"I love thee with the passion put to use In my old griefs, and with my childhood's faith."

Sonnet 43 (from Sonnets from the Portuguese) by Elizabeth Barrett Browning

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 every day's
Most quiet need, by sun and candle-light.
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.

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Greater minds than mine have applied themselves to disecting this precious poem. I place it here because on this, Valentine's Day, people everywhere are employing poetry for the purposes of expressing what they cannot — from a sugary valentine candy that says "I'm Yours" to a schmaltzy card, loaded with sugar and heavy cream. But when I read EBB's words, they are so — lucid — that it almost boggles the mind that this has become a poem about passionate love.

Rabindranath Tagore on Love and Beauty, Art and Design

"Love gives beauty to everything it touches. Not greed and utility; they produce offices, but not dwelling houses. To be able to love material things, to clothe them with tender grace, and yet not be attached to them, this is a great service. Providence expects that we should make this world our own, and not live in it as though it were a rented tenement. We can only make it our own through some service, and that service is to lend it love and beauty from our soul. Your own experience shows you the difference between the beautiful, the tender, the hospitable, and the mechanically neat and monotonously useful."

I have been thinking a lot about what I do for a living versus what I do with the gifts given to me by God. Out of the soul of Tagore comes a very beautiful and profound illustration, not only of the difference (as I see it) between Art and commercial art, but of the overlaps and extensions of each into each other's space (which of course are not bound by lines at all!).