Aurora Leigh (Excerpts) by Elizabeth Barrett Browning

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[Book 1]
I am like,
They tell me, my dear father. Broader brows
Howbeit, upon a slenderer undergrowth
Of delicate features, -- paler, near as grave ;
But then my mother's smile breaks up the whole,
And makes it better sometimes than itself.
So, nine full years, our days were hid with God
Among his mountains : I was just thirteen,
Still growing like the plants from unseen roots
In tongue-tied Springs, -- and suddenly awoke
To full life and life 's needs and agonies,
With an intense, strong, struggling heart beside
A stone-dead father. Life, struck sharp on death,
Makes awful lightning. His last word was, `Love --'
`Love, my child, love, love !' -- (then he had done with grief)
`Love, my child.' Ere I answered he was gone,
And none was left to love in all the world.
There, ended childhood. What succeeded next
I recollect as, after fevers, men
Thread back the passage of delirium,
Missing the turn still, baffled by the door ;
Smooth endless days, notched here and there with knives ;
A weary, wormy darkness, spurr'd i' the flank
With flame, that it should eat and end itself
Like some tormented scorpion. Then at last
I do remember clearly, how there came
A stranger with authority, not right,
(I thought not) who commanded, caught me up
From old Assunta's neck ; how, with a shriek,
She let me go, -- while I, with ears too full
Of my father's silence, to shriek back a word,
In all a child's astonishment at grief
Stared at the wharf-edge where she stood and moaned,
My poor Assunta, where she stood and moaned !
The white walls, the blue hills, my Italy,
Drawn backward from the shuddering steamer-deck,
Like one in anger drawing back her skirts
Which supplicants catch at. Then the bitter sea
Inexorably pushed between us both,
And sweeping up the ship with my despair
Threw us out as a pasture to the stars.
Ten nights and days we voyaged on the deep ;
Ten nights and days, without the common face
Of any day or night ; the moon and sun
Cut off from the green reconciling earth,
To starve into a blind ferocity
And glare unnatural ; the very sky
(Dropping its bell-net down upon the sea
As if no human heart should 'scape alive,)
Bedraggled with the desolating salt,
Until it seemed no more that holy heaven
To which my father went. All new and strange
The universe turned stranger, for a child.
Then, land ! -- then, England ! oh, the frosty cliffs
Looked cold upon me. Could I find a home
Among those mean red houses through the fog ?
And when I heard my father's language first
From alien lips which had no kiss for mine
I wept aloud, then laughed, then wept, then wept,
And some one near me said the child was mad
Through much sea-sickness. The train swept us on.
Was this my father's England ? the great isle ?
The ground seemed cut up from the fellowship
Of verdure, field from field, as man from man ;
The skies themselves looked low and positive,
As almost you could touch them with a hand,
And dared to do it they were so far off
From God's celestial crystals ; all things blurred
And dull and vague. Did Shakspeare and his mates
Absorb the light here ? -- not a hill or stone
With heart to strike a radiant colour up
Or active outline on the indifferent air.
I think I see my father's sister stand
Upon the hall-step of her country-house
To give me welcome. She stood straight and calm,
Her somewhat narrow forehead braided tight
As if for taming accidental thoughts
From possible pulses ; brown hair pricked with grey
By frigid use of life, (she was not old
Although my father's elder by a year)
A nose drawn sharply yet in delicate lines ;
A close mild mouth, a little soured about
The ends, through speaking unrequited loves
Or peradventure niggardly half-truths ;
Eyes of no colour, -- once they might have smiled,
But never, never have forgot themselves
In smiling ; cheeks, in which was yet a rose
Of perished summers, like a rose in a book,
Kept more for ruth than pleasure, -- if past bloom,
Past fading also.
She had lived, we'll say,
A harmless life, she called a virtuous life,
A quiet life, which was not life at all,
(But that, she had not lived enough to know)
Between the vicar and the country squires,
The lord-lieutenant looking down sometimes
From the empyrean to assure their souls
Against chance-vulgarisms, and, in the abyss
The apothecary, looked on once a year
To prove their soundness of humility.
The poor-club exercised her Christian gifts
Of knitting stockings, stitching petticoats,
Because we are of one flesh after all
And need one flannel (with a proper sense
Of difference in the quality) -- and still
The book-club, guarded from your modern trick
Of shaking dangerous questions from the crease,
Preserved her intellectual. She had lived
A sort of cage-bird life, born in a cage,
Accounting that to leap from perch to perch
Was act and joy enough for any bird.
Dear heaven, how silly are the things that live
In thickets, and eat berries !
I, alas,
A wild bird scarcely fledged, was brought to her cage,
And she was there to meet me. Very kind.
Bring the clean water, give out the fresh seed.
She stood upon the steps to welcome me,
Calm, in black garb. I clung about her neck, --
Young babes, who catch at every shred of wool
To draw the new light closer, catch and cling
Less blindly. In my ears, my father's word
Hummed ignorantly, as the sea in shells,
`Love, love, my child.' She, black there with my grief,
Might feel my love -- she was his sister once,
I clung to her. A moment, she seemed moved,
Kissed me with cold lips, suffered me to cling,
And drew me feebly through the hall into
The room she sate in.
There, with some strange spasm
Of pain and passion, she wrung loose my hands
Imperiously, and held me at arm's length,
And with two grey-steel naked-bladed eyes
Searched through my face, -- ay, stabbed it through and through,
Through brows and cheeks and chin, as if to find
A wicked murderer in my innocent face,
If not here, there perhaps. Then, drawing breath,
She struggled for her ordinary calm
And missed it rather, -- told me not to shrink,
As if she had told me not to lie or swear, --
`She loved my father, and would love me too
As long as I deserved it.' Very kind.

[Book 5]

AURORA LEIGH, be humble. Shall I hope
To speak my poems in mysterious tune
With man and nature ? -- with the lava-lymph
That trickles from successive galaxies
Still drop by drop adown the finger of God
In still new worlds ? -- with summer-days in this ?
That scarce dare breathe they are so beautiful ?--
With spring's delicious trouble in the ground,
Tormented by the quickened blood of roots,
And softly pricked by golden crocus-sheaves
In token of the harvest-time of flowers ?--
With winters and with autumns, -- and beyond,
With the human heart's large seasons, when it hopes
And fears, joys, grieves, and loves ? -- with all that strain
Of sexual passion, which devours the flesh
In a sacrament of souls ? with mother's breasts
Which, round the new-made creatures hanging there,
Throb luminous and harmonious like pure spheres ? --
With multitudinous life, and finally
With the great escapings of ecstatic souls,
Who, in a rush of too long prisoned flame,
Their radiant faces upward, burn away
This dark of the body, issuing on a world,
Beyond our mortal ? -- can I speak my verse
Sp plainly in tune to these things and the rest,
That men shall feel it catch them on the quick,
As having the same warrant over them
To hold and move them if they will or no,
Alike imperious as the primal rhythm
Of that theurgic nature ? I must fail,
Who fail at the beginning to hold and move
One man, -- and he my cousin, and he my friend,
And he born tender, made intelligent,
Inclined to ponder the precipitous sides
Of difficult questions ; yet, obtuse to me,
Of me, incurious ! likes me very well,
And wishes me a paradise of good,
Good looks, good means, and good digestion, -- ay,
But otherwise evades me, puts me off
With kindness, with a tolerant gentleness, --
Too light a book for a grave man's reading ! Go,
Aurora Leigh : be humble.
There it is,
We women are too apt to look to One,
Which proves a certain impotence in art.
We strain our natures at doing something great,
Far less because it 's something great to do,
Than haply that we, so, commend ourselves
As being not small, and more appreciable
To some one friend. We must have mediators
Betwixt our highest conscience and the judge ;
Some sweet saint's blood must quicken in our palms
Or all the life in heaven seems slow and cold :
Good only being perceived as the end of good,
And God alone pleased, -- that's too poor, we think,
And not enough for us by any means.
Ay, Romney, I remember, told me once
We miss the abstract when we comprehend.
We miss it most when we aspire, -- and fail.
Yet, so, I will not. -- This vile woman's way
Of trailing garments, shall not trip me up :
I 'll have no traffic with the personal thought
In art's pure temple. Must I work in vain,
Without the approbation of a man ?
It cannot be ; it shall not. Fame itself,
That approbation of the general race,
Presents a poor end, (though the arrow speed,
Shot straight with vigorous finger to the white,)
And the highest fame was never reached except
By what was aimed above it. Art for art,
And good for God Himself, the essential Good !
We 'll keep our aims sublime, our eyes erect,
Although our woman-hands should shake and fail ;
And if we fail .. But must we ? --
Shall I fail ?
The Greeks said grandly in their tragic phrase,
`Let no one be called happy till his death.'
To which I add, -- Let no one till his death
Be called unhappy. Measure not the work
Until the day 's out and the labour done,
Then bring your gauges. If the day's work 's scant,
Why, call it scant ; affect no compromise ;
And, in that we have nobly striven at least,
Deal with us nobly, women though we be.
And honour us with truth if not with praise.

Overview

These excerpts from Aurora Leigh—Barrett Browning's verse novel of nearly 11,000 lines—present two pivotal moments in the life of a woman poet. Book 1 gives us Aurora's childhood: orphaned in Italy at thirteen when her father dies with "Love" on his lips, she is wrenched from her Italian nurse Assunta and shipped to England, where her father's sister—a woman whose "harmless life, she called a virtuous life" was "not life at all"—raises her in a cage of propriety. The passage is autobiography barely disguised: Barrett Browning channels her own experience of loss, displacement, and the suffocating conventions imposed on women into Aurora's story. Book 5 shifts from narrative to manifesto. Aurora, now an established poet, interrogates her own ambition: "Shall I hope / To speak my poems in mysterious tune / With man and nature?" The passage builds to a feminist declaration that remains startling: women artists look to men for validation ("We women are too apt to look to One"), and this dependency is itself an artistic failure. Aurora resolves to pursue "Art for art, / And good for God Himself" without requiring male approval. But the resolution is hard-won—she admits that her cousin Romney's indifference to her work wounds her, and that the temptation to measure success by one man's esteem is real. Together, these excerpts show Barrett Browning's range: the Book 1 passage is sensory, emotional, and novelistic—we see Italy receding from the steamer deck "Like one in anger drawing back her skirts." The Book 5 passage is intellectual and argumentative, working through a philosophical problem in real time. Both are written in blank verse of extraordinary flexibility, moving from intimate grief to social satire to cosmic ambition within a single breath.

Line-by-Line Analysis

Lines 1-6

Aurora describes her inheritance: her father's broad brows combined with her mother's smile that "breaks up the whole, / And makes it better sometimes than itself." This is a self-portrait that is also a genealogy—she is the product of two countries, two temperaments. The mother's smile "breaks up" the father's gravity, suggesting that feminine warmth disrupts and improves masculine seriousness.

Lines 7-16

"Nine full years, our days were hid with God / Among his mountains"—childhood in Italy is Edenic, hidden, protected. Then the catastrophic awakening: "suddenly awoke / To full life and life's needs and agonies." The father dies with "Love" repeated three times as his last word—"Love, my child, love, love!" The repetition is both desperate and generous. "None was left to love in all the world"—the child's world empties in a sentence.

Lines 17-24

"There, ended childhood." Barrett Browning compresses grief into fever-like images: "Smooth endless days, notched here and there with knives"—days that are both blank and violent. "A weary, wormy darkness, spurr'd i' the flank / With flame, that it should eat and end itself / Like some tormented scorpion"—grief as a creature that tries to destroy itself. The imagery is almost hallucinatory.

Lines 25-40

The separation from Assunta, Aurora's Italian nurse, is rendered as physical violence: "A stranger with authority, not right, / (I thought not) who commanded, caught me up." The distinction between authority and right is a child's moral clarity. Aurora's ears are "too full / Of my father's silence, to shriek back a word"—she is deafened by absence. Italy itself recedes: "The white walls, the blue hills, my Italy, / Drawn backward from the shuddering steamer-deck."

Lines 36-52

Italy personified as a woman "drawing back her skirts / Which supplicants catch at"—the homeland withdraws like an offended figure. "Then the bitter sea / Inexorably pushed between us both"—the sea is an active agent of separation. The ten-day voyage strips away all familiar reference points: "the moon and sun / Cut off from the green reconciling earth" become alien and glaring. "The very sky... / Bedraggled with the desolating salt"—even heaven is contaminated by the journey.

Lines 53-72

England arrives as anticlimax: "the frosty cliffs / Looked cold upon me." The red houses through fog, the alien lips speaking her father's language without kissing her—every detail emphasizes displacement. "I wept aloud, then laughed, then wept, then wept"—the stumble in the pattern (wept twice at the end) breaks the symmetry, enacting the child's emotional collapse. Someone blames seasickness. The dismissal is devastating.

Lines 61-72

"Was this my father's England? the great isle?"—the child expected grandeur and finds division: "The ground seemed cut up from the fellowship / Of verdure, field from field, as man from man." England's hedgerows become metaphors for English social isolation. The skies look "low and positive"—close, certain, uninspiring. Aurora wonders if Shakespeare absorbed all the light, leaving nothing for the landscape.

Lines 73-90

The aunt's portrait is one of the great character sketches in Victorian poetry. "She stood straight and calm"—rigid, contained. Her forehead is "braided tight / As if for taming accidental thoughts." Her hair is "pricked with grey / By frigid use of life." Her mouth is "a little soured about / The ends." Her eyes are "of no colour"—they "might have smiled, / But never, never have forgot themselves / In smiling." Every physical detail encodes emotional suppression. The aunt has spent her life preventing herself from feeling.

Lines 91-112

"She had lived, we'll say, / A harmless life, she called a virtuous life, / A quiet life, which was not life at all"—the devastating triple definition, each undercutting the last. The aunt exists between the vicar and the squires, managing propriety. "The poor-club exercised her Christian gifts / Of knitting stockings, stitching petticoats"—charity as busywork. The parenthetical about flannel quality—"with a proper sense / Of difference in the quality"—is social satire worthy of Austen.

Lines 108-117

"She had lived / A sort of cage-bird life, born in a cage, / Accounting that to leap from perch to perch / Was act and joy enough for any bird." The cage-bird metaphor is central: the aunt does not know she is captive because she has never known freedom. Her intellectual life is "preserved" by a book-club "guarded from your modern trick / Of shaking dangerous questions from the crease"—the books are kept safe from ideas. Aurora is the wild bird brought into this cage.

Lines 118-142

"I, alas, / A wild bird scarcely fledged, was brought to her cage." Aurora clings to the aunt in grief, but the aunt's response is telling: "Kissed me with cold lips, suffered me to cling." The word "suffered" means both "allowed" and "endured"—the embrace is tolerated, not returned. The aunt "wrung loose my hands / Imperiously" and searches Aurora's face with "two grey-steel naked-bladed eyes"—looking for something dangerous, "a wicked murderer in my innocent face." Her promise to love Aurora "as long as I deserved it" reduces love to merit pay.

Lines 143-155

The Book 5 excerpt opens with Aurora commanding herself: "Be humble." But the passage immediately reveals that humility is the last thing she feels. She asks whether her poetry can match "the lava-lymph / That trickles from successive galaxies / Still drop by drop adown the finger of God"—the ambition is cosmic. The catalogue of what poetry must equal spirals from nature to sexuality to maternity to death, each more intense than the last.

Lines 170-186

Aurora faces her specific failure: she cannot move "one man"—her cousin Romney, who is "born tender, made intelligent" yet "obtuse to me, / Of me, incurious." He likes her well enough but evades her work, treating her as "too light a book for a grave man's reading." The personal wound drives the philosophical argument: if she cannot reach the person closest to her, what hope for universal art?

Lines 187-202

"We women are too apt to look to One, / Which proves a certain impotence in art." Aurora diagnoses the trap: women artists seek validation from a single male authority rather than trusting their own judgment. "We must have mediators / Betwixt our highest conscience and the judge"—women cannot go directly to God or art; they route through men. This is both a feminist critique and a self-critique: Aurora recognizes the pattern in herself.

Lines 203-218

The resolution: "This vile woman's way / Of trailing garments, shall not trip me up." Aurora resolves to reject the need for male approval. "Must I work in vain, / Without the approbation of a man? / It cannot be; it shall not." She reaches for something beyond fame itself: "the highest fame was never reached except / By what was aimed above it. Art for art, / And good for God Himself, the essential Good!" Art must aim higher than recognition to achieve recognition.

Lines 219-230

The passage closes with a Greek maxim repurposed: "Let no one be called happy till his death." Aurora adds: "Let no one till his death / Be called unhappy." The reversal insists on hope—judgment is not final until the work is done. "If the day's work's scant, / Why, call it scant; affect no compromise"—honesty, not consolation. "Deal with us nobly, women though we be, / And honour us with truth if not with praise"—the final demand is not for approval but for honest engagement with women's art.

Themes

• The woman artist's struggle for autonomy and recognition
• Displacement and loss of homeland as formative experience
• The cage of Victorian femininity
• Art's ambition to match the scale of nature and human experience
• The trap of seeking male validation for creative work
• Grief as the end of childhood
• The wild bird versus the cage bird
• Art for art's sake versus art for approval

Literary Devices

Extended Metaphor

"A sort of cage-bird life, born in a cage, / Accounting that to leap from perch to perch / Was act and joy enough for any bird" — The aunt as cage-bird—and Aurora as wild bird brought to her cage—structures the entire childhood narrative. The metaphor insists that the aunt's limitations are not natural but imposed, and that she cannot recognize them because she has never known otherwise.

Personification

"The white walls, the blue hills, my Italy, / Drawn backward from the shuddering steamer-deck, / Like one in anger drawing back her skirts" — Italy becomes a woman pulling away from the child who is being taken from her. The personification transforms geographic separation into personal rejection, making the loss feel like abandonment.

Rhetorical Question

"Must I work in vain, / Without the approbation of a man?" — Aurora poses the question to herself—and immediately answers it. The rhetorical form enacts the internal struggle: the question reveals the dependency she is trying to overcome.

Character Sketch Through Physical Detail

"Eyes of no colour, — once they might have smiled, / But never, never have forgot themselves / In smiling" — Every physical feature of the aunt encodes emotional repression: the braided forehead taming thoughts, the soured mouth, the colorless eyes. The body is a record of a life spent suppressing feeling.

Catalogue / Anaphora

"with the lava-lymph... with summer-days... With spring's delicious trouble... With winters and with autumns" — The Book 5 passage builds ambition through accumulation: each "with" adds another domain poetry must equal. The catalogue spirals from galaxies to flowers to sexual passion to death, escalating the impossible standard.

Ironic Repetition

"Very kind." (appears twice) — Aurora uses "Very kind" twice to describe her aunt's reception—first the formal welcome, then the conditional promise of love. The repetition drains the phrase of sincerity; by the second use, it is pure irony.

Blank Verse Flexibility

"I wept aloud, then laughed, then wept, then wept" — Barrett Browning's iambic pentameter accommodates conversational rhythms, emotional outbursts, and satirical asides without losing its forward drive. The stumble in "wept, then wept" breaks the expected pattern to mirror the child's collapse.

Historical Context

Published in 1856, Aurora Leigh was Barrett Browning's most ambitious work—a "novel in verse" spanning nine books and nearly 11,000 lines of blank verse. It was enormously popular in its time, outselling all of her other works. The poem tells the story of Aurora Leigh, an aspiring woman poet who must navigate Victorian expectations about gender, art, and social reform. Barrett Browning drew heavily on her own life: like Aurora, she lost her mother young, was raised by a controlling relative, and fought to be taken seriously as a woman artist. The Book 5 passage on women and art was considered revolutionary—Virginia Woolf later called Aurora Leigh "the first novel... written by a woman, in which the writer is also an artist." The work influenced George Eliot, Christina Rossetti, and Emily Dickinson.