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SONNETS FROM THE PORTUGUESE AND THE POLITICS OF RHYME

ALTHOUGH VICTORIAN REVIEWERS uniformly praised Elizabeth Barrett Browning for the “sincere” poetic voice of Sonnets from the Portuguese, they often blamed her for faulty craft. In structure and rhyme scheme the poems in the sequence recall the Petrarchan tradition, suggesting the idealized love that accompanies it, yet their varied syntax and diction seem more conversational than ideal. Enjambment usually destroys the integrity of octave and sestet. Then in the Sonnets Barrett Browning continued her use of odd rhymes, which had been raising critical eyebrows since earlier poems. For example, in the most famous sonnet — XLIII, “How do I love thee?” — Barrett Browning rhymed the noun phrase “put to use” (9) with the infinitive “to lose” (11) and rhymed “faith” (10) with “breath” (12). Victorian reviewers, somewhat disoriented, offered a variety of explanations for these apparent technical lapses. Some attributed them to a defective ear for music (“Review of Poems” 278; [Massey] 517).1 George Saintsbury — taking the lead from the controversy over the “cockney school” of poetry — reproved Barrett Browning, born to the educated classes, for relying out of laziness on vulgar pronunciation to force rhymes instead of taking the time to discover correct ones (280–81). Even her poet-friend and correspondent, Mary Russell Mitford, wondered if isolation at Wimpole Street had led to an overly narrow experience with proper pronunciation of English (reported in Horne 458; see also Hayter 38–39). Victorian reproofs and anecdotes like these followed Barrett Browning’s work into the formalist twentieth century.