Sonnets from the Portuguese
These forty-four sonnets trace the archaeology of love: its doubts, its hesitations, its slow emergence from shadow into blinding light. Written to her husband Robert Browning during their courtship and early marriage, Elizabeth Barrett Browning refused the conventional pose of the passive Victorian woman. Instead, she wrote with startling directness about desire, vulnerability, and the soul's capacity for devotion. The sequence moves from initial resistance to the famous declaration of Sonnet 43, where love becomes both physical and spiritual, "best, and highest, and purest." The poet insists love survives death, persists beyond the grave. This is love as revelation, as redemption, as the thing that proves what the human spirit can become. Published anonymously in 1850 under the guise of translations from the Portuguese, the sonnets caused an immediate sensation. They've never lost their power. For anyone who has ever loved, or wanted to understand what love truly means, these poems remain essential.
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“How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.I love thee to the depth and breadth and heightMy soul can reach, when feeling out of sightFor the ends of being and ideal grace.I love thee to the level of every day'sMost quiet need, by sun and candle-light.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 useIn my old griefs, and with my childhood's faith.I love thee with a love I seemed to loseWith 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.””
— Elizabeth Barrett Browning
“Quick-loving hearts ... may quickly loathe.””
— Elizabeth Barrett Browning
“If thou must love me, let it be for naughtExcept for love's sake only. Do not say,'I love her for her smile”
— Elizabeth Barrett Browning
“And yet, because I love thee, I obtainFrom that same love this vindicating grace,To live on still in love, and yet in vain””
— Elizabeth Barrett Browning
“I saw, in gradual vision through my tears,The sweet, sad years, the melancholy years,Those of my own life, who by turns had flungA shadow across me.””
— Elizabeth Barrett Browning
“Alas, I have grieved so I am hard to love.Yet love me--wilt thou? Open thine heart wide,And fold within, the wet wings of thy dove.””
— Elizabeth Barrett Browning
“Will that light come again,As now these tears come...falling hot and real!””
— Elizabeth Barrett Browning
“My letters! all dead paper, mute and white!And yet they seem alive and quiveringAgainst my tremulous hands which loose the stringAnd let them drop down on my knee to-night.This said, -- he wished to have me in his sightOnce, as a friend: this fixed a day in springTo come and touch my hand ... a simple thing,Yet I wept for it! -- this, ... the paper's light ...Said, Dear I love thee; and I sank and quailedAs if God's future thundered on my past.This said, I am thine -- and so its ink has paledWith lying at my heart that beat too fast.And this ... O Love, thy words have ill availedIf, what this said, I dared repeat at last!””
— Elizabeth Barrett Browning
“Men could not part us with their worldly jars,Nor the seas change us, nor the tempests bend;Our hands would touch for all the mountain-bars,--And, heaven being rolled between us at the end,We should but vow the faster for the stars.””
— Elizabeth Barrett Browning
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