The Ambivalent Garden and Wordsworth’s Shadow in Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s “The Deserted Garden”

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size

Disclosure statement

The author reports there are no competing interests to declare.

Notes

1 See Simon Avery’s “Telling It Slant,” Angela Leighton’s Elizabeth Barrett Browning, especially pp. 67-70, Dorothy Mermin’s “Becoming a Woman Poet,” and Ranen Omer’s “Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Apocalypse.”.

2 EBB’s admiration for Wordsworth is well- documented in works such as “On a Portrait of Wordsworth by B. R. Haydon” and Essays on the English Poets and the Greek Christian Poets. For a closer examination of the relationship between EBB and Wordsworth, see Kathleen Blake’s “Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Wordsworth” and Amy Billone’s “‘In Silence Like to Death.’”.

3 All references from “The Deserted Garden” are from A Selection from Elizabeth Barrett’s Poetry and are noted with line numbers.

4 All references from “Lines” are from Wordsworth’s Poetry and Prose and are noted with line numbers.

5 Rebecca Stott mentions how such a gendered view extended into the perception of poems of male and female writers in the Romantic era. Women’s poetry was seen as “beautiful, small-scale, and exquisite” (66).

6 Comparable restrictions are reflected in the poems’ forms. Wordsworth wrote “Lines” in blank verse that emphasizes the naturalness and fluidity of his experience. EBB constructs her poem with regular envelope quatrains. Her quatrains are unconventional, though, as the last lines miss a foot; while the first three lines of the quatrains are written in iambic tetrameter, the last lines are written in iambic trimeter. The structure of her poem mimics her garden confined with artificial boundaries, but also one that eludes perfect control.

7 See Blake for EBB’s esteem for Wordsworth as a poet of “infinite egotism,” especially pp. 388-89.