Not just a collection of poems written in the same form and genre but a flowing and intimate portrait of love given and received, "Sonnets From the Portuguese" is perhaps poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning's most well-known work. This intimate and evocative publication that transcends meter and rhyme is brought to unique life in this audiobook by Adriel Brandt
The immense honesty, humble gratitude, and deep affection present in this work reveal the profundity not only of the poet's love, but also of the power of the love she received. Barrett Browning, who was disabled early in life by terrible migraines and spinal pain, reveals in her poems how love inspired her to embrace life—love, in her case, received from her husband for whom this collection was written.
Whether you are loved most deeply by a partner, a relative, or a friend, may you know love that empowers you as Barrett Browning was empowered by the love she makes so tangible in these poems.
Why is this male narrator reading intimate poems written by a woman for her spouse? In bringing this profound collection of poems to life, Adriel Brandt lends his soft baritone to perhaps the only place where the male voice is not aggressively dominant; indeed, where it is, maybe, too quiet: a place of humility, sensitivity, and reflective adoration. The longevity and ubiquity of this work speaks to its transcendence of its audience of one, to begin with, and when he revisited the work for this project, Brandt found that Barrett Browning gave voice to what had been uncommunicable in his own soul. What had been a woman's interior adulations, then love letters for a husband, then a publication read by millions, became the poetry of his own condition—once more, and always, personal: an intimate communication of profoundest love.
