Browse 6 quotations connecting Elizabeth Barrett Browning with Grief, with meanings, source notes and related themes.
Sources represented here include A Child's Grave at Florence, Sonnets from the Portuguese.
“For us, to hope and bear on.”
The short clause gives the bereaved survivors a modest task: continue carrying the loss while keeping some form of hope available.
“A Child’s Grave at Florence,” stanza XXIX; Project Gutenberg #31015. The surrounding stanza contrasts the family’s earthly grave and silence with the child’s imagined heavenly life.
“Love, strong as Death, shall conquer Death, Through struggle made more glorious.”
The bereavement poem turns enduring love into a religious claim that loss does not exhaust the relationship or its hoped-for future.
“A Child’s Grave at Florence,” stanza XXIII; Project Gutenberg #31015. This is Christian elegiac conviction, not empirical evidence about death or grief outcomes.
“But winter kills the orange-buds, The gardens in the frost are, And all the heart dissolves in floods, Remembering we have lost her.”
Winter garden imagery gives the family’s bereavement a seasonal landscape, joining visible frost to the emotional force of remembering the child.
“A Child’s Grave at Florence,” stanza XV; Project Gutenberg #31015. The natural image belongs to an elegy for a specific child rather than a general theory of grief.
“But God gives patience, Love learns strength, And Faith remembers promise, And Hope itself can smile at length On other hopes gone from us.”
The elegy moves from a family’s acute loss toward a specifically Christian vocabulary of patience, strengthened love, remembered promise and slowly returning hope.
“A Child’s Grave at Florence,” stanza XXII; Project Gutenberg #31015. The poem commemorates a child who died in 1849 and frames consolation through Christian faith.
“For grief indeed is love and grief beside.”
The sonnet treats grief as attachment plus the pain attached to what has been lost, refusing to separate sorrow cleanly from love.
Sonnets from the Portuguese, Sonnet XXXV, Project Gutenberg #2002. “For grief indeed is love and grief beside” occurs as the lyric speaker asks whether a new beloved can fill a place still occupied by family memory and bereavement. It remains intimate Victorian love poetry, not a clinical model or universal definition of grief.
“And, though I have grown serene And strong since then, I think that God has willed A still renewable fear.”
The speaker recognizes real growth in serenity and strength while admitting that earlier sorrow still leaves a fear that can return.
Sonnets from the Portuguese, Sonnet XXXVI; Project Gutenberg #2002. The growth is emotional and relational within the poem, not a clinical recovery benchmark.
