Robert and Elizabeth Browning

A secret courtship between two legendary poets

Life in Love

Escape me?
Never---
Beloved!
While I am I, and you are you,
 So long as the world contains us both,
 Me the loving and you the loth
While the one eludes, must the other pursue.
My life is a fault at last, I fear:
 It seems too much like a fate, indeed!
 Though I do my best I shall scarce succeed.
But what if I fail of my purpose here?
It is but to keep the nerves at strain,
 To dry one's eyes and laugh at a fall,
And, baffled, get up and begin again,---
 So the chace takes up one's life ' that's all.
While, look but once from your farthest bound
 At me so deep in the dust and dark,
No sooner the old hope goes to ground
 Than a new one, straight to the self-same mark,
I shape me---
Ever
Removed!


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 Marriage


Their 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.