Poetic License...

Elizabeth Barrett Browning Counts the Ways, Discovers She Has Thirteen Fingers

by Margo Morgan

A year ago on January 10, 1845, young Elizabeth Barrett received "A no off-hand Complimentary letter" from one Robert Browning, declaring--in sentences of no Less than 12-lines-and-208-words, containing a dozen debonair dashes, trickles of trailing ellipses, a horde of hyphenated-descriptors, peppered with inappropriate upper-Case Letters--declaring (in case you've gotten lost in the sentence by now), his love for her verses with all his heart...his wordy message, which, by the time she waded through it, causing the by-then exhausted, out-of-breath, and light-headed Miss Barrett to collapse in a frenzied melange of ardor, confusion, and brain overload, deliriously muttering how this future suitor's letter "threw me into ecstasies."

And then the drama began. Racking her brain to recall this gentleman who, as he alleged, had tried to see her years before but was turned away because she was too unwell, Miss Barrett nevertheless bolted to her desk and penned her now-famous "Sonnet XLIII" (This is Old English, and is commonly pronounced "ex-el-eye-eye-eye.") How do I love thee? Let me count the ways, she mused. Using her long, slender fingers to count, Elizabeth scribbled furiously, pen in mouth for convenience. Gracefully lifting each digit one by one, Miss Barrett began to list the handful of ways Mr. Browning--or at least his letter, for she had yet to meet him--touched her soul.

As Elizabeth herself relayed it: "I started by describing the 1) depth and 2) breadth and 3) height my soul can reach when feeling out of sight. That was three. And I wanted to say I love thee by sun and candle-light. Five. And I love thee freely and purely. Alas, that was one hand. At that point my sensibilities began to overflow and I began to lose count of the ways I loved hee. I love thee with the passion put to use my old griefs, and with my childhood faith. With a love I seemed to lose with my lost saints. Would Robert know what I mean? Would he resonate? Finally, seeing I was quickly running out of fingers, I told him I love thee with the breath, smiles, tears, of all my life!"

"When I proofread my poem," continued Barrett, "I was stunned. I had listed thirteen ways. How can that be? Let me count the fingers. When I was finished, I was startled to see that I indeed had thirteen fingers. It's a tad unsettling to have gone this long thinking I was normal in every way." Miss Barrett subsequently sank into a grave depression, fearing rejection from this man whose words elated her. Who could ever love a woman with thirteen fingers?

Browning, on his part, received Elizabeth's affections with shy pleasure. A bit of a poet himself, he expressed himself under the guise of Any Wife--so as not to appear too eager to the unsuspecting Barrett--and wrote this first line of a rhymed couplet in his later-to-be-titled "Any Wife to Any Husband":

"I have but to be by thee, and thy hand..."

Elizabeth drew much solace from Robert's tender acceptance of her deformity. As we can infer from the headline, love is nicely blind: Elizabeth Barrett is now Elizabeth Barrett Browning. She wears her wedding band on her sixth finger, creating an optical illusion that her hands are commonplace.

Margo Morgan is a nom de plume. So is her name. Pay no attention to any other appellation that appears on this page. Your Hub wanted a legitimate name, so Ms. Morgan chose one randomly from the phone directory. Ms. Morgan is reclusive, and chooses to remain anonymous.