This is a Good Poem February 2nd

It’s the month of the dead.  Let’s think about love.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Sonnet 43, 1845

One of the reasons I love this poem, aside from the fact that’s it’s an amazing declaration of love from a wonderful real life love story, is because I taught this in a high school English class once, and a boy told me, “I would kill to have a girl say that to me.”   When you get high school boys loving poetry, you’ve written a good poem.

But my favorite Barrett poem is still Sonnet 14:

“If thou must love me, let it be for nought

Except for love’s sake only.

Do not say, “I love her for her smile—her look—her way

Of speaking gently,—for a trick of thought

That falls in well with mine, and certes brought

A sense of pleasant ease on such a day”—

For these things in themselves, Belovèd, may

Be changed, or change for thee—and love, so wrought,

May be unwrought so. Neither love me for

Thine own dear pity’s wiping my cheeks dry:

A creature might forget to weep, who bore

Thy comfort long, and lose thy love thereby!

But love me for love’s sake, that evermore

Thou mayst love on, through love’s eternity.”

Or as some dude once put it, “Love is not love which alters when it alteration finds . . . ” (Sonnet 116.)

 

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