love sonnet

Image: Jen Szeto (@windowofimagination)

Image: Jen Szeto (@windowofimagination)

Read this today. Sublime. Elizabeth Barrett Browning's sonnet Love:

We cannot live, except thus mutually 

We alternate, aware or unaware, 

The reflex act of life: and when we bear 

Our virtue onward most impulsively, 

Most full of invocation, and to be 

Most instantly compellant, certes, there 

We live most life, whoever breathes most air 

And counts his dying years by sun and sea. 

But when a soul, by choice and conscience, doth 

Throw out her full force on another soul,

The conscience and the concentration both 

Make mere life, Love. For Life in perfect whole 

And aim consummated, is Love in sooth,

As nature’s magnet-heat rounds pole with pole.