Sonnets from the Portuguese: A Celebration of Love

You couldn't make this stuff up... well, maybe you could, but strictly for the Harlequin Romance market. Famous poet and man about London Robert Browning reads a poem by Elizabeth Barrett, a girl he never met... mainly because nobody else ever did either, since she lives in her bedroom in Emily Dickinson-style seclusion, in her case as an invalid, lifelong victim of some Victorianly-obscure wasting disease, under the care of a tyrannically possessive, somewhat demented father... and falls in love with her at long distance. Being who he is, Browning manages to wangle an interview, then further meetings, until, inevitably, he and this strange, ethereally beautiful (in Browning's eyes, at least) bedridden woman, six years his senior, fall in love. Browning knows he must spirit this creature away and possess her for his own, a challenge for which he must enlist the assistance of others of her (not entirely unsympathetic) family members, because of the father. Barrett senior, it seems, descended from a family of West Indian plantation owners, is possessed of the notion that none of his offspring should ever marry. The reason: he suspects his bloodline to be tainted by the tarbrush of slave ancestry somewhere along the line, and therefore not fit to be perpetuated. Not to be so easily put off, Browning arranges an abduction/elopement, spiriting "Ba" (his pet name for Elizabeth) out of the paternal tower in which she has been imprisoned for years, gets the two of them married on the fly before her father even tumbles to what has happened, and the couple decamp to Italy and the British expat community there, where they continue to spout poetry while living happily ever after, becoming in due time the darlings of the international high cultural set, Elizabeth even managing to have a darling son at age 43. Or approximately ever after. They did have some score of good years together, until Ba, who really was ill with something, finally died at age sixty, and her heartbroken husband took their son back to be educated in England and never married again. The kicker here, though, comes after the Brownings have been living some months of connubial bliss in Italy, when Robert happens to discover a secret collection of beautiful love sonnets among his wife's personal effects, and asks her what they might be. She confesses to him that during those months of meetings in her Wimpole Street bedroom, when all they did was talk, she had secretly fallen in love with him already, and was consoling her fantasies during his absences by writing secret love poems to him. Browning was flabbergasted, insisting that she ought to publish. The poems are indeed beautiful, thought by some to be EBB's best work, the most famous among them being the one that includes the lines "How do I love thee? / Let me count the ways..." Ba resists; for her, the poetry is too personal to expose to the public gaze. Robert comes up, accordingly, with a solution. Publish under a pseudonym or false

Reading through this volume I find it difficult to become deeply engaged. Something in the archaic, quaint language of much of the poetry deters. Yet there is a poem, the poem of all the anthologies that is a great and memorable one, one that justifies a life- work. " How do I love thee , Let me count the ways" is one of the most beautiful and inspiring love- poems ever written.

These poems were written by Elizabeth Barret Browning for her husband, the poet Robert Browning. They were not meant to be published but they have become her most well- known work. They contain one of the finest love poems ever written, the much anthologized , " How do I love thee? Let me count the ways." and other poems reflecting her love for her husband and her views on life. The poems are written in a very explicit and clear way,in a style which had great appeal to the common reader of their day. And despite a certain archaic quality in the diction they speak to us today. Here is one example. "If thou must love me , let it be for naught, Except for love's sake only. Do not say, "I love her for her smile-her look- her way Of speaking gently- for a trick of thought That falls in well with mine, and certes brought A sense of pleasant ease on such aday"- For these things in themselves. Beloved, may Be changed, or change for thee- and love, so wrought, May be unwrought so. Neither love me for Thine own dear pity 's wiping my cheeks dry- A creature might forget to wep, who bore Thy comfort long, and lose thy love thereby! But love me for love's sake , that evermore Thou may'st love on, through love's eternity." The early death of Elizabeth Barrett Browning underlines the intense and tragic quality of her and her husband's great love.

My ex girlfriend, Ashleigh, gave this to me years ago, before she was forced by her family to marry this guy named Tyler. Long story but she sent this book to me and signed the inside.Next to Shakespeare, this is the most bittersweet and poeticpoems of love that I have ever read.It was said that a husband and wife team wrote these so one can only imagine how passionate their marriage was, huh?

Barrett Browning's sonnet sequence is far from the sloppy, sentimental doggerel it has been made out to be. Instead, the poems examinge Barrett Browning's guilt over her brother's death, her awakening passion for Robert Browning, and her fear of an inability to love. If one looks very closely at these poems, what appears is not a tribute to Browning, but in fact a brilliant woman's realization that her life has been totally sterile, and that she has now been placed in the precarious position of having to make choices that will alter the course of her life. Tehcnically, the poems are brilliant; written with all of Barrett Browning's characteristic blend of caution and verve.