Three Little Words, Tried but True: Elizabeth Barrett Browning

Perhaps every great poet eventually explores the power of the written or spoken word in his or her literature. In her sonnet numbered 21 in Sonnets from the Portuguese, Elizabeth Barrett Browning deals with this very topic: specifically, the words of love. Her poem is primarily an exhortation to her love, that he might “[s]ay over again, and yet once over again, / That thou dost love me” (lines 1-2). No matter how many times her lover Robert may utter those words, she knows that she cannot be satiated in them. She knows that to Robert, himself a writer, “the word repeated / Should seem ‘a cuckoo-song’” (lines 2-3), a mindless repetition. Cuckoos are known not only for their repetitive song but also for being daft, thoughtless birds; no lover would want his words to amount to nothing more than a cuckoo-song. But Browning reminds her love that “never to the hill or plain, / Valley and wood, without her cuckoo-strain / Comes the fresh Spring in all her green completed” (lines 4-6). If Robert’s loving words are the “cuckoo-strain,” then Elizabeth herself is “the fresh Spring in all her green completed.” Browning, as described in the introduction to her life and works (528-29), was a bit of a recluse during these years of her life, though she had already achieved poetic fame. It took a cuckoo-song—repetitive, unoriginal, seemingly mindless to all but the lovers themselves—to draw Elizabeth out of her seclusion and into her being Spring incarnate, the epitome of newness and freshness. The simplest of phrases, then, when completely sincere, can accomplish more than all the world’s flowery language ever could.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning deals with her own doubts in this poem, as well. She describes to her love: “I amid the darkness greeted / By a doubtful spirit-voice, in that doubt’s pain / Cry, ‘Speak once more—thou lovest!’” (lines 8-9). To allay her doubts—doubts that many a lover faces, especially a new lovers—Browning requests no more tokens of love than words, which are so precious to both of them. She needs nothing but to hear (or, rather, read) simple words of love. Though her lover may fear that these words, with great frequency, will lose meaning, Barrett Browning argues: “Who can fear / Too many stars, though each in heaven shall roll, / Too many flowers, though each shall crown the year?” (lines 9-11). The stars of the sky and flowers of the field are so insurmountably numerous, yet additions to them only leave them looking lovelier and more spectacular. So it is with words that really mean something, like the words “I love you”: false, cheap words would fade with repetition, but true lovers need not worry about the potency of their words.

Only in the last two lines of her sonnet does Browning turn from the central themes of repetition and words. Almost as an afterthought, she adds, “only minding, Dear, / To love me also in silence with thy soul” (lines 13-14). In this final couplet, Browning acknowledges the potential emptiness of words alone. In tradition surrounding the English sonnet form, the final couplet provides a “turn” and is generally the most meaningful portion of the poem; essentially, then, Browning communicates to her reader—her lover and eventual husband, Robert Browning—that all of the assurances she made regarding words and their meaning only work if the speaker or writer truly means his words. If Robert says that he loves her but the “silence” of his “soul” does not agree, then the spell will be broken: the beautiful cuckoo-song, the “fresh Spring in all her green completed,” the stars in the sky and flowers in the field, all of it will be rendered totally meaningless. Thus, the conventions of love are beautiful, never trite, and always welcomed unless they are not heartfelt, at which point the lovers are wrong to even bother pretending.