"What I do and what I dream include thee, as the wine must taste of its own grapes"
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Desire is doing double duty here: it’s romantic confession, but also a claim about authorship. Browning doesn’t just say the beloved is present in her life; she builds an aesthetic argument that her work and her inner life are inseparable from this person, the way wine is inseparable from the grapes that made it. It’s a metaphor that refuses the usual Victorian split between public action and private feeling. “What I do” signals vocation, output, the world-facing self; “what I dream” signals the unruly interior. Both, she insists, “include thee.” The beloved isn’t an accessory to her identity but an ingredient in the finished product.
The wine line matters because it smuggles inevitability into intimacy. Wine “must” taste of its grapes: not “should,” not “might.” That modal verb turns affection into necessity, implying that any attempt to scrub the beloved out of her work would be as absurd as demanding wine without origin. It’s also quietly sensual. Wine is taste, mouth, fermentation, time. Browning gets physical without saying anything explicitly improper, a classic move in an era that required women poets to be both ardent and decorous.
Context sharpens the stakes. In Sonnets from the Portuguese, written around her clandestine courtship with Robert Browning, she’s negotiating love as liberation and risk: a woman with illness, family control, and public scrutiny. The subtext is defiant: my art will carry you, my inner life will not be policed, and the proof will be on the tongue.
The wine line matters because it smuggles inevitability into intimacy. Wine “must” taste of its grapes: not “should,” not “might.” That modal verb turns affection into necessity, implying that any attempt to scrub the beloved out of her work would be as absurd as demanding wine without origin. It’s also quietly sensual. Wine is taste, mouth, fermentation, time. Browning gets physical without saying anything explicitly improper, a classic move in an era that required women poets to be both ardent and decorous.
Context sharpens the stakes. In Sonnets from the Portuguese, written around her clandestine courtship with Robert Browning, she’s negotiating love as liberation and risk: a woman with illness, family control, and public scrutiny. The subtext is defiant: my art will carry you, my inner life will not be policed, and the proof will be on the tongue.
Quote Details
| Topic | Soulmate |
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