Notes 3/16

Aurora Leigh by Elizabeth Barrett Browning


The rhythm of English poetry combines Germanic rhythm with French rhythm and creates a beautiful rhythm that makes poetry in English best. English poets can pit accent against syllable length, making a rolling type of speech.


Elizabeth Barrett Browning

She published her first book of poetry when she was 22 years old. She was very political, writing a long poet about children in work houses similar to the style of Charles Dickens. Her father cloistered her and she became addicted to morphine; her mother died when she was twenty. In 1846, she eloped with Robert Browning; they lived in Italy in a radical Bohemian lifestyle. She loved and lived with Browning until her death; she wrote some of the most beautiful, intense love poetry for him: "How do I love thee."


Book 1 Aurora Leigh

Her mother died four years after her birth and her father when she was twelve; she goes to live with her restrictive aunt, discovering her father's books on poetry and in that room becomes alive. "To live" has two connotations - to breath physically or to thrive spiritually


When her aunt looks for her mother in her face, she's trying to find the woman who stole her title and wealth when she married her brother (Aurora's father). Everything was passed through the first born son and when there is no heir, then its passed onto the nearest relative. Her father wasn't expected to marry and everything would have passed to his sister. But he meets Aurora's mother, moves to Italy and neglects his role as first born son. Once his wife dies, he puts all his affection on Aurora.


Aurora Leigh was the third greatest epic poem - Paradise Lost was the first (justify God to man); Wordsworth's The Prelude (growth of a poet) was the second. Aurora Leigh is also about the growth of a poet but also the growth of a woman. This poem is a papyrus, which was animal hide that was used as paper. Words were written, read then scraped off and reused. We are a papyrus: television, music, pop culture, literature, history has shaped us, words were written before us, scraped off and new ones added that created the layer of who we are today.


"traveling inland" a culturation; "the outer Infinite" the divine, God, whatever you want to call it; Children and babies have this look, this understanding but adults slowly lose it. Aurora has not yet lost this understanding. She hungers for the love of a mother, the comfort only a mother can give.


"They know a simple, merry, tender knack
Of tying sashes, fitting baby-shoes,
And stringing pretty words that make no sense,
And kissing full sense into empty words"



Mothers can communicate with and understand their children. Nursery rhymes are pretty words that make no sense but they sound good. It's not about what is said but how it is said.