In "The Book of the Poets" (1842), Elizabeth Barrett Browning quotes as "the completest 'Ars Poetica' extant" a line from Sidney's Astrophel and Stella: "Foole, sayde my Muse to mee, looke in thine heart, and write" (Poetical Works 632). But even Sidney, for all his wisdom, "did too curiously inquire the fashion of the beautiful--the fashion rather than the secret"--and so suffered from the fault of those among his contemporaries who, in her view, "affected novelty rather than truth" (Poetical Works 632, 631). How then was Barrett Browning, writing across a distance of over two centuries, to overcome the sonnet's generic prescriptiveness and achieve a sincerity that had eluded her precursors?[1] One solution emerges in Sonnets from the Portuguese 37. In this poem's dialectic of wreck and rescue, she deliberately conflates and destabilizes a few tropes common to the Elizabethan amatory lyric. By so arraigning the doubtful sincerity of received convention, she discovers a means not only to accommodate novelty and truth but also to deal with the problem of sincere doubt.

Despite its adherence to a Petrarchan rhyme scheme, sonnet 37 deviates from the conventional asymmetry of octave and sestet in favor of an even structural balance. The poem's argument moves in three stages from an opening apology through a central explanation to a closing analogy:

Pardon, oh, pardon, that my soul should make,
Of all that strong divineness which I know
For thine and thee, an image only so
Formed of the sand, and fit to shift and break.
It is that distant years which did not take
Thy sovranty, recoiling with a blow,
Have forced my swimming brain to undergo
Their doubt and dread, and blindly to forsake
Thy purity of likeness and distort
Thy worthiest love to a worthless counterfeit:
As if a shipwrecked Pagan, safe in port,
His guardian sea-god to commemorate,
Should set a sculptured porpoise, gills a-snort
And vibrant tail, within the temple-gate.

According to recent commentators, the wit apparent in the poem's last four lines falsities the avowal of weakness in the first four. "No apology is necessary," says Dorothy Mermin, "for this witty comparison to a sexy sea god, or for the delightfully erotic porpoise" (132). For Glennis Stephenson, the "apology seems somewhat tongue in cheek," since the porpoise's erotic properties relate the beloved's attractiveness "as a man" and "not as some divine spiritual being" (83). Most perceptively, Angela Leighton contends that the closing analogy, though predicated on "a mistake," "carries the imaginative conviction of the poem against the speaker's apologies," which serve nonetheless to protect the beloved from "verbal travesty" (108-09). Unified in their admiration of the poet's conceit, these critics have not, however, investigated the way that Barrett Browning's wit depends for its trenchancy on direct engagement of established tropes. To this end, the request for pardon, admittedly suspect on the grounds of the poet's aesthetic achievement, provides the necessary preface to her exposure of the dubious ideological assumptions encoded in the figures that she reinscribes.

Introducing the image of the speaker's "swimming brain" in the poem's seventh line, Barrett Browning not only anticipates her final figure but turns for her idiom to the Renaissance trope of shipwreck and tempestuous seas. This trope allows her to express the "doubt and dread" caused by the memory of "distant years which did not take / Thy sovranty." Eliding personal and literary recollection, the speaker looks backward through the image to its use in such sonnets as Parthenophil and Parthenophe 91, Phillis 11, Licia 42, Diana 4.3, Coelia 9, Zepheria 39, Idea 1, Chloris 35, and Diella 28.[2] In the traditional conceit, the sorrowful heart acts as the ship's pilot; the stormy seas of desire drown reason; and the speaker despairs of port. Indeed, the trope is so oriented to ruin that Sidney, when he amends it to convey the heart's joy, acknowledges the possibility of failure: "I see the house! My heart! thyself contain! / Beware full sails drown not thy tottering barge! / Lest joy . . . / Thee to thy wrack" (Astrophel and Stella 85). Because of this propensity to failure, Barrett Browning's reliance on the language of "distant years" erodes the surety her speaker craves even as it conveys the threat to reason posed by "doubt and dread." In her development of the motif, therefore, she resembles less Sidney than Spenser, whose Amoretti, like Sonnets from the Portuguese, moves beyond the "doubt and dread" of shipwreck to the assurance of safe harbor.

Spenser, when he uses the trope of shipwreck, gradually reworks its contours to clarify the narrative dimensions of his sequence. In Amoretti, he invokes four times the figure of the sea-borne ship. Constructing thereby a narrative of loss and recovery, he charts the movement from unrequited desire to mutual love: the storm-tossed bark of sonnet 34 symbolizes the speaker's "secret sorrow"; the shipwreck of 56, the speaker's despair; the "steady ship" of 59, the beloved's "self-assurance" and the speaker's happiness; the safety of port in 63, the speaker's joy. Moreover, between the storm and shipwreck of sonnets 34 and 56, Spenser develops an allusion to Arion, the ancient Greek poet supposed also to be Poseidon's son. In the originating myth, a dolphin, hearing Arion's song, saves the poet after he has been cast overboard by avaricious sailors.[3] In Amoretti 38, however, the speaker is a failed Arion, incapable of playing the lyre with skill sufficient to win the beloved's succour (see also Tofte, Laura 1.4). On the other hand, when Barrett Browning annexes the classical mythos of salvation at sea to the Renaissance trope of shipwreck, she considers failure from the perspective of initial success. In Sonnets from the Portuguese 37, then, the "sculptured porpoise" suggests the gratitude, woefully misdirected, of Arion or perhaps of Icadius, the "shipwrecked Pagan" whom Apollo, disguised as a dolphin, rescued and brought to Delphi. Exploiting the idea of pagan or false worship facilitated by this allusion, Barrett Browning is more concerned than Spenser to press the contradictions inherent in the sonneteer's attempt to reconcile love and art. She makes aesthetic representation a matter, quite literally, of good and bad faith. Thus, although she abridges the drama of Spenser's five sonnets and blends key generic tropes to create a compound conceit of considerable wit and charm, she repudiates this final figure as unfit to capture the beloved's "strong divineness."[4] In so doing, she appropriates the authority of Christian belief to oppose the "hyperbolised trajections" (Zepheria 2) of the Elizabethan poet or "shipwrecked Pagan."

The grounds for this opposition have been thoroughly established in the poem's apology: the "sculptured porpoise" is "an image only so / Formed of the sand, and fit to shift and break." This "image," notwithstanding its whimsical brilliance, recalls countless other idols "belied," as Shakespeare observes, "with false compare" (Sonnets 130). Likened to infidel goddesses, the beautiful women beloved of Renaissance verse become not merely fetishes to desire but objects of abuse. Constable's Diana, for instance, takes her place under "Mecca's temple roof" as an "Iron idol that compassion wants" (Diana 4.4). Similarly, William Percy turns his ambivalence toward the beloved into an indictment of her duplicity: "the Goddess of the Fane" reveals "A GORGON shadowed under VENUS' face" (Coelia 13). For her part, though, Barrett Browning understands that art, by so reducing "worthiest love to a worthless counterfeit," profanes truth as well as love. In fact, as if to reflect the distortion attending on the effort to eternize love in art, "counterfeit" rhymes imperfectly with "commemorate" and "temple-gate." Such distortion, of course, is the key to the final image, in which the poet submits the hyperbolic tendencies of "false compare" to meiotic reversal. In this droll affectation of "novelty rather than truth," a sea god assumes the level of a sea beast. But the putative failure of the renovated conceit marks Barrett Browning's success, inasmuch as its patent fraudulence calls into question the disingenuity of amatory convention. Furthermore, her speaker, by announcing the parody for what it is, tacitly aligns her own feeling with the purity and freedom she will claim for her love in the sequence's penultimate sonnet: "I love thee freely, as men strive for Right; / I love thee purely, as they turn from Praise" (sonnet 43).

In Sonnets from the Portuguese, Barrett Browning uses several strategies to explore and so to counter the doubts that threaten to prove love false. In sonnet 36, the speaker recalls, "When we met first and loved, I did not build / Upon the event with marble." Conventionally, such substances as marble reefy the beloved's obduracy and represent the poet's material. As Spenser explains, "fairest images / Of hardest marble are of purpose made, / For that they should endure through many ages" (Amoretti 51). By contrast, Barrett Browning's speaker initially has no wish to memorialize the occasion of first meeting precisely because she has no confidence in love's ability "To last" (sonnet 36). Although she has "grown serene / And strong since then," she remains susceptible to the "still renewable fear" that "these unclasped hands should never hold" (sonnet 36). This expression of fear, insofar as it is also an admission of faithlessness, necessitates the apology that opens sonnet 37, for the speaker, having doubted the durability of "a love set pendulous between / Sorrow and sorrow" (sonnet 36), unwittingly libels her lover. As Barrett Browning's sculptural metaphors suggest, moreover, the sonneteer's effort to immortalize love in art not only responds to similar fears but results in a comparable offence. Consequently, the twice-iterated appeal for pardon implicitly acknowledges two different, albeit closely related, forms of transgression.

The last poem to examine love through the lens of doubt, sonnet 37 occupies an important position in Barrett Browning's sequence. At the beginning of Sonnets from the Portuguese, the speaker simply defers the problem of love's uncertainty by resisting her suitor's attentions. "Beholding, besides love, the end of love, / Hearing oblivion beyond memory," she is "As one who sits and gazes from above, / Over the rivers to the bitter sea" (sonnet 15). As she later discovers, however, "the bitter sea" does not lie with "oblivion beyond memory," but with the remembered past's power to instill in the present a "doubt and dread" of "the end of love." Accordingly, when the speaker cedes the apparent objectivity of physical distance and surrenders herself to love, "doubt's pain" (sonnet 21) intensifies rather than subsides.

"Distrusting every light that seemed to gild / The onward path" (sonnet 36), the speaker questions the beloved as well as her perceptions of him:

Beloved, dost thou love? or did I see all
The glory as l dreamed, and fainted when
Too vehement light dilated my ideal,
For my soul's eyes? Will that light come again,
As now these tears come--falling hot and real? (sonnet 30)

Though the speaker realizes that she has "erred / In that last doubt" (sonnet 31), her "hot and real" tears yet testify to the reality of fear, howsoever irrational. Again, doubtful of her ability to inspire love, she tells her suitor, "I did not wrong myself so, but I placed / A wrong on thee" (sonnet 32). In each of these instances, doubt devolves from the beloved to the speaker herself. These shifts allow Barrett Browning to examine how a heightened subjectivity, given to dilate, diminish or otherwise "distort" the beloved's true self, becomes itself the enemy to love's "lasting troth" (sonnet 32). With sonnet 37, she finally vanquishes doubt by identifying its origins within the modes of thought and expression she has inherited as a poet. In the sonnets that follow, therefore, she "will not gainsay love, called love forsooth," for her beloved is "not such / A lover" as those others who would let time "turn the thing called love, aside to hate / Or else to oblivion" (sonnet 40).

In Sonnets from the Portuguese 37, Barrett Browning's distinction between "love, called love forsooth," and "the thing called love" initiates a critique of conventional constructions of desire as "fit to shift and break." Mediating the language and assumptions derived from "distant years," she makes "doubt and dread" the radical of a doubtful poetics. To protect truth from compromise, she shifts the object of the poem from the beloved's incomparable "purity of likeness" to the real problems involved in the process of aesthetic representation. In this way, Sonnets from the Portuguese 37 turns Barrett Browning's debt to her precursors into the measure of her difference from them: their wreck becomes her rescue.

 1. Dorothy Mermin discusses in some detail the way autobiography
    complicates the question of sincerity in Sonnets from the
    Portuguese. Although "convention-defying sincerity is a
    convention of the sonnet sequence," readers often find the
    poems "embarrassing" and "assume . . . that what is not
    conventional is autobiographical" (141). Moving beyond such
    assumptions, Mermin studies the sequence's "emotional and
    intellectual complexity, the richness of reference, the
    elaborate and ingenious conceits, and the subtle ways in which
    images are used both for their emotional power and to carry
    an argument" (145).

 2. References to these and other sequences (with the exception
    of Shakespeare's Sonnets) derive from Sidney Lee's Elizabethan
    Sonnets.

 3. Robert Graves summarizes the myth and its analogues (290-92).

 4. In addition to using Renaissance sonnet conventions, the
    conceit recalls the last lines of Wordsworth's "The World Is
    Too Much with Us; Late and Soon" (see Leighton 108) as well
    as Robert Browning's "My Last Duchess." That the latter had
    an impact on Sonnets from the Portuguese is not so surprising.
    As Mary Rose Sullivan has shown, the Brownings' habit of
    echoing each other's words--and of "adapting, reforming, and
    returning them ever more freighted with meaning"--began early
    in their correspondence and "inevitably spilled over into
    their composition of poetry" (57). Exemplifying this practice,
    sonnet 37 uses "My Last Duchess" to pay a double compliment
    to Browning  as a poet and a lover. Whereas the statue of
    Neptune, represented "Taming a sea-horse," symbolizes the
    coercive power of Browning's Duke, the "guardian sea-god"
    suggests the beloved's benevolent mastery. And while the Duke,
    unable to bend his wife to his will, prefers her portrait to
    her person, the sonneteer desires the man, not his image.

Barrett  Browning, Elizabeth. The Poetical Works of Elizabeth
     Barrett Browning. Ed. Frederic G. Kenyon. London: Smith,
     Elder, 1897.

Graves, Robert. Greek Myths. London: Cassell, 1955.

Lee, Sidney, ed. Elizabethan Sonnets. 2 volumes. 1904. New York:
     Cooper Square, 1964.

Leighton, Angela. Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Bloomington: Indiana
     UP, 1986.

Mermin, Dorothy. ElizabethBarrett  Browning:  The Origins of a New
     Poetry. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1989.

Shakespeare, William. The Complete Works of Shakespeare. Ed. David
     Bevington. 3rd ed. Glenview, IL: Scott, Foresman and Company,
     1980.

Stephenson, Glennis. Elizabeth Barrett Browning and the Poetry of
     Love. Ann Arbor: UMI Research P, 1989.

Sullivan, Mary Rose. " 'Some Interchange of Grace': 'Saul' and
     Sonnets from the Portuguese." Browning Institute Studies 15
     (1987): 55-68.

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