“Appraise Love and Divide”: Measuring Love in Augusta Webster’s Mother and Daughter

The measurement of love in sonnets, particularly Victorian sonnets, is a familiar, if under-examined, trope. “I love you, sweet: how can you ever learn / How much I love you?” a lover asks his beloved in Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s “Youth’s Antiphony,” one of the sonnets in his sequence “The House of Life.”¹ Rossetti depicts these words as the idle chatter of romance, filling the space, concealing “Through two blent souls one rapturous undersong” (l. 14). Later in the sequence, he further depicts this question as baseless, for “Not by one measure mayst thou mete our love”; the beloved corrects the lover for ever doubting “love’s equality” (“Equal Troth,” ll. 1, 11). Most famously, Elizabeth Barrett Browning attempts to answer the question for her beloved, offering to “count the ways” she loves.² Numerous sonneteers, including both Rossettis, measure the intervals between the times when lovers meet. These poets are not only lauding the value of their beloveds but considering how much love it is possible to feel and to express. Even while declaring that their love is infinite and therefore impossible to quantify, they display its magnitude in quantifying metaphors that count love’s ways or gauge its duration. Victorian sonnets often consider love to be eternal, but they nonetheless mark its temporal stages, fantasizing about the continuation of love in the afterlife.

Underlying Augusta Webster’s sonnet sequence Mother and Daughter is the startling proposition that love is a limited resource that can be divided, meted out. Her sequence transposes the concern for how much love is possible, how long love lasts, and how deep it is from the erotic context of the sonnet sequence onto a parent-child relationship. Webster emphasizes that a mother’s love cannot escape measurement for she must track the growth of her daughter, their increasing distance, and the gap between the experiences of mother and daughter that is both pedagogical and nostalgic. Unlike an erotic love, often imagined to continue in an afterlife that is either religious, literary, or both, Webster’s concept of a mother-daughter relationship has a painful natural end. Webster sharply contrasts the idealized permanence of erotic love with the constantly changing quality of maternal love. Haunted by fears about the duration of love, the sonnet sequence expresses a compulsion to prove love’s depth, comparing it to a still, silent lake and a void “filled to the utterest.”³ Written retrospectively, after her daughter was an adult, and when Webster herself was close to death, Mother and Daughter is concerned with the mother’s passing, and even in one instance, with the child’s. Webster confronts the painful fact of transience in the parent-child relationship, lamenting the passage of time and the distance from her daughter that increases as she ages.

To illuminate the bittersweet relationship between mother and child, Webster must turn to the inherent conditions and contradictions of the lyric, which is at once expansive in thought but economical in expression, rendering permanent a moment even as the meter tallies the time to the poem’s end. Mother and Daughter declares that while mothers of multiple children must “appraise love and divide” it among the children, loving each with “various stress,” the mother of a single child gives all of her love to her child, who “has the whole” (25.14, 9, 13). Although the sonnets insist that mothers of only children need not measure out their love the way mothers of siblings must, they simultaneously express an anxiety about needing to quantify the strength and duration of this mother’s love. Despite this resistance, the use of the sonnet form reflects the compulsion to count the stresses, sounds, and rhythms of maternal feeling. Webster’s use of terms like “stress” and “footsteps” refers to the genre, reminding the reader that the poems inevitably measure maternal love as the poet measures accent, syllable, and line (8.11). As the sonnets both wish for love’s infinitude and doubt it, the meter reinforces this tension, rushing during tropes of stillness, halting with extra...