'Sound Well and Go Well When Spoken'

I used to think that everyone knew it -- “How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.” -- the same way everyone knew “And what is so rare as a day in June?” and “Into the valley of Death / Rode the six hundred.” Of the three, only the second, from James Russell Lowell’s “The Vision of Sir Launfal,” was memorized as a school assignment, in eighth grade English. Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Tennyson were absorbed by osmosis. I don’t remember consciously memorizing those poems, the way I would lines by T.S. Eliot and Allen Tate, but they stick even after sixty years. 

I’m remembering Browning rather guiltily because June 29 is the anniversary of her death in 1861 and I know little of her work apart from #43 in Sonnets from the Portuguese:

 

“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 every day’s

Most 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 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.”

 

Her sonnets, especially #43 (safely out of copyright), were stitched on pillows, printed in greeting cards and in little booklets with sequins and sewn-in bookmarks. Truly, I’m not making fun of such things. They recall a less cynical time, when a young man could declare his love for a woman, and vice versa, with poetry. Browning’s sonnet is conversational. Nothing in it would strain recitation. The only archaism is the repetition of “thee,” but it works. Most of the poem consists of monosyllables. I can pull out this poem while out for a walk or doing my exercises in PT.

 

I’m reminded of what Kingsley Amis wrote in his introduction to The Faber Popular Reciter, the anthology he edited in 1978. He wished to include “poems that sound well and go well when spoken in a declamatory style, a style very far indeed removed from any of those to be found at that (alas!) characteristically twentieth-century occasion, the poetry recital, with all its exhibitionism and sheer bad art.”

 

In tribute to Browning, here is her “Love”:

 

“We cannot live, except thus mutually

We alternate, aware or unaware,

The reflex act of life: and when we bear

Our virtue onward most impulsively,

Most full of invocation, and to be

Most instantly compellant, certes, there

We live most life, whoever breathes most air

And counts his dying years by sun and sea.

But when a soul, by choice and conscience, doth

Throw out her full force on another soul,

The conscience and the concentration both

Make mere life, Love. For Life in perfect whole

And aim consummated, is Love in sooth,

As nature’s magnet-heat rounds pole with pole.”