A Man’s Requirement

Love Poems by Elizabeth Barrett Browning

A Man’s Requirement

Love me Sweet, with all thou art,
Feeling, thinking, seeing;
Love me in the lightest part,
Love me in full being.

Love me with thine open youth
In its frank surrender;
With the vowing of thy mouth,
With its silence tender.

III

Love me with thine azure eyes,
Made for earnest grantings;
Taking colour from the skies,
Can Heaven’s truth be wanting?

Love me with their lids, that fall
Snow-like at first meeting;
Love me with thine heart, that all
Neighbours then see beating.

Love me with thine hand stretched out
Freely — open-minded:
Love me with thy loitering foot, —
Hearing one behind it.

Love me with thy voice, that turns
Sudden faint above me;
Love me with thy blush that burns
When I murmur ‘Love me!’

VII

Love me with thy thinking soul,
Break it to love-sighing;
Love me with thy thoughts that roll
On through living — dying.

VIII

Love me in thy gorgeous airs,
When the world has crowned thee;
Love me, kneeling at thy prayers,
With the angels round thee.

Love me pure, as muses do,
Up the woodlands shady:
Love me gaily, fast and true,
As a winsome lady.

Through all hopes that keep us brave,
Farther off or nigher,
Love me for the house and grave,
And for something higher.

Thus, if thou wilt prove me, Dear,
Woman’s love no fable,
I will love thee — half a year —
As a man is able.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Robert Browning

Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning were a well known couple in Victorian literary circles. A strange match coming from very different backgrounds they eloped to get married after a lengthy exchange of letters to each other. Many of these letters still exist and we publish some of them on our LoveLettersCentral.com site. They later settled in Florence (where their son Robert Wiedemann Barrett was born).

Elizabeth Moulton Barrett (1806-61) was born in the north east of England (County Durham) the eldest of a family of 12. At the age of 32 the family moved from the open countryside to central London (50 Wimpole Street). Although an established and famous poet even before she came into first contact with Robert Browning she wrote her most famous love poems (Sonnets from the Portuguese) some four years after their marriage (see links above). Aurora Leigh (a love story written entirely in verse) written in 1857 was a huge success in many ways establishing Elizabeth Barrett Browning as one of the best writers of romantic love poems of the Victorian era. She was never a strong person and her health grew steadily worse before dying in June 1861. Elizabeth Barrett Browning was buried in Florence, Italy the place where the couple had made their home for many years.

Although Robert Browning (1812-89) is considered as one of our greatest Victorian romantic love poem writers in the view of many people he was never as good as his wife Elizabeth Barrett Browning. A Londoner by birth (his father worked as a clerk in the Bank of England). None of Robert Browning’s early works achieved much success possibly because they were not easy to understand so never sold widely. After his marriage and a lack of success with several works he practically gave up writing to take care of his sickly wife.

After her death Robert Browning again turned back to writing poetry publishing Dramatis Personae (1864) was a huge success which he built on with his greatest work The Ring and the Book (1868). None of his later books sold as well so he continued to live largely in the shadow of his late wife, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, until his death in the cold winter of 1889. Although Robert Browning died in Venice his body was returned to London for burial in Poets Corner in Westminster Abbey.

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