The Body of Poetry: Essays on Women, Form, and the Poetic Self

Victorian Voice-Making and the Contemporary Poet

Victorian Voice-Making and the Contemporary Poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s ambitious and ingenious verse novel Aurora Leigh is as much the autobiography of a real poetic voice as it is that of a Actional poet. Aurora Leigh’s extreme importance even for Emily Dickinson, a poet whose aesthetic was so very different from Barrett Browning’s, testiAes that as the “autobiography ” of a female poet, Aurora Leigh engages the crucial aesthetic issue of the female poetic voice more directly than any other nineteenth-century work. How does this poem solve the aesthetic problem faced continually by nineteenth-century female poets? How does it maintain the perspective of a poetic subject , a historically male role, in the voice of a gender that had been deAned as the “object” of poetry? The answers to this question have implications for both female and male poets today. Aurora Leigh’s Arst line, a quote from Ecclesiastes, punningly implies the poet’s resigned acceptance of the timeless characterization of writing as a masculine activity: “of writing man-y books there is no end” (hyphen mine). Now, as she writes, Aurora feels her dead “father’s slow hand . . . stroke out my childish curls across his knee.” The picture of a father’s hand actually forming or “strok[ing] out” the “childish curls” of the poet’s handwriting intensiAes in another plea four lines later: . . . O my father’s hand, Stroke heavily, heavily the poor hair down, Draw, press the child’s head closer to thy knee! I’m still too young, too young, to sit alone. If we take “hand” in the common nineteenth-century sense of handwriting, the image that emerges here is again one of the father’s “hand” stroking with the strokes of the poet’s own pen, 115 suppressing her own young identity—the female “poor hair” and poetically inexperienced “child’s head”—so that she can write. In this reading, the poem itself is the “I” that is too young to “sit alone” as itself, a woman’s epic poem, on the page; it tries rather to bring itself as close as possible to a humble role fully within the male tradition, a place represented by a father’s knee. After all, to use Andrew Lang’s infamous words in his eulogy on Christina Rossetti, Aurora knows that the female “sex is meant to inspire poetry rather than to create it.” And if an ambitious young poet cannot avoid being watched, at least she can watch herself, claim the place of the subject in whose eyes she is object, get there before another poet does. Aurora’s own eyes become windows—“They saw a light at a window, now and then / My father’s sister started when she caught / My soul agaze in my eyes” (I, 1026–31)—and they Bash in an elaborate metaphor when she is angry: “He struck the iron when the bar was hot; / No wonder if my eyes sent out some sparks” (II, 1002–3). Her hands are birds: “she touched my hand / With hers, as softly as a strange white bird / She feared to startle in touching” (IV, 203–5). She compares herself several times to a statue: “I stood there Axed,— / My arms up, like the caryatid / Yet my blush was Bame, / As if from Bax, not stone” (II, 60–65). At times, however, Aurora is a speaker of words rather than an object of words—especially when she is with her lover, Romney . Early in the poem, she rejects him: “I know your heart, / And shut it like the holy book it is” (II, 836–37). As she asserts her right to remain single and be a poet, she makes him a book, reversing the conventional idea that a woman is an empty page to be written on. Late in the story, blinded, he shows that he accepts Aurora’s poetic dominance over him when he echoes her metaphor again in reference to himself: . . . I must be heard a little . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Although you thought to have shut a tedious book And farewell. Ah, you dog-eared such a page, And here you And me. —VII, 74–78 In this pattern of metaphors, Romney is presented as a book already written—perhaps by the culture, by the poetic tradition, 116 or even by himself. Barrett Browning the writer asserts Aurora’s power as a writer by describing the man metaphorically, though, painfully, she undercuts it at the same time by putting Aurora in the...