Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Sonnet 28 “My letters! all dead paper, mute and white!”
In Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s sonnet 28 “My letters! all dead paper, mute and white!,” the speaker reacts to each stage of the growing love relationship, while she is looking through a bundle of love letters.
Introduction and Text of Sonnet 28 “My letters! all dead paper, mute and white!“
Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s sonnet 28 “My letters! all dead paper, mute and white!” from Sonnets from the Portuguese is dramatizing the speaker’s uncomplicated activity of perusing a bunch of her love letters.
She loosens the cord that binds them and then begins to report certain significant details from each missive. Each one, on which the decides to report, unveils a stage in the maturing relationship of the two lovers from friend to soul-mate.
Sonnet 28 “My letters! all dead paper, mute and white!”
My letters! all dead paper, mute and white!
And yet they seem alive and quivering
Against my tremulous hands which lose the string
And let them drop down on my knee to-night.
This said,—he wished to have me in his sight
Once, as a friend: this fixed a day in spring
To come and touch my hand … a simple thing,
Yet I wept for it!—this, … the paper’s light …
Said, Dear, I love thee; and I sank and quailed
As if God’s future thundered on my past.
This said, I am thine—and so its ink has paled
With lying at my heart that beat too fast.
And this … O Love, thy words have ill availed
If, what this said, I dared repeat at last!
Commentary on Sonnet 28 “My letters! all dead paper, mute and white!”
The speaker in Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Sonnet 28 “My letters! all dead paper, mute and white!” is looking at the love letters from her beloved suitor and reacting to each step in the growth of their love relationship.
First Quatrain: Letters That Live
My letters! all dead paper, mute and white!
And yet they seem alive and quivering
Against my tremulous hands which lose the string
And let them drop down on my knee to-night.
The speaker begins by exclaiming “My letters!” She sits with a bundle of her letters in her hands and commences to muse aloud her response to fact that they even exist. She insists that they are actually nothing more than “dead paper, mute and white!” But because she is aware of the story that they contain, she claims that they seem to be “alive and quivering.”
Of course, it is the trembling of her hands that causes them to “quiver.” She has untied the cord that binds the letters together in a bunch, and her “tremulous hands” then permit those letters to “drop down on her knee.”
Second Quatrain: Each Letter a Pronouncement
This said,—he wished to have me in his sight
Once, as a friend: this fixed a day in spring
To come and touch my hand … a simple thing,
Yet I wept for it!—this, … the paper’s light …
The speaker, in the second quatrain, commences her report on what each letter pronounces. The first one that she selects is telling her that her suitor at first desired to visit her for the purpose of friendship.
After all they are both poets, and poets are likely to enjoy friendship with other poets. Thus, at the outset, the two poets experienced friendship, and she was pleasantly surprised that he even wished to visit her.
In the next missive she on which she focuses, he informs her her that he would like to visit and hold her hand; appropriately and timely, that day was a spring day. The romance inherent in these image choices is full of possibilities; yet, she regards the event “a simple thing.” Still, even though it may be simple, it brings tears to her eyes.
First Tercet: What God Judges
Said, Dear, I love thee; and I sank and quailed
As if God’s future thundered on my past.
This said, I am thine—and so its ink has paled
The next epistle with paper that is “light” informs her, “Dear, I love thee.” To this astonishing avowal, she exerts a passionate and extreme reaction. She sinks back in her seat with a startled cry for she felt as if God had declared some momentous decree on her past life.
As this sonnet sequence has progressively revealed, this speaker has passed quite a solitary and painfully sorrowful life. However, her past now is being put in judgment by God, and God is proclaiming that her future will not be replicating her sad past.
Second Tercet: Next to a Fast-Beating Heart
With lying at my heart that beat too fast.
And this … O Love, thy words have ill availed
If, what this said, I dared repeat at last!
The next letter avows to her that he belongs to her. The speaker has so treasured this letter that she has caused the ink to become pale from holding it to her fast-beating heart. The speaker has figuratively held this letter to her fast-beating heart, and that holding has metaphorically caused the ink to lighten.
The last epistle inflames her so much that she cannot allow herself to voice any of it nor even offer a hint of what it announces. Nevertheless, the continuing progress of the sonnet sequence allows the reader to remain perfectly satisfied with what might be a unsatisfying because inconclusive conclusion because the speaker chose to reveal nothing from the final letter’s contents.
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