A Paradigm of Love

from Sonnets from the Portuguese
Elizabeth Barrett Browning

XI

And therefore if to love can be desert,
I am not all unworthy. Cheeks as pale
As these you see, and trembling knees that fail
To bear the burden of a heavy heart,---
This weary minstrel-life that once was girt
To climb Aornus, and can scarce avail
To pipe now 'gainst the valley nightingale
A melancholy music,---why advert
To these things? O Belovèd, it is plain
I am not of thy worth nor for thy place!
And yet, because I love thee, I obtain
From that same love this vindicating grace,
To live on still in love, and yet in vain,---
To bless thee, yet renounce thee to thy face.
The one who is loved protests that she is unworthy of love--a barren desert--a weary wandering life  ("this minstrel life that once was girt//to climb Aornus. . ."  Aornus is a mountain fortress in India that was captured as Alexander the Great invaded.  So what was once bound for glory is barren, empty, and alone. 

However, the last five lines of the poem state propose an inversion Christian view of love and put Robert at the center of it.  "I am not of thy worth nor for thy place."  I am not worthy of the love invested in me. The classic Christian stand would be that because God love me, I am made worthy of the love He bestows.  But Elizabeth inverts this and gives to the power of love alone the "vindicating grace."  Because she loves she "earns the right" to continue one in love--but it is all in vain because by her love she blesses him, but because she cannot show her love outright, she renounces him.  Her heart pulls, but her circumstances push him away.

Read it again and see how all the parts work together to bring us to this point in the theme.  And then glance back over some of the others and see how they all build toward this point and from this point on build toward the climax that spans sonnets 42-44.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Angel Time--Anne Rice

Review copy received 11/04/09 From the time of its announcement, I had been looking forward to this new book by Anne Rice.  As I say in every review, I am not a die-hard Anne Rice fan.  I found Interview with a Vampire interesting and intriguing, but in hindsight, must lay much of the responsibility of the current vampire as victim and love-object obsession at its feet.  After that, I had no patience with her writing until Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt. In that book I observed a kind of control and authorial voice that I had not seen in any of the books I had sampled since Interview .  So too with Christ the Lord: The Road to Cana. Perhaps because of the subject matter, perhaps for other reasons, these two books seemed to witness a level of control of language and story that the other books did not.  Gone were messy florid passages that lavished two, three, four paragraphs on the description of the lace and flounce of a jabot.  These new books were sp...
Read more

Another Queen of Night

I post this because whenever I recommend to anyone the Queen of Night, I always recommend it in the Lucia Popp rendition.  It's a matter of personal taste, but what I love about this is that it is somewhat slower than the other versions and as a result, it would seem to me somewhat more difficult to perform and sustain--those high notes in which the Queen's voice becomes the Magic Flute itself are rounded, full, and deep while remaining light and airy. I have read some rather severe criticism of this ritardando; and while it may or may not reflect Mozart's intent, it is certainly within the options for staging.  It creates a real vocal showpiece from what is already a magnificent example of same. It really is an amazing example of a virtuoso composition sung by a virtuoso voice.  All of which should not be taken to mean that I do not truly appreciate the version posted earlier by Diana Damrau, it's just nice to see what a difference tempo can make. I think we can take...
Read more