This week’s poem is about love, and it is Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s “Sonnet from the Portuguese XIV”.

But love me for love’s sake, that evermore
Thou may’st love on, through love’s eternity.
Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806—1861)

Poem 296. Sonnets from the Portuguese XIV

If thou must love me, let it be for nought
Except for love’s sake only. Do not say
‘I love her for her smile … her look … her way
Of speaking gently, … for a trick of thought
That falls in well with mine, and certes brought
A sense of pleasant ease on such a day’—
For these things in themselves, Belovèd, may
Be changed, or change for thee,—and love, so wrought,
May be unwrought so. Neither love me for
Thine own dear pity’s wiping my cheeks dry,—
A creature might forget to weep, who bore
Thy comfort long, and lose thy love thereby!
But love me for love’s sake, that evermore
Thou may’st love on, through love’s eternity.

In fourteen lines, Elizabeth Browning beseeches her lover (Robert Browning, we assume) to love her purely for love’s sake, rather than any specific physical trait, mannerism or behaviour.

She begins by saying quite directly not to love her for anything other than love itself—not for her smile, her physical beauty, her speech, and not for her patterns of thought even if they match those of her lover very closely. These things can change in time either in reality or in a person’s perceptions of another, so that a love based upon them may wither and she considers that they are therefore unsuitable reasons for loving another. She develops this theme by barring love for pity’s sake—she believes that love born of pity may also fade once pity gives way to another emotion. The last two lines command her lover to love only “for love’s sake” because love itself is eternal and infinite and cannot come to an end.

This reminds me of the chorus from “Love Me For a Reason”:

Don’t love me for fun, girl
Let me be the one, girl
Love me for a reason
Let the reason be love
Love Me For a Reason, David Jones Jr, Johnny Bristol and Wade Brown.

It also recalls St. Paul’s First Letter to the Corinthians:

Love never fails. But where there are prophecies, they will cease; where there are tongues, they will be stilled; where there is knowledge, it will pass away.
1 Corinthians 13:8

I like this sonnet because it explores the nature of love and suggests that only the purest form will last the ages.

Love Me For Love’s Sake

Poem 296. Sonnets from the Portuguese XIV

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