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In her “Sonnets from the Portuguese,” Elizabeth Barrett Browning writes “the soul’s Rialto hath its merchandise.”

Sonnets from the Portuguese used form and meter with an ease and grace that I envied.

Set to selections from Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s “Sonnets From the Portuguese,” these songs are strikingly dissonant and violent — as in the first sonnet’s image of Love seizing the poet by the hair — but they generally resolve to traditional harmonies.

So, AVB, with apologies to EBB, who did after all publish her poem in a collection called Sonnets from the Portuguese, how does WHL love thee?

One naturally thinks of them as companion pictures to Mrs. Browning’s “Sonnets from the Portuguese.”