Browse 6 quotations connecting Elizabeth Barrett Browning with Strength, with meanings, source notes and related themes.
Sources represented here include A Child's Grave at Florence, Aurora Leigh, Casa Guidi Windows.
“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 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 uses, therefore, I must count worth while.”
After describing a slow return from profound loss, Aurora reconnects being alive with possible uses and reasons to continue engaging with the world.
Aurora Leigh, Book I, printed page 21 / Wikisource scan leaf 30, scan-backed Chapman and Hall third edition (London, 1857), cross-checked against Project Gutenberg #56621. After recounting bereavement and a slow return to ordinary consciousness, Aurora says, “For uses, therefore, I must count worth while.” This remains literary first-person narration about loss and renewed engagement with life, not clinical advice or a recovery benchmark.
“whoever may Discern true ends here, shall grow pure enough To love them, brave enough to strive for them, And strong to reach them though the roads be rough”
The political poem links clearer ends with the character needed to pursue them, moving from discernment to courage, effort and persistence on a difficult road.
Casa Guidi Windows, Part II, printed page 143 in the represented Poetical Works volume, Project Gutenberg #31015. This corrects the inherited Part II provenance. The frozen catalog row begins ‘whoever may Discern true ends here,’ but the witness embeds that clause in Browning's longer sentence beginning ‘I tell you rather that, whoever may...’. Browning is arguing specifically about Tuscan/Italian political freedom in the Risorgimento context; the excerpt is not a context-free motivational or psychological rule.
“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.
