A Thousand Ships

by Jo Robertson

You’ve heard the stories. You know their names.

Helen of Troy -- whose face launched a thousand ships -- and her lover Paris.

“Helen, thy beauty is to me like those Nicean barks of yore that gently, o’er a perfum’d sea, the weary way-worn wanderer bore to his own native shore.” (Edgar Allan Poe)

Elizabeth Barett, who defied her parents’ wishes and married an up and coming young poet named Robert Browning.

“How do I love these? 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.”

Thomas Moore who, it is told in an apocraphyal story, wrote a love poem to his wife after she contracted smallpox which left her face scarred.

“Believe me if all those endearing young charms, which I gaze on so fondly today, were to change by tomorrow and fleet in my arms, like fairy gifts fading away! Thou wouldst still be adored, as this moment thou art, let thy loveliness fade as it will . . .”

Peter Abelard, who suffered castration for his love of Héloise.

“But if I lose you, what have I left to hope for? Why continue on life's pilgrimage, for which I have no support but you, and none in you save the knowledge that you are alive, now that I am forbidden all other pleasures in you and denied even the joy of your presence which from time to time could restore me to myself?”

Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall, whose love inspired a song and was captured in movies?

“We had it all, just like Bogie and Bacall, starring in our own late, late show, sailing away to Key Largo.”

But what of the others? The unnamed, unknown lovers down through the centuries whose stories and lives have stirred our hearts? Plain, ordinary men and women in the lives they live around us and flashing and flamboyant ones in the books we read.

Benjamin Lewis, who left love notes lying around the house in odd places – inside a book, on the nightstand, on the kitchen window sill, where Mary Elizabeth Burton would find them.

You haven’t heard of the latter couple because they’re my parents, married fifty years when Dad died, but believing their love would transcend the eternities. Every day of their married lives together my father wrote my mother a love note. After her death, while cleaning out her house, we still found them scattered here and there.

Who are YOUR favorite lovers through history, literature, or real life? Here are my three all-time favorite lovers:

1. Rhett Butler and Scarlet O’Hara – because he’s so rakishly desirable and the only man who truly understood her

2. Nancy Regan and Ronald Regan – because I’ve rarely seen a real-life couple in the public eye so devoted to one another

3. Biblical Jacob and Rachel – because he worked seven years for the privilege of marrying Rachael, and then another seven when Laban tricked him into marrying her sister Leah first

Readers, who are YOUR favorite lovers? I'm offerring a $15 Amazon gift certificate to a lucky random commenter. Be sure to say why they're your favorite.