Today’s Poem: A Man’s Requirements

On her birthday, the surprising wit of Elizabeth Barrett Browning

Richardson’s New London Fashionable Gentleman’s Valentine Writer, or, The Lover’s Own Book, circa 1850 (Wikimedia Commons)

Among many other things we think when we think of the Victorians, we think that there are Victorians who are funny, and Victorians who are not funny. Edward Lear is funny. The Rossettis are not funny. Lewis Carroll: funny. Tennyson: not. And so on. At the same time, we know perfectly well that there are broad categories, and then there are people. And people, as people, are full of surprises.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806–1861), whose birthday we mark today, is a case in point. Knowing her, as many of us do, by way of the passing glance at her poems, we may think we have her pegged. We may think of her as a person of passionate feeling, to the point of being possibly, sometimes, maybe, a little mawkish. The Sonnets From the Portuguese — at least the ones we tend to know — may impress us with their irrepressible fervor.

But those sonnets might not inspire in us a sense of their author as, say, a progenitress of Dorothy Parker or Edna St. Vincent Millay — though Browning’s name has been linked with Millay’s in a crossword clue whose solution is “sonneteers,” and as John Simon has noted, Millay’s “Love Is Not All” may be read as a “negative” of Browning’s famous “How Do I Love Thee?” Even so, by and large, we don’t identify Elizabeth Barrett Browning as a wit. There are funny Victorians, but we don’t generally sort her into their class. 

Elizabeth Barrett Browning by Michele Gordigiani, 1858 (Wikimedia Commons)

Yet here she is, in today’s poem, tossing off a series of gossamer-light common-measure quatrains to make a joke about a man’s capacity for love. The burden of the poem is as slight as its stanzas: Ask a man to love the way a woman does, and he’ll fail. But light as these little quatrains are, they build in ironic momentum as they detail the ways that women love men — or, rather, the ways a man expects to be loved by a woman: wholly, completely, in utter self-abnegation, fixing on the beloved every thought, hope, and prayer, making a god of him. So the speaker commands that her beloved love her. And in return? “I will love thee — half a year — / As a man is able.” 

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A Man’s Requirements

by Elizabeth Barrett Browning

I

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

II

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 granting;
Taking colour from the skies,
   Can Heaven’s truth be wanting?

IV

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

V

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

VI

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

IX

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

X

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

XI

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

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