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kurtiskozel's review
5.0
Browning deals with love as though it is a religion in itself, which it may be. Her romanticication of otherwise negative emotions counter-balences their opposites. She is loosed through the bindings of love; she is ecstatic in the grief of love; her name is lost and found in the tongue of her lover, and in the name of love. She decimates herself once and then once again in the pursuit of this love. She is at once in love with love, and also unworthy of her highest aspiration of love.
She has tapped into a form of liminal climax of romanticism, where things are and are not; where opposites are supported by their very contrary halves; where she feels everything and everything; and where death and life seem to be as much the same as love and grief, though the two pairs seem to be a double-headed figure with life-death looking backwards and love-grief looking forwards. These are objective-objective pairs of opposites, without distinction between their polarity.
Saliently, she describes her papers as (objectively) dead, but (subjectively) alive in sonnet 28. This sort of duality is slightly less common (where things are objectively one thing, but subjectively another through the creative, generating, redemptive power of love), but all the more telling of what I speak on later as her (subjective) unworthiness for love, which might imply an (objective) worthiness for it. Perhaps, in her view in any case, a sensual unworthiness for love is the strongest, logical argument for a spiritual worthiness for love. Something like love's version of the Dunning-Kruger effect. The more you love, the more you realize you are unworthy of it yourself, but the more you have nonetheless.
It's an odd combination, that I don't think I fully understand on my first read. To be honest, I'm not sure what to make of it either. I can say she seems more or less internally consistent in her approach.
She never attempts to justify love or call into question its purpose outright. Love, to her, is a self-evidident virtue. She questions, so obviously it's nearly a cliche, "how" to love, which she answers nearly perfectly with the image of a fire that will consume any fuel, whether treasured (as cedar) or not (as flax). That is, love loves in all forms, but most of all love loves love. In an image, Aphrodite's (love) favored son is Cupid (he who begets love), and Cupid's favored lover is Psyche (the soul, in one sense). Love loves to beget love... upon the senses, the mind, the soul; which in turn loves the begetter and, by extension in some ways, love itself.
What I might confirm seeing after future readings as the true center of her work is her unworthiness of love, which has no answer given as far as I can tell. She needs love, desires love, but she is -- as evidently she wants to be -- merely the *object* of a love that needed to be expressed and she is the mere, humble, lowly instrument of that grand myth. As though the fire were raging on, and she were some weed that was both fascinated and consumed by the rages.
I'll admit, on reading this excellent book, I did take no small umbrage at the passivity I felt in the motif of "unworthiness of love" and what I saw as perhaps an all-too-high dose of passivity and, what I thought of as giving up; a sacrifice; victimness. But, if I had my way, it wouldn't be the poem, likely wouldn't be poetry, and certainly wouldn't be this book. Considering she is far more the expert than I, I considered it and I think I've found Ariadne 's thread in her story, because she doesn't give up; she is grieving and she is struggling and she is writing, not to figure it out, but to figure a way in. She is not merely passive, she is praying, meditating in her own way, to understand the mystery of "why" and "how", and ultimately, "what" love is (though she never asks this outright, and which she might consider in a thousand cases to be more or less blasphemy), which is as theological a question as it is literary.
Still, I don't think these were meant for male eyes. At best, these might be insights into Divine Love, and at worst they are venue for incels playing Peeping Toms into the feminine romantic sphere or the poetic counterpart to soy milk. These aren't poems for the male fascination, and I shudder to think of a masculine mind trying to take these as one-to-one comparisons to how they should see or perceive love between themselves and their feminine lovers (where they play the part of Ms. Browning). There is something to be said about men understanding a feminine perspective on love, in particular regards to grief -- which I've typically only considered in regards to the loss of love, not its gain -- but they still speak to different parts of the brain for men than they do for women and I don't think there's supposed to be a shared view, although a shared understanding would do no harm. Though again, and this is something I need to keep thinking about, there is a question about whether or not this speaks to Universal Love or to Romance generally or to courtship behavior. It's such a fine line here, and I think some of the sonnets speak to one, others to another, and yet more to another, but the line needs to be drawn, I think, to best understand these poems.
I've mentioned this before, but her characterization of negative emotions is interesting. She does not treat them as bad, but seemingly misused in any way other than their relation to love. Again and again, grief is the chief symptom of love, even as much of not a hundred times more than the desire to be consumed, named, taken, kissed, and held, if only symbolically, by the lover. This grief, at times, is nearly identical to what I'd like to call anxiety, but it's color is so much brighter, so much more blue and gold than the grey I've otherwise seen it. There's a blackness, but it is only the primer on which love has painted.
She has tapped into a form of liminal climax of romanticism, where things are and are not; where opposites are supported by their very contrary halves; where she feels everything and everything; and where death and life seem to be as much the same as love and grief, though the two pairs seem to be a double-headed figure with life-death looking backwards and love-grief looking forwards. These are objective-objective pairs of opposites, without distinction between their polarity.
Saliently, she describes her papers as (objectively) dead, but (subjectively) alive in sonnet 28. This sort of duality is slightly less common (where things are objectively one thing, but subjectively another through the creative, generating, redemptive power of love), but all the more telling of what I speak on later as her (subjective) unworthiness for love, which might imply an (objective) worthiness for it. Perhaps, in her view in any case, a sensual unworthiness for love is the strongest, logical argument for a spiritual worthiness for love. Something like love's version of the Dunning-Kruger effect. The more you love, the more you realize you are unworthy of it yourself, but the more you have nonetheless.
It's an odd combination, that I don't think I fully understand on my first read. To be honest, I'm not sure what to make of it either. I can say she seems more or less internally consistent in her approach.
She never attempts to justify love or call into question its purpose outright. Love, to her, is a self-evidident virtue. She questions, so obviously it's nearly a cliche, "how" to love, which she answers nearly perfectly with the image of a fire that will consume any fuel, whether treasured (as cedar) or not (as flax). That is, love loves in all forms, but most of all love loves love. In an image, Aphrodite's (love) favored son is Cupid (he who begets love), and Cupid's favored lover is Psyche (the soul, in one sense). Love loves to beget love... upon the senses, the mind, the soul; which in turn loves the begetter and, by extension in some ways, love itself.
What I might confirm seeing after future readings as the true center of her work is her unworthiness of love, which has no answer given as far as I can tell. She needs love, desires love, but she is -- as evidently she wants to be -- merely the *object* of a love that needed to be expressed and she is the mere, humble, lowly instrument of that grand myth. As though the fire were raging on, and she were some weed that was both fascinated and consumed by the rages.
I'll admit, on reading this excellent book, I did take no small umbrage at the passivity I felt in the motif of "unworthiness of love" and what I saw as perhaps an all-too-high dose of passivity and, what I thought of as giving up; a sacrifice; victimness. But, if I had my way, it wouldn't be the poem, likely wouldn't be poetry, and certainly wouldn't be this book. Considering she is far more the expert than I, I considered it and I think I've found Ariadne 's thread in her story, because she doesn't give up; she is grieving and she is struggling and she is writing, not to figure it out, but to figure a way in. She is not merely passive, she is praying, meditating in her own way, to understand the mystery of "why" and "how", and ultimately, "what" love is (though she never asks this outright, and which she might consider in a thousand cases to be more or less blasphemy), which is as theological a question as it is literary.
Still, I don't think these were meant for male eyes. At best, these might be insights into Divine Love, and at worst they are venue for incels playing Peeping Toms into the feminine romantic sphere or the poetic counterpart to soy milk. These aren't poems for the male fascination, and I shudder to think of a masculine mind trying to take these as one-to-one comparisons to how they should see or perceive love between themselves and their feminine lovers (where they play the part of Ms. Browning). There is something to be said about men understanding a feminine perspective on love, in particular regards to grief -- which I've typically only considered in regards to the loss of love, not its gain -- but they still speak to different parts of the brain for men than they do for women and I don't think there's supposed to be a shared view, although a shared understanding would do no harm. Though again, and this is something I need to keep thinking about, there is a question about whether or not this speaks to Universal Love or to Romance generally or to courtship behavior. It's such a fine line here, and I think some of the sonnets speak to one, others to another, and yet more to another, but the line needs to be drawn, I think, to best understand these poems.
I've mentioned this before, but her characterization of negative emotions is interesting. She does not treat them as bad, but seemingly misused in any way other than their relation to love. Again and again, grief is the chief symptom of love, even as much of not a hundred times more than the desire to be consumed, named, taken, kissed, and held, if only symbolically, by the lover. This grief, at times, is nearly identical to what I'd like to call anxiety, but it's color is so much brighter, so much more blue and gold than the grey I've otherwise seen it. There's a blackness, but it is only the primer on which love has painted.
lilly_reads98's review
These sonnets mention god a lot, which I was not expecting or wanting. And it’s all sonnets from just one person.
classyklassen's review against another edition
3.0
okay i have to accept that I'm not a poetry girlie :// sorry i just don't vibe with it!! my grandpa gave me this collection which is a bunch of poems elizabeth barrett browning wrote after she got married! cute but yeah once again i don't really like poetry so I'm giving up on trying to read collections, if i want to read poetry i will just read random assorted ones. it just takes a lot to get me to actually resonate with the poem ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ i took a photo of one that i enjoyed in the moment but when i was rereading it to make this post i actually don't get what i liked at all?? anyway lol. what was fun though was that i was watching anne with an e season one the day after i read this collection and anne actually recited one of the poems!! it was cool to recognise it and what a strange coincidence!! anyway if you like poetry maybe check it out but I'll be avoiding poetry in the near future lol. also this woman is not portuguese. 3 stars ig.
alanmichael's review against another edition
challenging
emotional
inspiring
mysterious
reflective
fast-paced
4.0