And so we have ourselves some poetry.
It's from Love Letters From Great Men. A book I bought on Friday and have been excited about reading.
As the book says you don't need to be a literary genius to write a love letter. Some of these letters, some written by those who make a living by forming words, do not make sense. It's because they're written from the heart.
Blood pounds through their veins and one vein in particular as they write to the woman causing this. Every woman deserves a love letter.
I would love to type more but as I am literally typing from this book, I will just include a few passionate proses. For the sake of my fingers I decided to copy some from the net because the original words seem to be intact.
A heartfelt love letter can be read anywhere. It can be read in the busiest park on the coldest bench and it will conjure up various images to the reader, being alone in their room so they can fantasise about their union with their lover.
You will not believe what longing for you possesses me. The chief cause of this is my love and then we have not grown used to be apart. So it comes to pass that I lie awake a great part of the night thinking of you and that by day when the hours return at which I was wont to visit you my feet take me as it so truly said to your chamber but not finding you there I return sick and sat at heart like an excluded lover. The only time that is free from these torments is when I am being work out at the bar and in the suits of my friends. Judge what you must be my life when I find mu repose in toil my solace in wretchedness and anxiety. Farewell.
To Calpurnia, from Pliny.
Mozart to his Constanze
Dear little wife, I have a number of requests to make. I beg you
1 not to be melancholy
2 to take care of your health and to beware of spring breeezes
3 not to go walking alone and preferably not to go walking out at all
4 to feel absolutely assured of my love. Up to the present I have not written a single letter to you without placing your dear portrat before me
5 and lastly i beg you to send me more details in your letters....
Beethoven to his Immortal Beloved. To this day we do not know for certain who she was.
My angel my all my own self only a few words today and that too with pencil (with yours) only till tomorrow is my lodging definitely be fixed. What abnonimable waste of time in such things - Why this deep grief when necessity speaks ? can our love endure except through sacrifices, through not demanding everything? Canst thou change it thou are not wholly mine and I not entirely thine?, Oh God, look into beautiful Nature and compose your mind to the ineveitable Love demands everything and is quite right so it is for me with you for you with me only you foget so easily that i must live for you and for me were we quite united you would notice this panful feeling as little as i should my bosom is full to tell you much there are moments when i find that speech is nothing at all..
To see those eyes I prize above mine ownDart favors on another—And those sweet lips (yielding immortal nectar)Be gently press'd by any but myself—Think, think Francesca, what a cursed thingIt were beyond expression! J.
(John Keats)
To his Fanny Brawne
My sweet Girl—Your Letter gave me more delight than any thing in the world but yourself could do; indeed I am almost astonished that any absent one should have that luxurious power over my senses which I feel. Even when I am not thinking of you I receive your influence and a tenderer nature stealing upon me. All my thoughts, my unhappiest days and nights have I find not at all cured me of my love of Beauty, but made it so intense that I am miserable that you are not with me: or rather breathe in that dull sort of patience that cannot be called Life.
I never knew before, what such a love as you have made me feel, was; I did not believe in it; my Fancy was afraid of it, lest it should burn me up. But if you will fully love me, though there may be some fire, 'twill not be more than we can bear when moistened and bedewed with Pleasures.
You mention 'horrid people' and ask me whether it depend upon them whether I see you again. Do understand me, my love, in this. I have so much of you in my heart that I must turn Mentor when I see a chance of harm befalling you. I would never see any thing but Pleasure in your eyes, love on your lips, and Happiness in your steps. I would wish to see you among those amusements suitable to your inclinations and spirits; so that our loves might be a delight in the midst of Pleasures agreeable enough, rather than a resource from vexations and cares. But I doubt much, in case of the worst, whether I shall be philosopher enough to follow my own Lessons: if I saw my resolution give you a pain I could not.
Why may I not speak of your Beauty, since without that I could never have lov'd you? I cannot conceive any beginning of such love as I have for you but Beauty. There may be a sort of love for which, without the least sneer at it, I have the highest respect and can admire it in others: but it has not the richness, the bloom, the full form, the enchantment of love after my own heart. So let me speak of your Beauty, though to my own endangering; if you could be so cruel to me as to try elsewhere its Power...
You say you are afraid I shall think you do not love me—in saying this you make me ache the more to be near you. I am at the diligent use of my faculties here, I do not pass a day without sprawling some blank verse or tagging some rhymes; and here I must confess, that, (since I am on that subject,) I love you the more in that I believe you have liked me for my own sake and for nothing else. I have met with women whom I really think would like to be married to a Poem and to be given away by a Novel. I have seen your Comet, and only wish it was a sign that poor Rice would get well whose illness makes him rather a melancholy companion: and the more so as so to conquer his feelings and hide them from me, with a forc'd Pun.
I kiss'd your Writing over in the hope you had indulg'd me by leaving a trace of honey. What was your dream? Tell it me and I will tell you the interpretation threreof.
Ever yours, my love!
Finally, for now, my favourite couple Elizabeth Barret and Robert Browning.
"The courtship and marriage between
Robert Browning and Elizabeth were carried out secretly. Six years his elder and an invalid, she could not believe that the vigorous and worldly Browning really loved her as much as he professed to, and her doubts are expressed in the
Sonnets from the Portuguese, which she wrote over the next two years. Love conquered all, however, and, after a private marriage at St. Marylebone Parish Church, Browning imitated his hero
Shelley by spiriting his beloved off to Italy in August 1846, which became her home almost continuously until her death. ...
As Elizabeth had inherited some money of her own, the couple were reasonably comfortable in Italy, and their relationship together was content. The Brownings were well respected in Italy and they would be asked for autographs or stopped by people because of their celebrity. Elizabeth grew stronger, and, in 1849, at the age of 43, she gave birth to a son, Robert Wiedemann Barrett Browning, whom they called Pen...
Several Browning critics have suggested that the poet decided that he was an “objective poet” and then sought out a “subjective poet” in the hope that dialogue with her would enable him to be more successful...
At her husband's insistence, the second edition of Elizabeth’s Poems included her love sonnets; these increased her popularity and high critical regard so that she cemented her position as favourite Victorian poetess."
"Although her poetry, letters, and diaries reveal a profound ambivalence about love, Elizabeth Barrett Browning seems, despite some difficulties, to have enjoyed a very happy relationship with her husband,
Robert Browning. According to Kathleen Blake, Robert Browning was practically "a one-man refutation of virtually all of her anxieties."
Robert Browning was emphatically unlike the doctors humorously described by E.B.B., who carried the inkstand out of her room as part of the cure because if poetry involves malady for men, "for women it was incompatible with any common show of health under any circumstances".
Their relationship began in his admiring her poetry. His audacious first letter moves from loving her books to loving her. E.B.B. was alarmed by his "extravagance", and worried that he might substitute lioness-worship for real feeling, with something of Aurora Leigh's distaste for merely literary adulation.
.. E.B.B. had had previous experience of one-sided affection, as we see in her diary of 1831-3, which concerns her relationship with the Greek scholar H.S. Boyd. For a year her entries calculate the bitter difference between his regard and her own, and she wonders if she can ever hope for reciprocation. In fact she finds her womanly capacity for feeling a liability and wishes she could feel less — "I am not of a cold nature, & cannot bear to be treated coldly. When cold water is thrown upon a hot iron, the iron hisses. I wish that water wd. make that iron as cold as self."
..Besides being hurt in love, E.B.B. also felt she had done hurt, and this too made her cautious. She felt that she had actually caused her brother's death by wanting him to be with her, and done violence to a tight-knit family. She fearfully questioned what sort of a gift her heart would make to Browning since she was not young (thirty-eight), six years an invalid, broken-spirited in guilt and sorrow.
So for a long time Robert Browning had to accede to her formula, urged in the Sonnets, that he loved her for nothing at all, just because he loved her. But once he had overcome her mistrust, he began to campaign for his right to include her poetic gift among his reasons for being smitten: "How can I put your poetry away from you?" She must keep up writing her writing for "Ba herself to be quite Ba". He worried that she might scant her own work in order to help him and write him letters, for her knew how self-sacrificing affection could make her. She answered that she felt better and stronger for his interest and did not grow so idle as he thought. She was composing the Sonnets during their letter-writing courtship, and she also outlined her rough idea for Aurora Leigh. Browning comments that he would like to undertake something as ambitious himself, and "you can do it, I know and am sure."
Browning was a helpful critic from the beginning, for instance, from his earliest letter commenting on her translation of Prometheus Bound. But E.B.B. was not easily influenced and often stood up for her originality even when people thought it amounted to eccentricity, as they more than once did. On her controversial Poems Before Congress she says, "I never wrote to please any of you, not even to please my own husband". ..Browning's benefit to her work went beyond encouragement, criticism and provision of a model to study but not to copy. E.B.B. had felt the limits of her own experience as limits to her poetry. She had known a filial and invalid exaggeration of feminine enclosure. Browning gave her Italy, gave her travel, gave her experience. Her letters in marriage run over with the high spirits of a wanderer and observer
Besides expanding her material, Browning also restored her to her own aesthetic. E.B.B.'s ars poetica stressed self-expression, made it a first principle to "looke in thine heart, and write"
You will only expect a few words, what will those be?
When the heart is full it may run over, but the real
fullness stays within.
You asked me yesterday "if I should repent?"
Yes, my own Ba, I could with all the past were
to do over again, that in it I might somewhat
more, never so little more, conform in the outward
homage, to the inward feeling, What I have professed,
(for I have performed nothing) seems to fall short
of what my first love required even, and when I think
of this moment's love...I could repent, as I say.
Words can never tell you, however, form them,
transform them anyway, how perfectly dear you
are to me, perfectly dear to my heart and soul.
I look back, and in every one point, every word
and gesture, every letter, every silence, you have
been entirely perfect to me, I would not change
one word, one look.
My hope and aim are to preserve this love, not to
fall from it, for which I trust to God who procured
it for me, and doubtless can preserve it.
Enough now, my dearest, dearest, own Ba!
You have
given me the highest, completest proof of love that
ever one human being gave another.
I am all gratitude,
and all pride (under the proper feeling which ascribes
pride to the right source) all pride that my life has
been so crowned by you.
God bless you prays your very own R.
"As we study literature, Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning appear as one of most romantic literary couple from the Victorian period. After reading her poems for the first time, Robert wrote to her: "I love your verses with all my heart, dear Miss Barrett--I do, as I say, love these verses with all my heart."With that first meeting of hearts and minds, a love affair would blossom between the two. Elizabeth told Mrs. Martin that she was "getting deeper and deeper into correspondence with Robert Browning, poet and mystic; and we are growing to be the truest of friends." During the 20 months of their courtship, the couple exchanged nearly 600 letters. But what is love without obstacles and hardships? As
Frederic Kenyon writes, "Mr. Browning knew that he was asking to be allowed to take charge of an invalid's life—believed indeed that she was even worse than was really the case, and that she was hopelessly incapacitated from ever standing on her feet—-but was sure enough of his love to regard that as no obstacle."The Bonds of MarriageTheir subsequent marriage was a secret matter, taking place on September 12, 1846, at Marylebone Church. Most of her family members eventually accepted the match, but her father disowned her, would not open her letters, and refused to see her. Elizabeth stood by her husband, and she credited him for saving her life. She wrote to Mrs. Martin: "I admire such qualities as he has—-fortitude, integrity. I loved him for his courage in adverse circumstances which were yet felt by him more literally than I could feel them. Always he has had the greatest power over my heart, because I am of those weak women who reverence strong men."Out of their courtship and those early days of marriage came an outpouring of poetic expression. Elizabeth finally gave her little packet of sonnets to her husband, who could not keep them to himself. "I dared not," he said, "reserve to myself the finest sonnets written in any language since Shakespeare's." The collection finally appeared in 1850 as "Sonnets from the Portuguese."
Kenyon writes, "With the single exception of Rossetti, no modern English poet has written of love with such genius, such beauty, and such sincerity, as the two who gave the most beautiful example of it in their own lives."The Brownings lived in Italy for the next 15 years of their lives, until Elizabeth died in Robert's arms on June 29, 1861. It was while they were living there in Italy that they both wrote some of their most memorable poems. "
