“Mine Earthly Heart Should Dare”: Elizabeth Barrett's Devotional Poetry:

And I--ah! what am I To counterfeit, with faculty earth-darkened, Seraphic brows of light And seraph language never used nor hearkened? --Elizabeth Barrett, "Epilogue" to "The Seraphim" We give many classifying names to Elizabeth Barrett Browning's poems, but "devotional" is not typically among them. Yet this form of religious verse takes up a substantial portion of her 1838 volume The Seraphim and Other Poems, conveying primarily in lyric form the devotional mode as a poetic discourse of "spiritual formation" (Larson 50), whose tropes of" the human soul connect spiritual reflection with lived experience in order to engage cultural issues of literary and religious authority in Victorian England. As Linda M. Lewis observes, "Barrett Browning was in her lifetime widely known as a devout, deeply religious poet" (2). Moreover, as Lewis, Alexandra Worn, and Karen Dieleman demonstrate, the texture of Barrett Browning's poems and poetics is most fully appreciated when approached with attention to its religious as well as its auto/biographical, political and cultural dimensions. (1) Indeed, in her preface to The Seraphim and Other Poems, Barrett engages what she sees as a significant debate about the role of devotional poetics in nineteenth-century poetry and culture. (2) As a reviewer from The Metropolitan Magazine (August 1838) suggests, Barrett maintained an "all-absorbing enthusiasm with which she advocates the cause of devotional poetry" (Brownings' Correspondence [hereafter abbreviated BC] 4.383). In particular, she demonstrates a keen interest in contradicting the notion set forth by Samuel Johnson, as well as many of her own critics, that religion and poetry should not mix. In support of her own claims, she mounts her rebellion against Johnson and other naysayers by writing a variety of poems that display the methods and influence of devotional verse. Barrett's focus on devotional poetry in her early- and mid-Victorian publications coincides with a sharp rise in the popularity of devotional poems in the literary marketplace (3) and with debates about the role of women in literary and religious spheres. Barrett's time in English history is one in which "[q]uestions of religious, racial, and national identity were already under heightened scrutiny ... due to a number of other historical phenomena," including England's imperialism, various movements and controversies in the Church of England, and a sharpening focus on "sexual difference" (Scheinberg 24). (4) In particular, I will focus on gender issues in order to explore ways in which Barrett engages ideas of difference through devotional poetics. In her prefatory remarks on poetry and in her devotional verse, Barrett critiques ideas of authority and social power implied in notions of difference. Rather than featuring religious difference as defined by distinctions between Christian and Jewish (as Scheinberg does), or Anglican and Roman Catholic (an important issue in Tractarian poetry), I argue that in Barrett's works, the discursive qualities of devotional poetics are emphasized most clearly by her poems' investment in what Janet Larson calls the "processes of spiritual formation" (50) in a broad sense. Barrett ascribed to Christian beliefs but resisted the dogma of any particular Christian sect throughout her life. As a result, her devotional discourse emerges in poems that feature social and gender difference in order to focus primarily on human experience rather than theological inquiry or debate. (5) Resisting definition as "abstract" or "spiritual" at the expense of their investment in the realities of human life, her devotional poems work as a means of intervention in what Barrett sees as unjust social practices, particularly with respect to women. (6) Thus we may read them as socially activist texts that broaden our definition of Victorian devotional poetry: in addition to G. B. Tennyson's assertion that devotional verse (7) is "poetry that grows out of and is tied to acts of religious worship" (6), I contend that Barrett's devotional poems feature tropes of the soul in the "processes [or process] of spiritual formation" as a means of vibrant social critique. …