Elizabeth and Robert: Their Love

On this day in 1846, romantic poet Elizabeth Barrett eloped with Robert Browning.

Theirs was a love story that lives on in her Sonnets from the Portuguese.

You may know nothing, absolutely nothing, about poetry, but I bet you know her poem, familiarly known as, How Do I Love Thee.

Maybe some historians say their love wasn’t all rainbows and unicorns, but I like to think it was true love with some life problems and emotional baggage like we all have.

History of Sonnets from the Portuguese

Barrett Browning didn’t want to publish her volume of poetry because she thought they were too personal. Her husband Robert Browning insisted they were the “best sequence of English-language sonnets since Shakespeare’s time” and encouraged her to publish them. To try to remain anonymous, she agreed but published them as if they were translations of foreign sonnets. Originally, she planned to call the collection “Sonnets translated from the Bosnian.”

Her husband suggested she change the source to Portuguese. One reason for that was because he called her my little Portuguese.

Since this work was published before January 1, 1924, and is in the public domain worldwide because the author died at least 100 years ago, I am publishing it below.

Sonnet XLII from Sonnets from the Portuguese aka How Do I Love Thee?

How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.
I love thee to the depth and breadth and height
My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight
For the ends of Being and Ideal Grace.

I love thee to the level of everyday’s
Most quiet need, by sun and candlelight.
I love thee freely, as men strive for Right;
I love thee purely, as they turn from Praise;
I love thee with the passion put to use

In my old griefs, and with my childhood’s faith;
I love thee with a love I seemed to lose
With my lost saints,—I love thee with the breath,
Smiles, tears, of all my life!—and, if God choose,
I shall but love thee better after death.

Takeaway Truth

An anthem to a beloved that still thrills us.