Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Poems of Love and War

The poems Elizabeth Barrett wrote to her husband Robert Browning during their courtship weren’t published until much later as Sonnets from the Portuguese (he called her “my little Portugese”), and they have long been the best-known love poems written in English, including that most famous line, “How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.” For the coming Valentine’s Day holiday we’ve created a new library of E.B.B.’s poems, added a few of them to our collection of classic love poems... and while I was selecting poems for the library, I came across a very powerful poem she wrote in the voice of a mother whose sons were lost to the Italian war of independence — and had to add it to our Poems of War anthology.