Barrett Browning and the viol

Doing some work on the great 19th-century poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning, I came across this image of a viol in her sonnet #32 in “Sonnets from the Portuguese.”

The first time that the sun rose on thine oath
To love me, I looked forward to the moon
To slacken all those bonds which seemed too soon
And quickly tied to make a lasting troth.
Quick-loving hearts, I thought, may quickly loathe;
And, looking on myself, I seemed not one
For such man’s love!—more like an out-of-tune
Worn viol, a good singer would be wroth
To spoil his song with, and which, snatched in haste,
Is laid down at the first ill-sounding note.
I did not wrong myself so, but I placed
A wrong on thee.  For perfect strains may float
’Neath master-hands, from instruments defaced,—
And great souls, at one stroke, may do and doat.

She wrote this sonnet in 1850, shortly after falling in love with Robert Browning, and eloping with him to live in Florence, Italy. I don’t know why Barrett Browning chose the viol as the image in the poem—it wasn’t being played in the mid 19th-century much. Perhaps because she and Robert were avid fans of Renaissance culture in all its forms.

It begins with her doubts about the hastiness of Robert’s declaration of love, imagining that her lover could so swiftly turn to loathing her, as a great musician could loathe a beat-up gamba – “out-of-tune,” “worn”, “ill-sounding”—picked up too quickly. The poem turns her harsh self-criticism into an elegant complement to Robert: he is such an artist , a “master-hand,” that he can pick up a clunker of an instrument and make beautiful music with it. 

Despite her disclaimer (“I did not wrong myself so”), I find it painful to hear her (at that point, perhaps the most widely-read poet in the English language) disparaging herself with this comparison to the old gamba. But what I find most moving—and central to the poem—is the degree of self-examination that the poem packs in, her unflinching “looking at myself.”

In the strange last line, she wryly ends the poem with a little joke at Robert’s expense: yes, he’s a “great soul” who can “do”—create “perfect strains” even on a crummy instrument; but he’s also capable of “doting”—that is, of acting foolishly in love, of over-valuing the one he’s fallen in love with.