Audiobook · read by volunteers
Sonnet 43
Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806–1861)
Read by Alan Davis Drake (1945-2010), Amalor Myrnnyx, Ancilla, Annie Coleman Rothenberg, Claire Goget, David Grimes, Daryl_S, lullabyman, Beth Peat, Glen Hallstrom · 23 chapters · 26 min
About the book
How do I love thee? Let me count the ways. Few lines of English poetry are so well known as the opening of Sonnet 43, the best loved of the poems in Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Sonnets from the Portuguese. In fourteen lines, the speaker measures her love against the breadth of the soul, the daily need of the heart and the passion of past griefs and childhood faith, and finally against something that may last beyond death. This recording gathers twenty-three different readings by LibriVox volunteers, each with its own pace and emphasis. Taken together, they show how a famous poem can still surprise. It is brief, tender and very easy to enjoy again and again.
Introduction
Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806-1861) was among the most celebrated English poets of the Victorian age. She wrote long narrative verse and political poems as well as lyrics, and she lived much of her later life in Italy after her marriage to the poet Robert Browning. Her Sonnets from the Portuguese were published in 1850, and they record, in a sequence of forty-four poems, the growth of love between two writers.
Sonnet 43 is the best known of them all. Its form follows the Petrarchan pattern, with an octave and a sestet, and its first line has become one of the most quoted in the language. The poem moves from the measurable to the immeasurable, using simple words and repeated structures to build a feeling of growing intensity.
Despite the title, the poems are not translations. They are original, and deeply personal.
This is a multi-version recording, a format that LibriVox uses for short poems. Twenty-three volunteers each recorded the poem, and the results are collected here one after another. It was the weekly poetry project for the week of the fourth of February, 2007. The whole lasts about twenty-five minutes. Listening to the sonnet in so many voices is a reminder that a love poem lives in the performance as much as on the page. It makes a fine short listen for any occasion where words of love are wanted, or simply for the pleasure of hearing a familiar masterpiece in many voices.
Public domain
Elizabeth Barrett Browning died in 1861: the work is in the public domain in Switzerland, more than 70 years after the author’s death.
The LibriVox volunteers dedicated this recording to the public domain.
Sources : LibriVox page · Files at the Internet Archive · Original text