Poem by Elizabeth Barrett-Browning

The Soul's Expression

WITH stammering lips and insufficient sound
I strive and struggle to deliver right
That music of my nature, day and night
With dream and thought and feeling interwound
And inly answering all the senses round
With octaves of a mystic depth and height
Which step out grandly to the infinite
From the dark edges of the sensual ground.
This song of soul I struggle to outbear
Through portals of the sense, sublime and whole,
And utter all myself into the air:
But if I did it, — as the thunder-roll
Breaks its own cloud, my flesh would perish there,
Before that dread apocalypse of soul.

1. Bianca among the Nightingales
2. Lord Walter's Wife
3. Substitution
4. Sonnets from the Portuguese. 26. I lived with visions for my company
5. Sonnets from the Portuguese. 16. And yet, because thou overcomest so

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