ELISABETH & ELISABETH: The Love, in the silence of the woods, when he is with me

ELISABETH SIDDAL-ROSSETTI 1829/1862 > From 1862, for the desire of the husband, the only copy of his poems of love was in the tomb of Elisbeth, a woman who was a model and artist, wife and poet. He was an Italian named Dante Gabriel Rossetti, but seven years later – for economic reasons – he obtained permission to open the grave, recovering the manuscripts of a love still wrapped in the red hair of a woman. Only after 40 years, that the strong-willed woman who had suffered so much in life, she returned to live for us, because his poems told in all the languages ​​of the world the moan of the trees and the silence of the woods.

A SILENT WOOD

O silent wood, I enter thee

With a heart so full of misery

For all the voices from the trees

And the ferns that cling about my knees.

In thy darkest shadow let me sit

When the grey owls about thee flit;

There will I ask of thee a boon,

That I may not faint or die or swoon.

Gazing through the gloom like one

Whose life and hopes are also done,

Frozen like a thing of stone

I sit in thy shadow but not alone.

Can God bring back the day when we two stood

Beneath the clinging trees in that dark wood?

FRAGMENT OF A BALLAD

More than a mile over the earth and the sea

My love without being summoned he returned to me

I remember not the words that he said,

But only of the trees that he was moaning above.

 

ELIZABETH BARRETT-BROWNING 1806/1861> If you go to Florence, I beg you to go to the English Cemetery, because it is in that place that since 1861 is buried Elisabeth, the girl who knew Shakespeare and Dante, the woman that at the age of 32 years he had already published a collection of his poems, the human being capable of love even in defiance of those who were opposed to his feelings. She and her husband – the poet Robert Browning – they continued to write their “we can”, giving himself the joy of a child, in Florence. In that city, in Piazza San Felice, you can also pay a visit to their home, what is now a museum, but where you feel in your heart the words of Elisabeth: “I love you not for what you are, but for what I am when I am with you. ”

HOW DO I LOVE YOU?

How do I love thee? Let me give you a count of all the ways.

I love thee with the depth and breadth

and the elevation of my soul

can reach, when experiencing (hearing) out of bounds

touches the ends of Being and ideal Grace.

I love thee to the sphere of daily necessities,

in daylight and candlelight.

I love thee freely, as men strive for Right;

I love thee purely, as they

shy away from being praised;

I love thee with the passion griefs

and that as a teenager put in the faith;

I love thee with the passion that I thought I had lost

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

Smiles, tears, of all my life! And,

God willing, I still love thee better after death.

THE BEST THING IN THE WORLD

What’s the best thing in the world?

June-rose, by May-dew impearled;

Sweet south-wind, that means no rain;

Truth, not cruel to a friend;

Pleasure, not in haste to end;

Beauty, not self-decked and curled

Till its pride is over-plain;

Love, when, so, you’re loved again.

What’s the best thing in the world?

Something out of it, I think.