Sonnets from the Portuguese 43: How do I love thee? Let me count the ways

Elizabeth Barrett Browning

How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.

I love thee to the depth and breadth and height

My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight

For the ends of being and ideal grace.

I love thee to the level of every day’s

Most quiet need, by sun and candle-light.

I love thee freely, as men strive for right;

I love thee purely, as they turn from praise.

I love thee with the passion put to use

In my old griefs, and with my childhood’s faith.

I love thee with a love I seemed to lose

With my lost saints. I love thee with the breath,

Smiles, tears, of all my life; and, if God choose,

I shall but love thee better after death.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning

Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806-1861) began writing as a young child and grew up to be an enormously popular poet. Her father encouraged her to…

Grade levels

7-9 / Sec. 1-3

10-12 / Sec. 4 & 5 / CEGEP 1

Méira Cook

Adam Father

He wakes up naked and drunk as a bear

on sun-fermented garbage.

Hungover and queasy and riled up by

bees.

Nothing going well today, he moans,

life being short and the craft, ah, long.

Juliane Okot Bitek

Day 62

Unless you believe in the eye of the needle

this kind of poverty will never be about material

it won't be about ragged clothing

or mud huts with broken walls

or river blindness

Tomasz Rózycki

11. Headwinds

When I began to write, I didn’t know

each of my words would bit by bit remove

things from the world and in return leave blank

Octavio Paz

Wind, Water, Stone

for Roger Caillois

Water hollows stone,

wind scatters water,

stone stops the wind.

Water, wind, stone.

Wind carves stone,

#readpoetry

Sonnets from the Portuguese 43: How do I love thee? Let me count the ways

Elizabeth Barrett Browning

Elizabeth Barrett Browning

Méira Cook

Adam Father

Juliane Okot Bitek

Day 62

Tomasz Rózycki

11. Headwinds

Octavio Paz

Wind, Water, Stone

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