Sonnets from the Portuguese  5: I lift my heavy heart up solemnly
By Elizabeth Barrett Browning
 
I lift my heavy heart up solemnly,
As once Electra her sepulchral urn,
And, looking in thine eyes, I overturn
The ashes at thy feet. Behold and see
What a great heap of grief lay hid in me,
And how the red wild sparkles dimly burn
Through the ashen greyness. If thy foot in scorn
Could tread them out to darkness utterly,
It might be well perhaps. But if instead
Thou wait beside me for the wind to blow
The grey dust up,... those laurels on thine head,
O My beloved, will not shield thee so,
That none of all the fires shall scorch and shred
The hair beneath. Stand further off then! Go.
 
 
Sonnets from the Portuguese is one of those books that just about everyone has heard of. We all know Sonnet 43:  “How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.” The poem Lisa read is the fifth sonnet in the sequence of 44 poems by Elizabeth Barrett Browning, which trace the early days of her relationship Robert Browning.
 
Their love story is legendary. When they met in 1844, Elizabeth Barrett was a 39 year old living with her father in London. She was a semi-recluse who saw very few people; and she was a chronic invalid not expected to live many years. She was also a remarkably successful poet, known in England and in America as the greatest woman poet of her time. Robert Browning, also a poet, was six years her junior, a lively, cheerful, sociable man who was struggling, unsuccessfully, to achieve a career as a poet. In 1844, Browning wrote to Barrett: “I love your verses with all my heart, dear Miss Barrett, and I love you, too.” Browning began to visit Wimpole Street, and about a year later they eloped, settling in Florence, where they lived—as they say—happily ever after, until Barrett Browning’s death in 1861.
 
Of course, real relationships are complicated, and that is exactly what Sonnets from the Portuguese captures so beautifully. While the volume ends with “How do I love thee?,” it starts with much less certainty. The poem Lisa read is an example of that. Barrett Browning loved the classics, and read the Greek and Latin poets in the original languages. Here, she references a scene from Sophocles’ play Electra, in which the title character laments over the urn containing the ashes of her dead brother. It was a scene that would have resonated powerfully with her, since she was still mourning the loss of two of her brothers who died within months of each other in 1840.
 
Here, it is the speaker’s heart that is an urn filled with ashes. The speaker is totally open with the lover—“looking in thine eyes, I overturn the ashes at thy feet.” She looks straight at him and shows him everything that is within her. At the same time, she doesn’t seem to recognize that there is anything there that is worth having. It is just dust and ashes, with a few sparks. She worries that at some point these few latent sparks will flame up and hurt him. We know the whole sequence of the Sonnets from the Portuguese ends with generous mutual love. But this poem ends with a dismissal: she tells him to distance himself from her, to be careful, to go. The recognition that she is loved makes her feel – at least initially – totally unworthy.
 
I chose this poem because it resonates with the season of Lent which we are entering this week. Lent, too, begins with ashes. The ashes we receive on Ash Wednesday have many meanings. They are a sign of repentance, and a reminder of the dust from which we came and to which we shall one day return. And the ashes speak of our complicated histories. An old antiphon for the liturgy of Ash Wednesday says, “Leave the past in ashes, and turn to God.”
 
Through the traditional Lenten practices of prayer, fasting, and almsgiving, we open our lives more fully to the God who loves us, pouring everything out at God’s feet. And, like the speaker of the poem, we may feel that there is nothing there worth God’s notice. Our Lenten task, like Barrett Browning’s in her great sonnet sequence, is to learn to be loved. I am reminded of the words of St. Elizabeth of the Trinity, a Carmelite mystic: “Let yourself be loved…  without fearing that any obstacle will be a hindrance to it, for I am free to pour out My love on whom I wish! … This love can rebuild what you have destroyed. Let yourself be loved.”
 
That is what this season is all about – letting ourselves be loved. Have a blessed Lent!