THE SENSE OF AN ENDING: ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING’S PERCEPTION OF DEATH (BASED ON THE SERAPHIM AND OTHER POEMS, 1838)

Abstract

This paper is a tribute to Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s perception of death according to The Seraphim and Other Poems (1838). While I focus more specifically on the image of the mourning mother in Isobel’s Child and The Virgin Mary to the Child Jesus, I suggest a wider context for the poetess’ experience of mortality, drawing on her correspondence and her poetry in the period 1826 – 1844, as I aim at exploring the cognitive value of a survivor’s sense of an ending whereby loss gets transformed into aesthetic experience.