Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806-61) is less famous now as a poet in her ain correct, and more than familiar as the wife of Robert Browning, whom she courted through a series of extraordinary honey letters in the 1840s. It was not always this mode. Once upon a time, Robert Browning was the struggling obscure poet and Elizabeth Barrett Browning was the ane who, upon Wordsworth'due south decease in 1850, was considered for the mail service of Poet Laureate. (In the end, Tennyson got the task.) But Barrett Browning left behind some of the most interesting Victorian poems, written in a variety of forms, genres, and styles. Hither are some of her very best poems.

'The Runaway Slave at Pilgrim's Betoken'. As well as writing some of the most famous dearest poetry of the Victorian era (see beneath), Elizabeth Barrett Browning also explored and tackled social bug in her poetry. In this poem, a dramatic monologue, she writes in the character of a black female slave in the United States, on the run having endured a serial of horrors: her lover has been murdered and she has been raped, and the baby that resulted was deemed 'too white' because of its mixed ethnicity. A tragic verse form (nosotros won't requite away the ending here though the stanzas below provide a clue), the verse form is still a powerful indictment of the treatment of blackness slaves in nineteenth-century America. The poem was written to heighten funds for the abolitionist crusade.

Our wounds are different. Your white men
Are, afterward all, not gods indeed,
Nor able to make Christs again
Do good with bleeding. Nosotros who drain . . .
(Stand up off!) nosotros help not in our loss!
Nosotros are too heavy for our cross,
And fall and trounce you lot and your seed.

I fall, I swoon! I look at the sky:
The clouds are breaking on my brain;
I am floated along, as if I should die
Of liberty's exquisite hurting –
In the proper noun of the white child, waiting for me
In the death-nighttime where nosotros may osculation and concord,
White men, I leave you all curse-free
In my broken heart's disdain!

Follow the link above to read the full poem.

'Bianca among the Nightingales'. This is a tragic dear poem, and another instance of the dramatic monologue form. Set in Italia, it sees Bianca weeping amongst the sorrowful song of the nightingales for her lost love:

The cypress stood upwardly like a church building
That nighttime we felt our love would hold,
And saintly moonlight seemed to search
And wash the whole world clean as gold;
The olives crystallized the vales'
Broad slopes until the hills grew strong:
The fireflies and the nightingales
Throbbed each to either, flame and song.
The nightingales, the nightingales.

Upon the bending of its shade
The cypress stood, self-balanced loftier;
Half upwardly, half downwardly, as double-made,
Along the footing, confronting the heaven.
And we, too! from such soul-height went
Such leaps of blood, and so blindly driven,
We deficient knew if our nature meant
Most passionate earth or intense heaven.
The nightingales, the nightingales.

Nosotros paled with honey, we shook with love,
Nosotros kissed then close we could not vow;
Till Giulio whispered, `Sweet, above
God's Ever guarantees this Now.'
And through his words the nightingales
Drove straight and full their long clear phone call,
Like arrows through heroic mails,
And love was atrocious in it all.
The nightingales, the nightingales.

'A Instrument'. Focusing on the piper-god from Greek mythology, Pan, this poem tells of how the god of shepherds fashions a flute from the reeds in a river, and starts to produce enchanting music:

What was he doing, the great god Pan,
Down in the reeds by the river ?
Spreading ruin and scattering ban,
Splashing and paddling with hoofs of a goat,
And breaking the golden lilies adrift
With the dragon-fly on the river.

He tore out a reed, the great god Pan,
From the deep absurd bed of the river :
The limpid h2o turbidly ran,
And the broken lilies a-dying lay,
And the dragon-fly had fled away,
Ere he brought it out of the river.

Follow the link above to read the full poem.

'How Do I Love Thee? Let Me Count the Ways'. This is a love poem written nearly Barrett Browning'south ain beloved, Robert. The verse form was commencement published in a sonnet sequence, Sonnets from the Portuguese, in 1850, though the poems that brand up the sequence were written effectually five years earlier. Information technology's a little-known fact that the showtime ever sonnet sequence in English was written by a woman, and throughout history the sonnet sequence has tended to exist associated with male poets: Petrarch, Sir Philip Sidney, Shakespeare, George Meredith. And although Barrett Browning's title sounds as though she is translating poems written past some Portuguese sonneteer, that title Sonnets from the Portuguese was in fact a niggling in-joke: 'Portuguese' was Robert's appreciating nickname for Elizabeth, so these sonnets are from her and her alone: sonnets from Robert's beloved 'Portuguese'.

How do I love thee? Allow me count the means.
I beloved thee to the depth and breadth and top
My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight
For the ends of being and ideal grace…

'Beloved, thou hast brought me many flowers'. Another of Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Sonnets from the Portuguese, is a fine love poem about her courting and eventual marriage to her fellow poet, Robert Browning. In terms of its form, 'Dearest, thousand hast brought me many flowers' is a Petrarchan or Italian sonnet. Merely unlike Petrarch's medieval sonnets in the courtly dear tradition, the relationship between the man and woman has been consummated in Barrett Browning's verse form. The courtship has involved the gift of 'many flowers' – flowers, of course, are ofttimes associated with poetry, as the etymology of the term anthology demonstrates.

Beloved, 1000 hast brought me many flowers
Plucked in the garden, all the summertime through
And winter, and information technology seemed as if they grew
In this close room, nor missed the sun and showers…

'If Grand Must Love Me, Let It Be for Naught'. Another poem from Barrett Browning's sonnet sequence to Robert, this one sees her espousing the idea of 'honey for love's sake'. With its catalogue of features which the poet says she wishes her lover will not single out, information technology forms a neat counterpoint to 'How Do I Dearest Thee?' above:

If thou must love me, let it be for nought
Except for honey'south sake simply. Practise not say
I love her for her smile … her await … her way
Of speaking gently, … for a trick of thought
That falls in well with mine, and certes brought
A sense of pleasant ease on such a day'—
For these things in themselves, Belovèd, may
Be changed, or alter for thee,—and dear, so wrought,
May be unwrought so. Neither beloved me for
Thine own dear compassion's wiping my cheeks dry,—
A creature might forget to weep, who bore
Thy comfort long, and lose thy love thereby!
Only love me for love'south sake, that evermore
Thou may'st dear on, through love'southward eternity.

Aurora Leigh . Barrett Browning'southward honey thing with ballsy poetry began at a young historic period: when she was merely twelve years old, she wrote The Boxing of Marathon, an epic poem about the battle between the Greeks and Persians in 490 BC. But her crowning achievement in the genre would be her long blank-verse novel Aurora Leigh (1857), about an aspiring female person poet, which takes in issues of matrimony, female authorship and independence, and what happened to women who 'strayed' outside of the accepted norms of Victorian society: the so-called 'fallen woman', embodied here past Aurora's friend Marian Erle. Although it'southward oft considered a verse novel, Aurora Leigh contains elements of epic verse.

'To Flush, My Dog'. 'A canis familiaris is a man's best friend', they say. Merely one hopes that in this case, every bit the onetime jest has it, 'man embraces adult female', and that what the anonymous author of this saying had in mind was the close bail between dogs and humans, whether men or women. Flush, the name of the cocker spaniel belonging to Barrett Browning, was clearly a close friend of his poet-possessor, and Barrett Browning penned this lovely poem about her beloved dog.

Loving friend, the gift of one,
Who, her own true organized religion, hath run,
Through thy lower nature;
Exist my benediction said
With my paw upon thy caput,
Gentle beau-animal!

Like a lady's ringlets dark-brown,
Flow thy silken ears adown
Either side demurely,
Of thy silver-suited chest
Shining out from all the balance
Of thy body purely.

Follow the link higher up to read the full poem.