Text 27

SONNET XXXVIII

First time he kissed me, he but only kissed

The fingers of this hand wherewith I write;

And, ever since, it grew more clean and white,

Slow to world-greeting, quick with its 'Oh, list',

When the angels speak. A ring of amethyst

I could not wear here, plainer to my sight,

Than that first kiss. The second passed in height

The first, and sought the forehead, and half missed

Half falling on the hair. O beyond meed!

That was the chrism of love, which love's own crown,

With sanctifying sweetness, did precede.

The third upon my lips was folded down

In perfect, purple state; since when, indeed,

I have been proud and said, 'My love, my own'.

In 1845, Elizabeth Barrett, a well-known Victorian poet, was a household invalid (she had been seriously ill as a result of a broken blood vessel), and nearly forty years old. A fan letter from an aspiring poet, Robert Browning, seven years her junior, commenced a correspondence that quickly kindled to love, though the two didn't meet face-to-face for months. When Barret's tyrannical father forbid her to marry, she found the strength to elope with Browning to Italy, where they lived happily in semi-exile until Elizabeth's death.

Another Victorian lady, Christina Rossetti (1830-1894), wrote sad and religious poems and poems for the young. Yet among her best productions are excellent sonnets on unhappy love. Along with her brother, Dante Gabriel, and William Morris, Rossetti belonged to the 'Pre-Raphaelite' group. Those painters and poets of the group created a certain remote strangeness in their work, they sought darkishly medieval subjects.

Christina Rossetti was one of the most prolific poets of the century. Her poems of loneliness and desolation speak for the age as well as for herself. In many of them, it is the woman who initiates, speaks, and looks towards the man. At first sight, she might appear to be a poet of exclusively private experience; but this is less than the whole truth. Much of her poetry is a sensitive and intimate following-through of the life of feeling and of faith, rendered with surprising directness. She is well aware of the inequities of women's lives in her time. Read Text 28.