
When We Two Parted (1808), st. 4.
When We Two Parted (1808), st. 4.
No. LXIII
Sonnets from the Portuguese (1850)
Context: 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 everyday'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.
Source: To the Memory of My Beloved, the Author, Mr. William Shakespeare (1618), Lines 27 - 33
Poems by Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell (1846), To Cowper (1842)
Context: p>All for myself the sigh would swell,
The tear of anguish start;
I little knew what wilder woe
Had filled the Poet's heart.I did not know the nights of gloom,
The days of misery;
The long, long years of dark despair,
That crushed and tortured thee.</p
“As two floating planks meet and part on the sea,
O friend! so I met and then drifted from thee.”
"The Brief Chance Encounter", p. 196.
Poetry of the Orient, 1865 edition
“We meet thee, like a pleasant thought,
When such are wanted.”
To the Daisy.
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)
Attributed in Dag Hammarskjöld, Markings, tr. Leif Sjoberg and W. H. Auden (1964), journal entry for (October 1, 1957).