Spiritual Quote of the Day (Elizabeth Barrett Browning, on Children vs. Preachers’ Examples)

“Do you hear the children weeping and disproving,
O my brothers what you preach?
For God’s possible is taught by His world’s loving,
And the children doubt of each.”—English poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806-1861), on child labor, in “The Cry of the Children,” originally printed in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine (August 1843)

One hundred and eighty years ago this month, British public opinion against child labor was given a powerful boost by the publication of “Cry of the Children,” by Elizabeth Barrett Browning.

As noted in this blog post from the British Library, her poem lifted public support for Lord Shaftesbury’s Ten Hours Bill.

In a blog post 13 years ago, I lamented the impression left by the play and movie The Barretts of Wimpole Street of a frail, agoraphobic poet. At the time of this poem, Barrett (still a couple of years away from meeting and marrying Robert Browning) was a literary figure of considerable skill and power, as demonstrated by this poem.

Barrett Browning identified herself as a Congregationalist Christian, and her religious devotion intensified rather than declined with age. But, in social justice poems like this and the abolitionist “The Runaway Slave at Pilgrim’s Point” (1848), she still saw human agency as the prerequisite for effecting change.

The verses above implicitly pose the issue of what and in what manner Christian ministers should preach. Should they comfort sin-burdened man—or challenge him to effect change?

Of one thing Barrett seems to approve: children will quickly sense a disparity between what a preacher says and does. In our own time, one turnoff for many Christians has been the hypocrisy of their religious community’s hierarchy in preaching Christian compassion but displaying so little of it themselves.

Spiritual Quote of the Day (Elizabeth Barrett Browning, on ‘Every Common Bush Afire With God’)

“Earth’s crammed with heaven,        
And every common bush afire with God;     
But only he who sees, takes off his shoes,     
The rest sit round it and pluck blackberries.”—English poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806–1861), Aurora Leigh (1856)

Photo of the Day: ‘An Universal and Unmoving Cloud’—Beaufort SC

“The sky above us showed

An universal and unmoving cloud,

On which, the cliffs permitted us to see

Only the outline of their majesty,

As master-minds, when gazed at by the crowd!

And, shining with a gloom, the water grey

Swang in its moon-taught way.”—English poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806-1861), “A Sea-Side Walk,” in Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning: Poems and Letters (Everyman’s Library, 2003)

While vacationing in Hilton Head, SC, in November 2014, I took a day trip to the nearby Lowcountry community of Beaufort. It also impressed me with its lovely seaside views, as you can tell from this photo I took at the time.

This Day in Literary History (‘The Raven’ Makes Poe A Household Name)

Jan. 29, 1845—“The Raven” first saw print in the New York Evening Mirror and was attributed to Edgar Allan Poe, a writer-editor of nomadic inclination and daemonic energy. It thrust its author squarely into the literary limelight, making him hot on the lecture circuit and enough wherewithal to buy out the owners of the Broadway Journal and achieve his dream of running his own magazine.

Unfortunately, Poe made little money off his newfound celebrity, and personal troubles led him to hit the road again, leading him to a squalid and controversial death four years later. While he anatomized the creation of his most popular poem in highly cerebral fashion after its publication, the mad descent of his love-haunted narrator has fed popular perceptions ever since that the verses resulted less from the critical acumen and more from the tortured psychology of the poet.

One of the first of Poe’s champions abroad, Charles Baudelaire, considered him a forerunner of the poete maudit, or “cursed poet,” a creator not undone by substance abuse and other personal problems but gifted beyond the ordinary precisely by these forces. Poe “did not drink like an ordinary toper,” Baudelaire wrote, “but like a savage, with an altogether American energy and fear of wasting a minute, as though he were accomplishing an act of murder, as though there was something inside him that he had to kill, ‘a worm that would not die.”

In a prior post, I discussed how James Russell Lowell began as a champion of Poe before the latter, in an arguably questionable and certainly career-damaging move, accused the Boston poet of plagiarism. What I did not realize at the time was how Lowell’s devastating counterpunch—that his accuser was “three-fifths genius and two-fifths fudge”—came about through an opening left by Poe himself.

In reviewing Charles Dickens’ Barnaby Rudge, Poe took notice of the importance of a talking raven to the plot, but complained that the novelist had missed the opportunity to capitalize on the creature by giving it a more symbolic purpose. Poe’s later use of the babbling bird led Lowell and his circle to carp (not unreasonably, given his own recent charge) that the dark creature was not entirely an original product of its creator’s imagination.

Poe’s brazen habit of taking to task the subject of his reviews was demonstrated further in the weeks before publication of “The Raven” when he wrote about Elizabeth Barrett's poem "Lady Geraldine's Courtship." No sooner had he taken her to task for want of originality (while, admittedly, praising her for delicacy of expression) that he borrowed her complicated rhyme and rhythm scheme for the poem taking shape in his head even then.

No aspect of the poem was an accident, Poe claimed in his “Philosophy of Composition”: It was all based on total control by the author. More than a few readers, I think, will be suspicious of the relentless logic with which he described its making. The whole thing sounds as preposterous as the lengthy ratiocination employed by his fictional detective Auguste Dupin to explain how he solved a crime.

I admit to not being a fan of Poe’s poetry. Too often, in their use (or overuse) of repetition, they seem only one step removed from doggerel. (It was not always so with him: A poem revised by Poe later that year, “To Helen,” is, in keeping with its subjects, beautiful precisely because of the classical restraint and symmetry of its meter—for instance, “the Glory that was Greece,/And the Grandeur that was Rome”).

But there is no gainsaying the fact that this very repetition, not to mention the practically swooning nature of some of the imagery (“Then methought the air grew denser, perfumed from an unseen censer”), has made "The Raven" easy to memorize and compulsively fascinating when read aloud. In addition, if horror involves a character’s drastically altered psychology state, then “The Raven” is the Poe poem that most closely approximates his pioneering tales of the supernatural.

The poem has lent itself to visual as well as auditory dimensions, most notably in the 1963 Roger Corman film starring Vincent Price, which—if you’ll pardon the expression—took flight from Poe’s account of the nocturnal bird. More recently, its mordant refrain, "Nevermore," has provided the title for a new musical in New York City. The poem has also lent itself to countless parodies and puns (my favorite among the latter: William Safire’s 1993 collection of his New York Times Magazine “On Language” columns, Quoth the Maven).

A restless spirit in search of a place in the world, Poe lived at various points up and down the Eastern Seaboard: Richmond, Va., West Point, Boston, New York, and Philadelphia. One of these places—where, actually, he died in 1849, following an Election Day incident hyped by a frenemy—was Baltimore. The city repaid him for briefly making it his home by naming their football team the Baltimore Ravens in the 1990s.

Quote of the Day (Elizabeth Barrett Browning, on Love and God’s “Meanest Creatures”)

“There's nothing low
In love, when love the lowest: meanest creatures
Who love God, God accepts while loving so.
And what I feel, across the inferior features
Of what I am, doth flash itself, and show
How that great work of Love enhances Nature's.”— Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Sonnets From the Portuguese: A Celebration of Love (1850)

This Day in Literary History (Browning, Barrett Begin Taboo “Wimpole Street” Romance)

January 10, 1845—With a piece of fan mail that swiftly turned into something more, Robert Browning wrote to a fellow poet, invalid Elizabeth Barrett (in the accompanying photo), beginning one of the great literary romances—as well as the enduring question of why the object of his admiration and adoration had remained so long under the thumb of her tyrannical father. 

Time was, if you came of age between 1930 and 1960, you couldn’t help coming across an entertainment medium—stage, film, radio, or television—without some version or other of The Barretts of Wimpole Street, the drama of how the dashing 33-year-old Browning spirited the frail, agoraphobic poet out of her house and eloped with her to Italy. The story is almost as famous as Sonnets From the Portuguese, the poems written by Elizabeth Barrett Browning to her husband, a man six years her junior who revived her interest in life by awakening her sexuality. 

The tale of of this dark-haired, wan princess rescued from her bedroom and her ogre father contains the kind of drama that Browning was unable to create in his straight poetic dramas before this, but that he became famous for in his monologues such as "My Last Dutchess." Unfortunately, it also obscures the relative state of their reputations at the time--and, more important, the very real contribution to British poetry by Elizabeth that led Browning to take pen in hand to begin with. 

When they first began to correspond, Elizabeth enjoyed more critical and commercial success than her future husband, both in her own poetry and her criticism. Robert had only begun to gain an audience with Pippa Passes four years before. But it took another generation, after Elizabeth's death, before he rivaled Tennyson as the dominant figure of Victorian poetry.

Elizabeth was more famous at this time. Five years later, in fact, after Wordsworth's death, she became a credible candidate to succeed him as Britain's poet laureate. (The honor went instead to Tennyson.)

All this from a woman who, from her mid-teens, had been increasingly afflicted with what doctors of the time considered spinal and lung ailments. For the last six years, she had not left her bedroom at all, beset by grief over the death of a brother, with her beloved cocker spaniel Flush her only comfort.

But in early 1845, Browning changed her life. After commending her poetry for its “fresh strange music, the affluent language, the exquisite pathos and true new brave thought,” Browning took matters a step further: “I do, as I say, love these books with all my heart -- and I love you too.” The extraordinary thing about this last statement is that he had never set eyes on its recipient before—and would not do so for another five months. 

The feeling was mutual. Before she met her eventual husband, Elizabeth had found a picture of him in a paper and tenderly clipped it out. It showed Browning with thick hair and an air of self-confidence—assets that would prove helpful in loosening her from her parental thrall. She responded the next day to his letter, and eloped with him, despite the disapproval of her father (and brothers), a year later. 

Why was Edward Moulton Barrett so adamantly opposed to his daughter’s courtship? At least a few theses have been advanced (including religious). Let’s examine some of these in turn: 

* He regarded Browning as lower-class. Read superficially, this sounds simply like snobbery. (It’s also slightly absurd—Browning’s parents took care of his expenses so he could afford to be a poet.) But it has an important implication, which I’ll call the “Dr. Sloper Corollary” (in honor of the Henry James father in Washington Square and the play and film it inspired, The Heiress): i.e., Browning was not so much interested in Mr. Barrett’s daughter as in her money—i.e., Mr. Barrett’s money, that is. 

* He had abused his eldest daughter and was insanely jealous of anyone who threatened to disrupt the relationship. In recent years, as such matters have become more talked-about on shows such as Oprah, this theory has gained traction. It’s a contention all but impossible to disprove, because, one could argue, the Victorians, with their standards of propriety, would surely have destroyed any documentary evidence proving this. One person who believed it was Charles Laughton, who played Edward Barrett, in all his muttonchop glory, onscreen in the 1934 film adaptation of The Barretts of Wimpole Street. Told that the script would need to excise lines implying incest, Laughton responded: “They can’t censor a gleam in my eye.” (See this YouTube excerpt to see how Laughton made this one of his indelible screen portraits of tyrants.) 

* He feared the consequences of his family’s mixed-blood heritage—and especially couldn’t abide the thought that this racial impurity would be compounded if Elizabeth took up with another product of miscegenation. The prior two explanations are perfectly adequate in accounting for why Edward Barrett forbade Elizabeth from marrying. Unfortunately, it doesn’t explain why Edward Barrett forbade any of his kids who survived to adulthood from marrying—not just the three daughters, but all nine of his sons. Such a sweeping ban could be required, some have argued, only if Barrett feared that black blood in the family line would be perpetuated—multiplied, even—if his daughter married Browning.

Barrett's affluence was based on the family sugarcane plantation in Jamaica, where they had held slaves for years (until, that is, the practice had been banned in the British Empire the decade before). He could not be sure that none of his forbears did not have slave parentage.

Worse than this (for Mr. Barrett, anyway), according to biographer Julia Markus, was that Browning's own lineage posed the same issues.