“Mine Earthly Heart Should Dare”: Elizabeth Barrett's Devotional Poetry

Abstract

And I--ah! what am I To counterfeit, with faculty earth-darkened, Seraphic brows light And seraph language never used nor hearkened? --Elizabeth Barrett, Epilogue to We give many classifying names to Elizabeth Browning's poems, but is not typically among them. Yet this form religious verse takes up a substantial portion her 1838 volume The Seraphim and Other Poems, conveying primarily in lyric form the devotional mode as a poetic discourse formation (Larson 50), whose tropes of the human soul connect reflection with lived experience in order to engage cultural issues literary and religious authority in Victorian England. As Linda M. Lewis observes, Barrett Browning was in her lifetime widely known as a devout, deeply religious poet (2). Moreover, as Lewis, Alexandra Worn, and Karen Dieleman demonstrate, the texture Browning's poems and poetics is most fully appreciated when approached with attention to its religious as well as its auto/biographical, political and cultural dimensions. (1) Indeed, in her preface to The Seraphim and Other Poems, engages what she sees as a significant debate about the role devotional poetics in nineteenth-century and culture. (2) As a reviewer from The Metropolitan Magazine (August 1838) suggests, maintained an all-absorbing enthusiasm with which she advocates the cause devotional (Brownings' Correspondence [hereafter abbreviated BC] 4.383). In particular, she demonstrates a keen interest in contradicting the notion set forth by Samuel Johnson, as well as many her own critics, that religion and should not mix. In support her own claims, she mounts her rebellion against Johnson and other naysayers by writing a variety poems that display the methods and influence devotional verse. Barrett's focus on devotional in her early- and mid-Victorian publications coincides with a sharp rise in the popularity devotional poems in the literary marketplace (3) and with debates about the role women in literary and religious spheres. Barrett's time in English history is one in which [q]uestions religious, racial, and national identity were already under heightened scrutiny ... due to a number other historical phenomena, including England's imperialism, various movements and controversies in the Church England, and a sharpening focus on sexual (Scheinberg 24). (4) In particular, I will focus on gender issues in order to explore ways in which engages ideas difference through devotional poetics. In her prefatory remarks on and in her devotional verse, critiques ideas authority and social power implied in notions difference. Rather than featuring religious difference as defined by distinctions between Christian and Jewish (as Scheinberg does), or Anglican and Roman Catholic (an important issue in Tractarian poetry), I argue that in Barrett's works, the discursive qualities devotional poetics are emphasized most clearly by her poems' investment in what Janet Larson calls the processes formation (50) in a broad sense. ascribed to Christian beliefs but resisted the dogma any particular Christian sect throughout her life. As a result, her devotional discourse emerges in poems that feature social and gender difference in order to focus primarily on human experience rather than theological inquiry or debate. (5) Resisting definition as abstract or spiritual at the expense their investment in the realities human life, her devotional poems work as a means intervention in what sees as unjust social practices, particularly with respect to women. (6) Thus we may read them as socially activist texts that broaden our definition Victorian devotional poetry: in addition to G. B. Tennyson's assertion that devotional verse (7) is poetry that grows out and is tied to acts religious worship (6), I contend that Barrett's devotional poems feature tropes the soul in the processes [or process] formation as a means vibrant social critique. …