Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s “Sonnet 2” focuses on her budding relationship with her beloved life partner. Her speaker contends that their relationship is destined and karmically meted, and thus, nothing could have kept them apart once God granted permission for them to unite.
First Quatrain: “But only three in all God's universe”
The speaker reports that in the couple’s relationship, there are only three beings who have been privy to “this word thou hast said.” When her partner first told her that he loved her, she senses that God was speaking His own love for her as well.
As she excitedly but tenderly took in the meaning of the declaration of love, she realized what her lot might have become without this happy turn of events. She responds rather hesitantly, even awkwardly recalling her physical illnesses that she labels “the curse.”
Second Quatrain: “So darkly on my eyelids, as to amerce”
The “curse” is an exaggeration of the earthly physical body’s complaints, the pain of merely living in a physical body. It might be noted, however, that the poet did experience much physical illness during her lifetime. Thus, she allows her speaker to allude to inharmonious conditions that unsettle but inform the dramatics of her poetics.
The “curse” that was put “[s]o darkly on [her] eyelids” might have prevented her from seeing her beloved, and if she had died, her separation from him would have been no worse then her inability to see him in life.
First Tercet: “From God than from all others, O my friend!”
The speaker then avers, “‘Nay’ is worse / / From God than from all others, O my friend!” If God answers no to one’s most ardent prayers, then the supplicant suffers more than being turned down by a mere mortal.
But by good fortune, God brought them together, and therefore, “Men could not part us with their worldly jars, / Nor the seas change us, nor the tempests bend.” Echoing the marriage vow, “what God hath joined together, let no man put asunder,” the speaker asserts that the bond that made her happiest in the world is the bond with her beloved partner and future husband.
Second Tercet: “Our hands would touch for all the mountain-bars”
She then reveals that she is confident that their union is destined by God and therefore even if “mountain-bars” tried to separate them, their “hands would touch.” And even if after death, heaven tried to intervene in their union, “We should but vow the faster for the stars.”
Other Barrett Browning Articles
 |
