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Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Sonnets from the Portuguese, 1850
Elizabeth Barrett was nearly forty years old. She had spent years largely confined to her room in her father's house on Wimpole Street in London, ill, dependent, writing poetry from her bed.
Her father was fiercely opposed to his children marrying. She expected nothing further from her life.
Then a poet six years younger wrote her a letter. During their secret courtship she wrote the forty-four sonnets that would become Sonnets from the Portuguese and kept them private.
After they eloped she showed them to him. He told her to publish. She gave them the title Sonnets from the Portuguese, making them appear to be translations rather than her own love poems.
This is the first sonnet in the sequence. The one that opens everything. She is looking backward at the years she has lost, and something takes hold of her from behind.
“I thought once how Theocritus had sung
Of the sweet years, the dear and wished-for years,
Who each one in a gracious hand appears
To bear a gift for mortals, old or young:
And, as I mused it in his antique tongue,
I saw, in gradual vision through my tears,
The sweet, sad years, the melancholy years,
Those of my own life, who by turns had flung
A shadow across me. 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."”
Look where she put that word. Silver.
Not bright. Not golden. Not warm. Silver, which is the sound a bell makes in a cold room when you were not expecting it. She did not write that love came for her gently. She wrote that something seized her by the hair and pulled her backward and told her to guess what it was.
She guessed death. Of course she did.
She had been in that room for years, and when something came up behind a woman who had stopped expecting anything, death was the only reasonable answer. Death is the answer that every piece of her experience had prepared her for.
She was wrong.
I need you to sit with that. She was wrong and the poem knows she is wrong before she does, and the silver answer rings out anyway. Not Death, but Love.
She was not looking for it. She was weeping over the years she had already lost, counting them one by one, the sweet ones and the sad ones and the ones that flung a shadow. She was doing arithmetic on her own life and coming up short. She was doing what you do at two in the morning when you cannot stop tallying.
And while she was doing that, love grabbed her by the hair.
Not tapped her on the shoulder. Grabbed her. Drew her backward. Said guess. Love, in this poem, does not arrive politely. It does not fill out a form. It interrupts a woman in the middle of giving up, and it does not ask permission.
She wrote this in secret. She was nearly forty, and she had spent years believing that little more would change. She wrote the poem anyway.
The answer you have been giving is the wrong one. That is not a tragedy. That is the whole point of the sonnet. You give the wrong answer, and the silver correction comes.
Underneath it I wrote
I have been giving the wrong answer. I can hear the correction starting.
Today. Copy the last three lines of this sonnet by hand. The ones beginning with "Guess now." Write them slowly enough that you feel that turn from death to love happen under your pen. Then underneath, write the answer you have been giving, and the one you are beginning to hear instead.
What I wrote that year
Underneath a sentence of Middlemarch, in November of the year I could not write, I put four words. "I am still here." That was the whole entry. I did not know then that this was the notebook starting. I thought I was just making sure the pen worked.
