Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Unpublished Honeymoon Poem, a Poetics in Transition, and Petrarch's Vaucluse: "Wilder ever still & wilder!"

Abstract

Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Unpublished Honeymoon Poem, a Poetics in Transition, and Petrarch's Vaucluse:"Wilder ever still & wilder!" Marjorie Stone (bio) and Beverly Taylor (bio) The intensively revised but eventually abandoned poetic fragment prompting this article offers vivid glimpses into a legendary incident during the honeymoon of Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning. The previously unpublished manuscript by EBB that we publish and analyze here also casts light on her poetic development and her psychic and sensory upheaval following the Brownings' secret marriage on 12 September 1846. We term the manuscript of some sixty-five lines the "Vaucluse fragment" because it records thoughts and sensations aroused in EBB by a memorable stop the Brownings made as they traveled southward on their wedding trip from London to Pisa, accompanied from Paris onwards by the art critic Anna Jameson and her niece Gerardine. Pausing at Avignon, the travelers made a literary pilgrimage eastward on 8 October through a stirring mountain landscape—described in the fragment as "Wilder ever still & wilder!" Their destination was Petrarch's fabled fountain at Vaucluse, where the river Sorgue arises as if from secret springs in a cave under the mountains—in wetter seasons tumbling down through a jagged rocky ravine. For poets with a sophisticated appreciation of Petrarch's writing about his beloved Laura, and for lovers finally living the intensity they had long dreamed of, the Vaucluse visit was a pivotal moment in a setting suffused with symbolic meaning. Transported by liberty, love, and the thrill of retracing the steps of the poet who may be credited with engendering the most important tradition in European amatory poetry, the Brownings at Vaucluse marked one of the most famous honeymoon stops ever recorded. The Vaucluse visit has figured in biographies of the Brownings ever since. It has also been narrated from the perspective of EBB's famous spaniel in Virginia Woolf's novel [End Page 1] Flush: A Biography (1933) and recast in fictionalized form in A. S. Byatt's romance Possession (1990). To date, EBB's experience of the Vaucluse visit has been reconstructed as a sentimental story, drawing on accounts of it in her letters or other sources published in the nineteenth century. Biographers have not remarked even on the variations in EBB's own successive narratives of the visit or on their differences from the retrospective account published by Jameson's niece more than thirty years later. Meanwhile, the working draft of an unfinished poem expressing complex thoughts and feelings that the visit generated in EBB has lain neglected for more than 170 years in the tiny pocket notebook in which she first inscribed it. Its obscurity may arise in part from its indecipherability: while it begins fairly legibly, the manuscript itself grows progressively "wilder," mirroring the landscape it describes on the approach to Vaucluse. Indeed, the draft becomes so tangled at points that, given the pressures of meeting publishing deadlines, we reluctantly decided, after repeated attempts, that we could not include an accurate transcription of it in volume 5 of the Works of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, as we worked with general editor Sandra Donaldson and fellow volume editor Rita Patteson on masses of widely dispersed unpublished materials.1 Since that time, we have repeatedly returned to the Vaucluse fragment. Like Helena Michie and Robin Warhol in their reconstruction of George Schwarf's dinner parties and desires through tantalizing traces in Love among the Archives, we have been wary of our own "investments" in archival desire and archival romance.2 In the case of EBB's manuscript, however, the problem is not the "silence of the archive" that Michie and Warhol confront in attempting to "build a love story out of the flotsam" of an obscure "Victorian bachelor's life" (p. 58). Instead, it is a voluminous archive of biographical materials and criticism in which the legendary "romance plot" of the Brownings' courtship is endlessly reiterated, but with surprisingly little scholarly investigation of the honeymoon that followed. We therefore here offer (with caveats) transcription and analysis of the Vaucluse fragment for the first time, prefaced by an examination of some of its most pertinent contexts. Part 1 of this essay examines varying accounts of the...