Love Songs

These fifty-three sonnets constitute perhaps the most passionate love letter in the English language. Written by Elizabeth Barrett Browning to her husband Robert during their courtship and early marriage, the poems trace the arc of a love that defied convention: she the invalid daughter imprisoned in her father's house, he the poet who lifted her across thresholds of doubt and despair into the sun of Italy. The sequence moves from tender hesitation through growing fire to a devotion so absolute it aches. 'How do I love thee? Let me count the ways' has become the defining expression of romantic love in English, but the entire sequence sustains that pitch of feeling, each sonnet a room in the house of love she builds with words. These are not merely poems about love; they are love itself, transformed into language. They endure because they capture something universal: the way love makes the mortal feel immortal, the way another person's existence becomes indistinguishable from one's own breath.