Suggestions for further reading: Remoortel, Marianne Van. "(Re)gendering Petrarch: Elizabeth Barett Browning's 'Sonnets from the Portuguese'". Tusla Studies in Women's Literature, no.2, vol.25, 2006, pp.247-66. Marshall, Gail. “Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Shakespeare: Translating the Language of Intimacy.” Victorian Poetry, vol. 44, no. 4, 2006, pp. 467-86. Gazzaniga, Andrea. "'This Close Room': Elizabeth Barrett's Proximal Poetics in Sonnets from the Portuguese." Victorian Poetry, vol. 54, no. 1, 2016, pp. 67-92. Williams, Rhian. "'Our Deep, Dear Silence.': Marriage and Lyricism in Sonnets from the Portuguese." Victorian Literature and Culture, vol. 37, no. 1, pp. 85-102.

Here, we have a thwarted lover. The "silence of [her] womanhood" is unrealized love. This is very Petrarchan, but it also twists Petrarchan sonnets. These sonnets culminate in marriage, and "marriage, as much as the feminine position, is an institution more usually found outside the sonnet tradition" (Williams 89). Not only is the speaker feminine, but the relationship will go somewhere. Again, she's turning the Petrarchan tradition on its head.

"As one who must reorient herself in relation to the physical presence of another, Barrett uses terms of proximity and distance that are registered in both imagery and diction throughout the sonnets" (Gazzaniga 71). These two lines show the speaker moving from a space of death to one of eternal life: the grave to heaven.

Recalls Shakespeare's Ophelia, with the flower imagery. However, as Marshall notes, "Shakespeare's images of powerless despair are transmuted by EBB into the signs of her love" (469).

"Echoes Shakespeare...Sonnet 116" (Marshall 468)

"Sonnet 44 presents the closing metaphor of Sonnets of the Portuguese and can, in all its paradoxicality, be considered symbolical of the entire sequence" (Remoortel 262)

Reference to the lovesickness harped upon in Petrarchan sonnets (Remoortel 255).

Harkens to Petrarch's Rime 21 (Remoortel 254).

Contrasts with Petrarchan sonnets, which feature a man elaborating on a disembodied woman (Remoortel 254).

Greek poet