SOURCE: Montefiore, Janet. “Aurora Leigh and the Pure Milk of the Word.” In Arguments of Heart and Mind: Selected Essays 1977-2000, pp. 177-86. Manchester, England: Manchester University Press, 2002.

In the following essay, published for the first time in 2002, Montefiore examines images of God and the use of the female body as metaphor in Aurora Leigh.

The Paps We All Have Sucked

                                                                                Never flinch, But still, unscrupulously epic, catch Upon the burning lava of a song, This full-veined, heaving, double-breasted Age That, when the next shall come, the men of that May touch the impress with reverent hand, and say ‘Behold,—behold the paps we all have sucked! This bosom seems to beat still, or at least It sets ours beating: this is living art Which thus presents and thus records true life.’ 

—Elizabeth Barrett Browning¹

This much-quoted passage exhorting poets to write of the present works by a...