Читать книгу Hope’s Daughters - R. Wayne Willis - Страница 51

Robert wrote to Elizabeth in January of 1845 to praise her poetry: “I love your verses with all my heart.”

Elizabeth Barrett, one of England’s most prominent poets, was an invalid. In her mid-teens she had been struck down by a mysterious illness that rendered her reclusive and bedridden. A cousin of Elizabeth, John Kenyon, arranged for Robert Browning, six years her junior, to visit in her room. There began one of the most famous love stories immortalized in writing.

In one of Robert’s early visits, Elizabeth was able to lift her head off the pillow for the first time in a long time. Between visits, they exchanged nearly six hundred letters. Robert kept her room populated with flowers. Elizabeth eventually became able to sit up in bed. Twenty months after their first meeting, they eloped, permanently leaving the polluted air of London for the warmer, cleaner, therapeutic air of Italy.

Elizabeth never saw her father again. He disinherited her, as he did all of his eleven children who married. Letters from Elizabeth to her father were returned unopened. Elizabeth’s health improved remarkably in Italy. At age forty-three, she was able to give birth to a son. The family of three lived happily there for fifteen years. Elizabeth died in Robert’s arms.37

Out of that relationship came some of history’s greatest expressions of romantic love. One of her “Sonnets from the Portuguese” begins: “How do I love thee? Let me count the ways. / I love thee to the depth and breadth and height / My soul can reach.”

The poem ends: “I love thee with the breath, / Smiles, tears, of all my life!—and, if God choose, / I shall but love thee better after death.”38

I hope you aspire to make this a romantic Valentine’s Day.