'Sound Well and Go Well When Spoken'

I used to think that everyone knew it -- “How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.” -- the same way everyone knew “And what is so rare as a day in June?” and “Into the valley of Death / Rode the six hundred.” Of the three, only the second, from James Russell Lowell’s “The Vision of Sir Launfal,” was memorized as a school assignment, in eighth grade English. Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Tennyson were absorbed by osmosis. I don’t remember consciously memorizing those poems, the way I would lines by T.S. Eliot and Allen Tate, but they stick even after sixty years. I’m remembering Browning rather guiltily because June 29 is the anniversary of her death in 1861 and I know little of her work apart from #43 in Sonnets from the Portuguese: “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…