Not "Death" but "Love"

It’s February and who says people with disabilities should be left out in the ‘love’ month? Not at all….

I thought once how Theocritus had sung

Of the sweet years, the dear and wished-for years,

Who each one in a gracious hand appears

To bear a gift for mortals, old or young:

And, as I mused it in his antique tongue,

I saw, in gradual vision through my tears,

The sweet, sad years, the melancholy years,

Those of my own life, who by turns had flung

A shadow across me.  Straightway I was ’ware,

So weeping, how a mystic Shape did move

Behind me, and drew me backward by the hair;

And a voice said in mastery, while I strove,—

“Guess now who holds thee!”—“Death,” I said, But, there,

The silver answer rang, “Not Death, but Love.” 

Elizabeth Barrett Browning

Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806-1861) is now best remembered for her "Sonnets from the Portuguese," a cycle of sonnets during her courtship with Robert Browning. In fact however, she was an accomplished poet before she met Browning. Most of her poems were not about romantic love. They were topical poems about political issues such as child labor, slavery and the Italian national cause. Elizabeth Barrett was a "hopeless" invalid and recluse, six years older than Robert Browning. They were happily married and had a son. The fame of the poets, and the fairy-tale story of the girl who was thought to be doomed to be an old maid, rescued from a loveless existence and brought back to life and the world by a gallant suitor, kindled the imagination of the public.