Let Me Count the Ways

She was an invalid on Wimpole Street, famous already, kept in a room her father's will had furnished with duty. He, Robert Browning, wrote to her first on 10 January 1845 because he had read the poems. I love your verses with all my heart, dear Miss Barrett. Then, in the same letter: I love you too. It is a startling second sentence. She answered as a poet answers: with thanks, with precision, with the slow permission of someone who has had to ration her life.

They wrote for months before he was allowed up the stairs. The correspondence is not ornamental. They argue lines, Greek, the ethics of a visit. When he comes, the house watches. Edward Moulton-Barrett would not have consented to a marriage. In September 1846 they married at St Marylebone in a small privacy and left for the Continent. Italy was not a honeymoon postcard. It was air, work, a child later, a table at which two writers could sit without asking a father's leave.

During the courtship she wrote the sequence published in 1850 as Sonnets from the Portuguese, Portuguese because that was his name for her, not because the poems are translations. Sonnet 43 is the one fame kept. How do I love thee? Let me count the ways. Schoolrooms have worn the first line smooth. The poem itself is stranger: it counts by depth, by right, by necessity, by the old griefs, and then it risks the sentence after death. Mutuality is the point. She is not a muse. He is not a rescue. They chose each other in sentences before they chose each other in a church.