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1844 Was A Big Year on author Elizabeth Barrett Browning


  • RonPrice
    Apr 3 12:28 AM 2006
    Reply
    HOW DO I LOVE THEE?

    In 1844 Elizabeth Barrett(1806-1861) acquired a special new admirer of her poetry. In the next two years this admirer married Elizabeth. His name was Robert Browning. Four years after their marriage, the year of the martyrdom of the Bab in 1850, Elizabeth’s most famous book of poems were published: Sonnets from the Portuguese. Elizabeth Browning was regarded by the 1870s, at least by some, as both "England's greatest female poet" and the "most inspired woman poet of history."1 She attained sainthood not just as a poet but also as a wife, based on the love story told in poems like How Do I Love Thee?. The value of her poetry came to lie, as some came to argue, in their autobiographical quality. “The seal of genuine experience,” wrote George Smith in 1874, “is upon each poem…we grasp the character of the poet.”2 –Ron Price with thanks to 1Tricia Lootens, Lost Saints: Silence, Gender, and Victorian Literary Canonization., University Press of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA, 1996, p.136; and 2George Smith, "Elizabeth Barrett Browning." The Cornhill Magazine, 29 (1874), pp.469-90.

    * I have left many of Browning’s phrases in tact, but altered a good deal of her poem to suit my own particular tastes, desires and needs. This is a poem which needs much more work that I am currently prepared to give.

    How do I love thee? Let me count the ways:

    I love Thee to the depth and breadth and height
    My soul can reach, but always out of sight;
    To the ends of its Being and its ideal Grace.
    And, I should add, to the limits of my incapacity.

    I love Thee, especially when a most quiet need
    Comes to fill my heart with its pressing feed
    And by sun and, on rare occasions, candlelight.
    I love Thee freely while striving for what is right;
    I love thee purely, at least some of that god-given light.

    I love with a passion put to use and set in old griefs,
    And with that childhood faith. I love thee with a love
    I seemed to lose or just got tarnished with the years
    Or, perhaps, I could say more wisely seen.
    I love thee with the breath, smiles, tears, of all my life!
    If God choose I shall but love thee better after death.

    Ron Price With thanks to:
    Elizabeth Barrett Browning
    August 27th 2005



  • rufina caraid
    April 3, 2006
    Reply

    Browning

    It's not hard to be a 'fan' of this lady. thank you for your input Ron - it's most appreciated.

    Von
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