*Mar 21 2026 - Elizabeth Barrett Browning; The Soul's Expression

What stammering lip and insufficient sound
I strive and struggle to deliver right
That music of my nature, day and night
With dream and thought and feeling interwound,
And only answering all the senses round
With octaves of a mystic depth and height
Which step out grandly to the infinite
From the dark edges of the sensual ground!
The song of soul I struggle to outbear
Through portals of the sense, sublime and whole,
And utter all myself to the air.
But if I did it, - as the thunder-roll
Breaks its own cloud, my flesh would perish there,
Before that dread apocalypse of the soul.

Probably as famous today for being one half of the couple with Robert Browning, Elizabeth Barrett Browning was a Victorian Romantic poet of some quality in her own right.

Physically frail and possibly addicted to laudanum, Browning also campaigned tirelessly against slavery and to highlight the horrors of child labour.

>1 PaulCranswick: Thank you, Paul and Happy World Poetry Day to you!

Do all poets, I wonder, have this same fear? That if they expressed themselves fully they would die ("flesh would perish") and soon after the "dread apocalypse of the soul" too? That is such a heavy burden, to think that what you want "day and night," to express yourself fully, would kill both body and soul, utter destruction.

I'm somewhat reminded of the award winning poem by Renee Good (the woman who died by an ICE agent on a residential street in Minnesota). She too struggled with what she learned, the nomenclature and truth of science that she had been looking forward to in "On Learning to Dissect Fetal Pigs" https://poets.org/2020-on-learning-to-dissect-fetal-pigs

Very different in style, I know, but compare Barrett's last four lines,

And utter all myself to the air.
But if I did it, - as the thunder-roll
Breaks its own cloud, my flesh would perish there,
Before that dread apocalypse of the soul.

And Macklin's (Good's) last five lines,

life is merely

to ovum and sperm

and where those two meet

and how often and how well

and what dies there.

Does anyone else see a similar perspective--the fear, the worry that something fundamental to being human can be taken away if we look too boldly, speak truth too successfully? Or is it just me, and my obsession with poetry as my salve in these dark days in my country?

>1 PaulCranswick: thanks Paul, I only know a couple of poems by Elizabeth Barrett Browning including Sonnets of a Portuguese, I'm guessing there must have been times that doubt plagued her because of her health challenges, but this didn't stop her, in a bio I read of hers I thought it was v sweet that Robert Browning considered Elizabeth to be the better poet.

>3 DebiCates: Does anyone else see a similar perspective--the fear, the worry that something fundamental to being human can be taken away if we look too boldly, speak truth too successfully? I wouldn't say you are alone in this, it is a balancing act of aligning words to express what you mean hoping it conveys what you mean and you won't be misinterpreted.

>3 DebiCates: I'm little late to the party, but I've studying literature theory recently and this is something post-structuralist critics talk about a lot: the inability to properly communicate through language. There is so much room for interpretation and miscommunication, especially when one uses the more imaginative language of poetry. To me, although this incites the poet's great fear of misinterpretation and exposure, this is something that gives poetry a lot of its power, as some of the meaning is communicated through its author, and some of its brought by its audience.

I don't think the perfect and apocalyptic exposure of the soul isn't actually possible, language is too limited — rejoice, oh Elizabeth Browning. But in the striving towards this impossible ideal we learn so much about others and ourselves.

>1 PaulCranswick: The thing that caught me with this early Barrett Browning poem (and I hadn't intended to feature her other than I have just bought her complete poems) was the musical references in relation to the soul's sounding.

"insufficient sound", "the music of my nature" "octaves of a mystic depth", "song of soul", etc.

Some very nice phrases in a well constructed sonnet by a still not fully matured artist.

>6 PaulCranswick: Oh yes, I see it now. Thank you Paul for bringing that out.

It's strange, "music and poetry" is a theme keeps cropping up in my readings. And to think I missed it here.

>5 Interstellar_Octopus: I've been pondering this for a few days. I haven't studied poetry (or literature other than required at college) so your comments about Theory are especially intriguing.

In our group's comments on almost every poem I notice how often we have different interpretations, or at the very least we pick up on different communications and associations within those poems. Like you, as a reader I find that a blessing instead of a curse. Wonder if Browning had the same worry in her later years or if she, well, grew out of it and gave up the desperate worry. Wonder if she embraced that what her work connected not with some exacting intended communication but with the unknowable and autonomous places in each reader--at the time they read it, which will certainly change as they, too, grow.

Sometimes it feels like nothing short of a miracle we can communicate as well as we do.

I didn't have a clear connection with the poem upon first reading, so I read the responses posted here and then read it again. I still don't resonate with Barrett Browning's concerns, to the extent they're conveyed to me. The struggle to communicate clearly: yes, that I resonate with. But the worry or anguish she seems to harbour? That I don't sense in myself.

It left me wondering about this line:
Before that dread apocalypse of the soul

Is "that apocalypse" a reference to the imagined event in which she perfectly expresses herself?
If so, as I say, I don't have that dread.

Or instead, is "that" a reference simply to our own eventual demise? She's actually consoling herself, thinking: if I ever convey my meaning perfectly, as a mortal living as we do in mortal flesh, why -- that isn't what is natural for this life! It's part of mortal life to have this confusion and this striving to clear up some of it. If we were somehow to avoid that, it wouldn't be natural, and we'd die right then and there.

I played around with that idea, and while it makes more sense to me than my initial understanding of some awful dread of expressing herself perfectly, it still doesn't seem to be right. So I think in this instance, I simply don't resonate with whatever it is that bothers Barrett Browning.

>4 AnishaInkspill: Truth is not absolute. Our reality is subjective. We need to look truth in the face every day because it is not concrete. What poetry does for me is open the doors to my own subjectivity and the reality of others. That is why i believe it is a true door into our true selves and why it can only be shared in a safe space such as this forum.

Otherwise, I would not share

>8 DebiCates: Wonder if Browning had the same worry in her later years in the bio I read (Elizabeth Barrett Browning: A Biography) Robert Browning was a strong supporter of Elizabeth Barrett Browning's poems and even considered her a better poet. When I read this I thought it was very sweet.

>10 hamlet61: This is a really nice way Matt to think about poetry.

with the discussion of music in Elizabeth Barrett Browning's poems, here's another except that mentions from Aurora Leigh Book 1, line 415 - 419

I learnt much music,—such as would have been
As quite impossible in Johnson’s day
As still it might be wished—fine sleights of hand
And unimagined fingering, shuffling off
The hearer’s soul through hurricanes of notes