlessis says that we can't have male muses, no no no. They are always a creepy Svengali. My friend wrote a paper on Alice Notley's essay "Dr Williams' Heiresses," where Notley kind of seems to want to make WCW a male muse, although she doesn't use that term. But she wants female writers to feel comfortable USING male writers, as legitimate ancestors. ANYWAY THIS IS GETTING IRRELEVANT TO EBB I THINK.

The sonnets often feel like devotional poems, except the addressee is a boyfriend and not God. As I said before, EBB can take this similarity to pretty blasphemous places, explicitly replacing God with Robert Browning a lot. Robert Browning was probably OK with that, right? But I'm not sure she was? It starts out as an opposition between Love and Death: the poet has been expecting an early death, and has given up on life being fun and good, but instead of an early death she got a lovable boyfriend! She sets this up in the first sonnet:

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."
Pretty awesome! I love that Love/Death holds her by the hair. HOT. The Love/Death opposition is appropriate because 1) those are the two ways someone's story, especially a girl's story, can end; 2) those are two ways you can get relief from a miserable life; 3) biographically, EBB was pretty sickly, so it makes sense that she maybe really was expecting death and not love. But also maybe that's always what love feels like! to melodramatic girls, at least. Who knew that this would happen! Well, you thought it would probably happen. But who knew! that it would happen now! I was SURE that thing holding me by the hair was, like, the Amazon delivery guy. Or maybe death!

So once you have this death/love opposition, it's also an afterlife/this life opposition, like in the second sonnet. And then it's like, "I thought my life was pointing to God's seat in Heaven (because I was going to die) but it turns out it was pointing to you!" And then you're in trouble. But she still says pious things about God (see the end of "How do I love thee": "and if God choose,/I shall but love thee better after death.")

"How do I love thee" is probably the vaguest, most boring sonnet in the sequence. But that's because I love concrete images, and "the depth and breadth and height/My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight/For the ends of Being and ideal Grace" is super frustrating because you think you're going to get something REALLY REAL, like a box, and instead all those nice dimensions melt into "the ends of Being and ideal Grace." WORST. I _am_ an ESTJ.

The last sonnet is nice, but it doesn't seem to be as powerful as a lot of the other ones; I wonder why she ended with it. The speaker recalls how the beloved brought her flowers, which seemed to live even in her "close room." She compares the sonnets to the flowers (OK, making a blanket statement about the sonnets is appropriate for a closing poem) and tells the speaker to "take [them] back," which kind of seems like they're parting: "tell thy soul, their roots are left in mine." Sonnets are usually about unattainable love, so this reminder that their hearts will go on, near, far, wherever you are, is appropriate to end with; but it's weird, they're totally getting married. I guess the sonnet sequence doesn't know that.

The end! Wow, I apparently had a lot to say about Sonnets from the Portuguese. I'm not sure I can connect any of that to my experience at Casa Guidi this afternoon. My mom & I showed up, looked at the brass plaque outside the door, rang a bell, walked up some stairs, and were greeted by a friendly Italian man in a goofy t-shirt. I knew the apartment was owned by Eton (!), administered by the Landmark Trust, and rented out as a vacation home (let's go! it fits 6-10 people!), so I didn't know whether this guy was a Landmark Trust guy, or a renter, or what. He didn't immediately explain, so there was some awkward standing around in the Brownings' dining room, and then he started explaining about how we can only see a few rooms, the restored rooms, and the more modern rooms are for the renters. We finally asked him if he worked there and he was like, "I am a substitute." Apparently the housekeeper couldn't make it that day. Anyway, he was super nice, and we wandered around imagining we were the Brownings and looking at busts and letters to the king of Italy and imagining what a glorious experience this would be if I were really truly a real EBB scholar. Like if N from my program were there, she would have known the significance of that little white tea caddy!