The Romantics - So Glad I Found You

It had been a decade of uncertainty, feeling lost and out of my depth. I’d been riding an emotional roller-coaster that got faster and faster and would not stop. I jumped off, brushed myself down and wondered why I hadn’t done it sooner.

I lived alone, quietly. I had my job, my home, my car and I think I had my sanity, though others might have doubted it, I didn’t question it much. I enjoyed the silence of my own company. There had been too much noise before. I read book after book, Irwin Shaw, Colleen McCullough and Edna O'Brien amongst others. I unpacked the collection of Marshall Cavendish Mind Alive magazines that my father had subscribed to for me, which had remained untouched throughout my teens. I learned a lot from the articles that interested me and took pride in fixing the magazines into the binders that made it into an encyclopaedia.  If I wasn’t reading, I was writing. No television at this time, but I had a radio if I fancied ‘Saturday Night Theatre’ or ‘Play for Today’ and I had my record player.

My English Literature studies were far behind me, but I found myself revisiting the Bronte’s, some Dickens and my favourite stories from Joyce’s Dubliners. From somewhere into this mix came poetry and those poems familiar to me were taking on new meaning, or perhaps I’d missed something  before. It was the poets, the ones we call The Romantics and I latched on to something that I felt I belonged to.  I had (still have, my photo) The Penguin Book of Love Poetry and I read bits of it every day. It probably wasn’t the best poetry to throw myself headlong into. Death, separation and desolation were subjects perhaps best avoided, but difficult to do so when words were reaching out to me, especially those of Byron and Shelley.

I wish I could have been in the party or at least a fly on the wall in the summer of 1816 when Lord Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft (later Shelley), and others were having fun at Villa Diodati by Lake Geneva. It must have been a tremendous storm to keep them indoors for three days, if what I read is true. They wrote horror stories to scare each other, which might have been the beginnings of Mary’s novel, Frankenstein.  I imagine that writing was not their only past-time. Their lives were forever intertwined.  I love to read about their bohemian lifestyle and their freedom, but I wonder, were they really happy?

Somewhere buried in the archives of our house, I will still have the framed poems that once adorned the walls of my house. I liked to do calligraphy, back in the day when my eyes still worked, and one of the first I made for myself was Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Sonnet XLIII, from the Portuguese.

 

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

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 every day’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 the passion put to use

In my old griefs, and with my childhood’s faith.

I love thee with a 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.

 

Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806 - 1861)

 

Thanks for reading, Pam x