“Aurora Leigh” by Elizabeth Barrett Browning (post 2): Aurora’s alternate personalities—a skeptic, her “pipers,” and a strong one who sees her in the mirror

This first-person verse novel is composed of nine chapters or “books.” I will conclude First Book with the following quotes:

Skeptic interrupts Aurora's first-person narration:

                              “What’s this, Aurora Leigh,

You write so of the poets, and not laugh?

Those virtuous liars, dreamers after dark,

Exaggerators of the sun and moon,

And soothsayers in a tea-cup?

                                                 I write so

Of the only truth-tellers now left to God,

The only speakers of essential truth,

Opposed to relative, comparative,

And temporal truths…” (1, p. 30).

Aurora’s “own best poets,” poets inside her, her “pipers”:

“My own best poets, am I one with you,

That thus I love you, - or but one through love?

                             …do you play on me

My pipers, - and if, sooth, you did not blow,

Would no sound come?” (1, pp. 30-31).

Mirrors in Multiple Personality

                            “…I clenched my brows across

My blue eyes greatening in the looking-glass,

And said, ‘We’ll live, Aurora! we’ll be strong” (1, p. 36).

Search “mirrors” for past posts on this recurring issue in multiple personality.

1. Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Aurora Leigh [1856/1859]. Edited by Margaret Reynolds. A Norton Critical Edition. New York, W. W. Norton, 1996.