First published in 1850, Sonnets from the Portuguese is a sequence of 44 love sonnets written secretly by Elizabeth Barrett in 1845-6 during her courtship with fellow poet Robert Browning. The two married in September 1846, yet the reluctant Mrs. Browning did not present these passionate poems to her husband until three years later. At this time, he insisted on their publication in the second edition of Barrett Browning's book Poems. He later explained, “I dared not keep to myself the finest Sonnets written in any language since Shakespeare's”. Browning himself suggested the title Sonnets from the Portuguese to give the impression that the work was a translation so that its very intimate nature would be somewhat disguised.

The story of the Brownings' romance is famous today. The two met after Barrett praised one of Robert Browning's poems in her own work, “The Courtship of Lady Geraldine”. Mr. Browning sent Barrett a letter thanking her and returning the critical compliment, saying, “I love your verses with all my heart [….] – and I love you”. After several epistolary entreaties on the part of Browning, Elizabeth Barrett finally agreed to meet him in person. Bedridden and nearly 40 (Browning was six years her junior), Barrett was hesitant to give in to her suitor's affections. Just over a year later, however, the two eloped to Italy where Barrett Browning would live to write and publish for fifteen more years. She gave birth to a son, Robert Wiedeman Barrett Browning (Pen), in 1849, and on June 29, 1861, at home in Florence, she died quietly in her husband's arms.

Each of the poems in Sonnets from the Portuguese marks a point in Barrett and Browning's developing relationship; however, specific events (such as their exchange of letters and of locks of hair) are rarely mentioned. Rather, the work reflects – in an abstract style – the poet's complex evolution of emotions as she moves through sorrow, self-doubt, passion, fear, and ultimately, profound exhilaration and joy, even in spite of the relentlessly lingering thoughts of her own death.

Sonnet I, then, depicts a despondent speaker lying in darkness, grieving for the past:

I saw in gradual vision through my tears,
The sweet, sad years, the melancholy years,
Those of my own life, who by turns had flung
A shadow across me.

Suddenly, a mysterious shape enters the room, overtaking her. By now, well prepared to meet her end, she receives an unusual surprise:

And a voice said in mastery, while I strove, –
'Guess now who holds thee?' – 'Death,' I said. But,
there,
The silver answer rang, – 'Not Death, but Love.'

This narrative begins the emotional progression which provides the thematic thread linking the sonnets from first to last.

In addition, Barrett Browning frequently employs her technique to deliberately join the end of one poem to the beginning of the next. For example, sonnet I ends with a conversation; sonnet II begins with the lines “But only three in all God's universe/ Have heard this word thou hast said”. Then, sonnet V ends with “Stand farther off then! go”, and sonnet VI begins “Go from me”. With the poems connected in this way, the sequence as a whole develops its own story and meaning which then lends clarity back to the individual parts.

More than the record of a relationship, though, Sonnets from the Portuguese stands on its own as a work of art and a noteworthy contribution to literature. Not only does Barrett Browning successfully revive the form of the Italian sonnet developed by Petrarch in the fourteenth century – whose works she happened to be translating at the same time that these poems were written – but she also expands the traditional conventions of such a form to include a feminine variation as yet unseen in poetry.

Abiding by tradition, each of the poems in the sequence is comprised of fourteen lines, written in iambic pentameter, and separated into an octet (eight lines), in which the poem's story or question is introduced, and a sestet (six lines), in which the topic is resolved. The rhyme scheme of the octet follows the pattern abba, abba; the sestet can typically rhyme cde, cde, or – as Barrett Browning utilized it – cdc, cdc.

However, it is Barrett Browning's precise application of this rigid, long-established, masculine structure that allows her innovative feminine (even feminist) deviations to show up so significantly. Customarily, the speaker of the Petrarchan sonnet is the male lover, praising a silent, or absent, female object of worship. Here, however, the female object is, in fact, the speaker of the poem. Furthermore, she is not “golden” or “lovely” (Petrarch), but instead, dark, ill, and close to death. She is reluctant to accept the affections of her suitor, unsure if his sentiments can possibly be sincere. In sonnet III, she asks:

[…] What hast thou to do
With looking from the lattice-lights at me,
A poor, tired, wandering singer, singing through
The dark, and leaning up a cypress tree?

The cypress tree, a symbol of mourning, represents not only Barrett's own nearness to death, but also her perpetual sadness since the loss of her mother and, even more, her closest brother, Edward, years before. The poem's speaker mistrusts her suitor's attraction to such a gloomy creature, while at the same time, doubts her own ability to reciprocate his generous affection. In sonnet VIII, she asks:

What can I give thee back, O liberal
And princely giver [….]
Ask God who knows. For frequent tears have run
The colors from my life, and left so dead
and pale a stuff, it were not fitly done
To give the same as pillow to thy head.
Go farther! let it serve to trample on.

Here, the object of love, rather than discouraging her wooer in lofty silence, as does Petrarch's Laura, ashamedly insists that she is not worthy of his admiration. This insecurity that pervades the early sonnets, however, slowly dissolves and by sonnet X, the speaker takes the position that, if she has nothing to give, but only love, then love is enough.

Yet love, mere love, is beautiful indeed
And worthy of acceptation [….]
I love thee […] mark! […] I love thee – in thy sight
I stand transfigured, glorified aright, [….]
And what I feel, across the inferior features
Of what I am, doth flash itself, and show
How that great work of Love enhances Nature's.

The speaker's growing confidence, seen here, can be followed in the next twenty sonnets. She even begins to give her wooer instructions, saying “Love me for love's sake” (XIV), not for superficial qualities such as a smile, or a quick wit. She directs him in conversation, saying “Accuse me not […] that I wear/ Too calm and sad a face in front of thine” (XV); and “Say over again, and yet once over again,/ That though dost love me,” adding “– only minding, Dear,/ To love me also in silence with thy soul” (XXI). Perhaps the most aggressive of this speaker's amorous commands comes in sonnet XXXIII, when Barrett writes, “Yes, call me by my pet-name! let me hear/ The name I used to run at, when a child”. The speaker's impulsiveness in the later sonnets reflects the developing intimacy and devotion between the two lovers.

At the same time, such expression exemplifies further variations on Petrarch's conventional themes of love. While Barrett Browning successfully gives voice to the female beloved, and depicts her as far less than perfect, the true richness of emotion in Sonnets from the Portuguese lies in the simultaneous portrayal of the female beloved as a suitor as well.

Throughout her questions and criticisms of her admirer's flattery, the speaker takes equal time to worship him exaggeratedly in return. In sonnet III, she praises his poetic prowess, claiming:

[….] Thou, bethink thee, art
A guest for queens to social pageantries,
With gages from a hundred brighter eyes
Than tears even can make mine, to play thy part
Of chief musician.

The speaker feels that her lover's talent and nobility of character place him in a higher order. In the sonnet that follows, she repeats the sentiment with the lines: “Thou hast thy calling to some palace-floor,/Most gracious singer of high poems!”.

Likewise, in sonnet XVI, she explains how his royal manner, symbolized by color, helped to conquer her own doubts:

Because thou art more noble and like a king,
Thou canst prevail against my fears and fling
Thy purple round me.

Then, in sonnet XIX, purple becomes “purply black” in describing his hair of which she receives a lock as a gift. Both infatuated with and intimidated by his youth and beauty, she proclaims, “thy curl, it is so black!” At this point, the speaker's courage and reciprocal admiration are clear.

The sonnets in the second half of the series are primarily exuberant expressions of gratitude and proclamations of selfless love. The most famous of these is sonnet XLIII, which begins with the line “How do I love thee? Let me count the ways”. While the poem has been reprinted and repeated to the point of cliché, the powerful emotional expression of this piece serves as the climax of the sonnet sequence, followed only by one last poem, a dedication to Browning.

Although Barrett Browning's earlier works were often the subject of unfavorable reviews, criticized for her unsuccessful forced rhymes, unusual vocabulary, experimentation and abstraction, Sonnets from the Portuguese received unanimous praise. In an 1893 essay, critic James Ashcroft Noble expresses relief that Barrett Browning's manipulation of the sonnet form is not “marred by any of those eccentricities of treatment which interfere with the fullness of our delight in some of this poet's most delight-giving work”. He lauds the brave revelation of her soul, stating that “when the revelation is of such a soul as Mrs. Browning's it becomes a thing of priceless value”. In fact, in the same year of her sonnet sequence's original publication, Barrett Browning was under consideration to succeed the late William Wordsworth in the role of poet laureate.

Barrett Browning's influence remained after her death, inspiring such writers as Emily Dickinson and Virginia Woolf. Further, with the rise of feminist literary theory in the twentieth century, her mass of political essays and poetry, including Sonnets from the Portuguese, received a renewed interest. The fervor and honesty of her lines – and their consequent defiance of both the social mores of Victorian England, as well as the masculine traditions of literature – have established her image as a pioneer.

While Barrett Browning's newfound love provided the impetus behind her famous sonnet sequence, its true theme is victory: an artist's victory over the literary status quo, together with a human body's triumph over mortality. Thanks to Robert Browning – her fellow poet and her muse – the strength of Barrett Browning's passion continues to exceed the limits of earth.

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Citation: Cotto, Maggie. "Sonnets from the Portuguese". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 04 July 2003 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=1939, accessed 21 February 2026.]