Victorian Verse - Grief - Elizabeth Barrett Browning

Useful biographies of EBB can be found here and here. The last gives the probable context for this poem as being the death by drowning of EBB's brother, Edward.  It was written during, or shortly after her return from, three years spent in Torquay where she had moved to try and improve her health; for much of her life, EBB was sickly and spent months/years largely confined to her room.  

The poem is a Petrarchan sonnet - 14 lines of iambic pentametre with a regular rhyme scheme abbaabba (octet) cdecde (sestet).  Petrarch was the prime exponent of the sonnet form in Italy in the 14th century but it was adopted in England by Shakespeare and others, although sometimes with a different rhyme scheme.

Sonnets are traditionally love poems, although modern sonnets can cover any kind of experience. They usually put forward some kind of argument or premise - an idea for discussion - in the octet which is answered or countered in the sestet, although in Shakespeare this "answer" can occur as late as the final two lines. This switch in the argument, or answer to the question, is called the volta, or "turn".  You can find a good, more detailed, exploration of sonnet form, with ideas for writing your own, here.

The poem deals with the nature of Grief and contests the popular perception of grief being manifest through the "wailing and gnashing of teeth" - loud declarations of sorrow.  In contrast, she experiences grief as a feeling of lifelessness, like a statue.

I tell you, hopeless grief is passionless;

The reader is directly accosted by the poet’s argument.  She puts forward her premise bluntly, as if to reject any counter argument, which is that true grief is expressed without the outward shows of violent emotion.

That only men incredulous of despair,

Half-taught in anguish, through the midnight air

Beat upward to God’s throne in loud access 

Of shrieking and reproach.

In line 2, the “I tell you” is implied as in “(I tell you) That only men …”. She is addressing people (men is a gender-neutral form) who do not believe in, or have not experienced, despair, or have only a partial understanding (“half-taught”) of the pain of sorrow, who take out their feelings on God with loud prayers and wailing.

Note how the strict rhyme scheme is softened by the use of enjambment between “access/Of” and the use of the caesura after “reproach” which sets up the line to similarly run into the next, keeping the whole sonnet moving forward.

                                                                Full desertness,

In souls as countries, lieth silent-bare

Under the blanching, vertical eye-glare

Of the absolute heavens.

The soul experiencing true grief is as barren and lifeless as a desert, exposed to the pitiless sun – and the eye of God. The volta occurs at the caesura, after "heavens", where she now addresses men of true feeling (“Deep-hearted man”) and expounds on her idea of what grief really feels like.

                                                                            Deep-hearted man, express

Grief for thy dead in silence like to death—

Most like a monumental statue set

In everlasting watch and moveless woe

Till itself crumble to the dust beneath.

True grief is expressed in a death-like silence, like an ancient statue which sits motionless until it crumbles into dust.  It can do nothing else, being lifeless. 

Touch it; the marble eyelids are not wet:

If it could weep, it could arise and go.

The truth of her analogy is given in the final couplet.  She urges (us) to “Touch” the statue, metaphorically the person silent and motionless in grief, and we will find that the eyes are dry.  If they had the power to weep, then they would also have the power to move on and, by inference, leave the grief behind.  However, the true griever cannot “move on”.

The image of a statue in a desert is similar to the sonnet "Ozymandias" by John Keats, published in 1818, which can be found here and which EBB would almost certainly have known