How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.
One of the most famous lines of poetry in the entire history of poetry opens the verse titled simply “Sonnet 43.” (Though, as is often the case in collections of untitled sonnets, it has come to be known better as “How do I Love Thee?” What has interested critics, scholars and academics for almost two centuries now is that the poem commences with an expression that could be merely a rhetorical device or a passionate assertion. From just this opening line, there is an equitable possibility for the poem to proceed along either alternative lines of discourse.
Nay, if there's room for poets in the world
A little overgrown, (I think there is)
Their sole work is to represent the age,
Their age, not Charlemagne’s,--this live, throbbing age
In 1853, legendary poet Matthew Arnold published Preface to Poems in which he suggested that the age of the poet had passed because the modern age (the beginning of the Industrial Revolution in his case) had removed much of the impetus for poets to allow their fancy to take flight. Elizabeth Barrett Browning used her long “novel-in-verse” to directly respond to this growing perspective beginning spread into the mainstream. In doing so, Browning became a progenitor of a movement which would take root an entire century after later, rooted deeply in the mindset of the French Existentialists of the 1950s: la littérature engage or, translated into English, “committed literature.”
Do ye hear the children weeping, O my brothers,
Ere the sorrow comes with years ?
They are leaning their young heads against their mothers, —
And that cannot stop their tears.
The young lambs are bleating in the meadows ;
The young birds are chirping in the nest ;
The young fawns are playing with the shadows ;
The young flowers are blowing toward the west—
But the young, young children, O my brothers,
They are weeping bitterly !
They are weeping in the playtime of the others,
In the country of the free.
The commitment which Browning felt incumbent to use her literary gifts toward fulfilling include the pervasiveness of forced child labor to grease the machinery of the Industrial Revolution (sometimes literally, but mostly figuratively.” Her long poem “The Cry of the Children” presents the inhumanity of these conditions as both a poetic plea and narrative invocation of the desperation of their plight: the horrors remaining silent to those ignorant of what goes on inside factory walls is transformed into a repetitive motif that commences with the opening line of this stanza.
Thus, if thou wilt prove me, Dear,
Woman’s love no fable.
I will love thee—half a year—
As a man is able.
Committed and romantic Barrett Browning no doubt was, but her verse is not usually recognized as being particularly prone to humor. Arguably the single funniest lines she ever wrote arrive as the shocking 11th conclusion to a series of ten previous quatrains in which the speaker outlines the apparent requirements of how a man should be loved. The actual meaning of the final couplet is up for grabs; it is a rare case of ambiguity in the lexicon of love marking Browning’s verse.
Therefore to this dog will I,
Tenderly not scornfully,
Render praise and favour !
With my hand upon his head,
Is my benediction said
Therefore, and for ever.
The romantic spirit which makes Browning’s collection “Sonnets from the Portuguese” one of the most passionate volumes of verse ever published was not limited to those loves of her life walking on two feet and devoid of hair. The full-throated, unapologetic tenderness directed toward the titular canine character of this poem could quite easily be directed toward her husband Robert with just a few tweaks in the details. Although, admittedly, the unfortunate choice of a name for the dog could quite easily transform the tone of its title given just one typo. Lose the comma in the title and one might well approach it suspecting to find even darker humor than that found at the end of the “A Man’s Requirement.”
