Laura Barber « Tales From the Landing Book Shelves

This week sees the last of our daughter’s primary school career so I am posting The Way Through the Woods by Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936by in honour. She recited this poem at a school poetry recitation competition and I can safely say that we all knew it by heart by the time the event came around. We have Kipling’s poem in Penguin’s Poems by Heart (mentioned previously) which was a very apt title as it happened.

The Way Through the Woods

The Way Through the Woods

They shut the way through the woods
Seventy years ago.
Weather and rain have undone it again,
And now you would never know
There was once a road through the woods
Before they planted the trees.
It is underneath the coppice and heath
And the thin anenomes.
Only the keeper sees
That, where the ring-dove broods,
And the badgers roll at ease,
There was once a road through the woods.

Yet, if you enter the woods
Of a summer evening late,
When the night-air cools on the trout-ringed pools
Where the otter whistles his mate,
(They fear not men in the woods,
because they see so few.)
You will hear the beat of a horse’s feet,
And the swish of a skirt in the dew,
Steadily cantering through
The misty solitudes,
As though they perfectly knew
The old lost road through the woods…
But there is no road through the woods.

I may dig up even more nostalgic pieces for #PoetryinJune this week, so be warned…

Photo Credit: D.J.L. 2012

Sonnet (number XLIII) by Elizabeth Barrett Browning

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

To love and remember

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 everyday’s
Most quiet need, by sun and candlelight.
I love thee freely, as men strive for Right;
I love thee purely, as they turn from Praise.
I love thee with a passion, put to use
In my old griefs, and with my childhood’s faith.
I love thee with the 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.

I did mention yesterday that I was thinking of choosing one of Shakespeare’s sonnet’s before opting for some verses from a play, so today I have indeed given you a sonnet. This one by Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806-1861) was originally written in 1845 and published in 1850 as part of a collection called Sonnets from the Portuguese. I have taken the sonnet from the small but beautifully chosen anthology published by Penguin Classics (2009) and selected by Laura Barber that is pictured above. I think I bought this originally as an ideal travelling companion as it is neat enough to fit in pocket or bag.

Elizabeth Barrett had been writing and translating poetry and essays for several years before she was introduced to her future husband Robert Browning in 1845, who later persuaded her to publish her love sonnets. My first awareness of Barrett Browning had been though the story of the couple’s love affair and elopement which was set against a background of parental disapproval and Barrett Browning’s invalid status. The film The Barretts of Wimpole Street (1934 version) made a great impression on me, as Charles Laughton was so terrifying as Mr Edward Barrett. All this for me, initially overshadowed her values and achievements. She wrote in support of the anti-slavery movement (her family money came from Jamaican plantations) and also of child labour reform legislation. By the time Robert Browning asked to be introduced to her, she was a very well-known and critically acclaimed writer.

If you want to know more about Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s life and work I can recommend a biography by Margaret Forster (1989) and also Lady’s Maid (1990) in which Forster went on to explore the life of Barrett Browning’s devoted maid Lily Wilson. For something more unusual, but well worth reading try Virginia Woolf’s Flush: a biography (1933) told from the point of view of Barrett Browning’s pet dog which was given to Elizabeth by the writer Mary Russell Mitford. Finally, I have discovered that there is a Browning Society which promotes and discusses the work of both Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning.