Elizabeth Browning was an English poet writing during the Victorian era. Despite hardships in her own life, she wrote frequently about political issues and social injustices.
Key terms: victorian, metaphor, simile
Grief
I tell you, hopeless grief is passionless;
That only men incredulous of despair,
Half-taught in anguish, through the midnight air
Beat upward to God’s throne in loud access
Of shrieking and reproach. Full desertness,
In souls as countries, lieth silent-bare
Under the blanching, vertical eye-glare
Of the absolute heavens. Deep-hearted man, express
Grief for thy dead in silence like to death—
Most like a monumental statue set
In everlasting watch and moveless woe
Till itself crumble to the dust beneath.
Touch it; the marble eyelids are not wet:
If it could weep, it could arise and go.
Browning almost condemns humans for feeling grief in this poem. She maintains that "hopeless grief is passionless" - she tells us that we should feel grief silently, without shrieking or hopeless praying. That our grief should be "silence like to death". She compare grief to a statue- "if it could weep, it could arise and go". There's nothing that grieving can do for us, except to sit and decay, rather than help us move on and "weep" with us like perhaps we hope in that moment. It's not conciliatory; it's cold and lifeless. Browning had a good amount of grief in her own life; perhaps this is her meditation on her own experience with grief, if she is jaded or upset at the time that she wrote this.
http://www.poetryoutloud.org/poem/177112
I do not think that Browning condemns feelings and expressions of grief, but rather expresses a deeper, more abiding grief which leaves the heart feeling cold and dead, when one has already wept and screamed and prayed, and nothing has changed, and the reality and finality of the situation causing the grief becomes cemented in the soul. Then the tears dry up, and the grief settles in, like a cold, dead weight, deep in the heart. This is when grief becomes hopeless grief. It is the lasting feeling of deep anguish and despair, which never really completely leaves.
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