I.

SONNET 43 (HOW DO I LOVE THEE) LET ME COUNT THE WAYS

By: ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING

BACKGROUND ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Elizabeth Barrett Browning was an English poet of the Victorian era and the
Romantic Movement, popular in Britain and the United States during her lifetime.
Born in County Durham, the eldest of 12 children, Elizabeth Barrett wrote poetry
from the age of eleven. 

SONNET 43 (HOW DO I LOVE THEE? LET ME COUNT THE WAYS

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.

INTRODUCTION

'How Do I Love Thee?' is sonnet number 43 taken from Sonnets from the

Portuguese, a book first published in 1850. Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s poem “How Do
I Love Thee” or “Sonnet 43” is her most famous poem. She is a well-known Victorian
poet who achieved fame during her lifetime. She influenced numerous British and
American poets, most notably Emily Dickinson. Elizabeth Barrett Browning describes
one speaker’s affection for her husband. She admits to having a dying passion.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning chose this title to give the impression that she had
translated the work from Portuguese and would therefore avoid any controversy. It was
dedicated to her husband, poet Robert Browning.
But the work did cause a stir. For starters, the inspiration behind the work was
Elizabeth's love for the man who had, for all intents and purposes, rescued her from a
 quietly desperate, reclusive lifestyle she led in London, following the accidental death of
her closest brother.

Dominated by her possessive father, Elizabeth spent most of her time alone in an
upstairs room. She was a frail, sick woman who needed opium and laudanum in an effort
to cure her pain.

Her only consolation was poetry, and at this, she was very successful. When
Robert Browning read her work, he was so impressed he wrote asking to meet her.
Following several formal meetings, the two eventually fell in love and decided to
secretly elope to Italy in 1846, despite her father's resistance and anger. He ended up
disinheriting his daughter.
Elizabeth and Robert exchanged hundreds of love letters over the two years from
1845-46. In them, you get a clear idea of just how much they adored one another.
Elizabeth was close to 40 years of age when she broke free from the control of her
father. You can imagine her pent-up strength of feeling and sense of relief. She went on
to give birth to a son and was happily married for 16 years until her death in 1861.

THEME

The theme of Barrett Browning's poem is that true love is an all-consuming passion.

The sonnet’s most prominent theme is love. The speaker’s love is multifaceted and is
compared to her various experiences from life. Her love is initially described as an otherworldly
force that comes from deep within her soul. The speaker then contrasts this image with the
description of a calmer, more mundane love that sustains her on a daily basis. Her love is then
compared to the humble efforts of mankind in wishing to do good for the world without a need to
be praised. Love then takes on a passionate tone once more, as the speaker proceeds to compare
her feelings to the intensity that arises from spirituality and the childlike innocence of believing
in goodness. The sonnet as a whole describes how the love the speaker feels for her husband
consumes her body and soul, and it relays the hope that she can continue to love him even more
once she is gone.

MOOD
“Intense Love”

Sonnet 43 expresses the poet's intense love for her husband-to-be, Robert Browning. So intense
is her love for him, she says, that it rises to the spiritual level (lines 3 and 4). She loves him
freely, without coercion; she loves him purely, without expectation of personal gain.

MORAL
The poem’s meaning is about true love of a wife to his husband. Sonnet 43 is a testament of true
love that is clearly reflected in her writing. Love that even death cannot break is a true and
genuine. Love is the most potent energy that has brought humanity to peace. Love is all that
binds great relationships for both men and women. It’s just an inexplicable emotion that adds
color to one’s life. As a result, we hope that these examples of inspiring English poems about
love would inspire and boost your hearts to love yourself and others unconditionally.

LITERARY ANALYSIS

‘Sonnet 43’ is a romantic poem, written by Elizabeth Barrett Browning. In the poem she is trying
to describe the abstract feeling of love by measuring how much her love means to her. She also
expresses all the different ways of loving someone and she tells us about her thoughts around her
beloved. The tone of the poem is deep, in a loving way.

The poet starts of by saying “How do I love thee? Let me count the ways,” by which she starts of
with a rhetorical question, because there is no ‘reason’ for love. Rather than using “why” she
enforces this meaning. But then she goes on saying that she will count the ways, which is a
contradiction against her first line. In the rest of the poem she is explaining how much she loves.
In the second line she says “I love thee to the depth & breath & height” using normal
measurements for something that cannot be measured. This is a spatial metaphor. In this way she
is trying to illustrate she loves every single piece of him. That there is nothing that she would
change about him.

This is a sonnet and all sonnets have 14 lines where the two last usually have a broader meaning
than the rest of the sonnet. In the final lines she has achieved this by bringing up the subject of
the afterlife – “and, if God choose, I shall but love thee better after death”.
In the sonnet, Barrett Browning repeats “I love thee” over and over again rather than using
different words for love. This is to enforce the already existing knowledge about the strength of
her love, and that what she feels is love, nothing more and nothing less. Also, by repeating it she
is enforcing it on the readers that she loves him and there is nothing else to do about it, nothing
that will make her change her mind. Also in the poem, no gender is implied. She just keeps
saying “Thee” which has a certain formality over it. This is a very powerful key factor to the
poem because she uses no gender markers such as him, her, she, he which makes it possible for
the poem to be read out loud to any gender with any sexual preference.

In the poem, Barrett Browning says “My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight”. This is an
illustration of how much she trusts him. Even though she cannot see the ending of how this love
will end, she trusts him and is willing to reach out in darkness, not knowing what’s coming for
her. She also says “I love thee with the breath, smiles, tears of all my life!” This is implying that
no matter what is going on in her life, whether something horrible happened or it’s just a normal
day, she trusts him to stay by her side and that she will love every minute of it.

Barrett Browning also mentions the sun and candle-light while talking about her love. This line
is one of the only lines where she is using concrete imagery. She is using the image of light being
constant and abstract saying that her love will forever go on but with a sense of mystery. The sun
is also a very well-known image for being strong, powerful, and good. Also, even when you
can’t see the sun, you know it’s there and you know that it will always come back and brighten
up your day. The sun is something human beings can’t live without and this is how Barrett
Browning is illustrating her love. She can’t live without him. By using ‘sun’ she can also link it
to ‘love’, seeing as for her, that is what her love is, strong and passionate. Before that Barrett
Browning says “I love thee to the level of every day’s most quiet need”, implying that she needs
him, even when there is nothing special happening. That she just needs him in her life. Without
him it’s not the same. By the end of the poem, the poet says “and, if God choose, I shall but love
thee better after death.” This is a very dramatic ending to such a romantic poem and might be
seen as a hyperbole. What she’s saying is that if God gave her a choice between her own life and
his, she would choose for him to live and that when she is dead, she can finally love him to the
depth that he deserves, without anything standing in her way. That she could finally pay him
back for all the things he did for her, by giving him her life, for eternity. Not only that, but she
creates the image of their love, being infinite, that it will continue even after death tears them
apart.

When the poet mentions “With my lost Saints” she is referring to those people in her life that she
trusted and loved, which in the end, betrayed her. When she says “Saints” she is referring to the
glorification she put on them, how much she trusted them increasing the power of their betrayal.
By using this in a poem about love she makes the reader think that the person writing this is not
naïve, that she is able to ask questions and not let everything pass her by. She is saying that
people have betrayed her before, and that she has learned from her mistakes and that she is one
hundred percent sure that he will not betray her, that he is ‘The one’. Earlier on, Barrett
Browning says “I love thee purely” meaning that there is no distrust, no judgment in their love.
When something is pure it means that his has no flaws. But by saying this she also raises a
question by which love really can be pure or if this is just a similarity. That it is as close to pure
as possible. Also, in the line “I love thee freely, as men strive for right” she is saying that she
loves him, without expecting anything back. Also that she is willing to fight for him.

In the poem, Barrett Browning is using infrequent rhymes. An example of this is in the line “I
love thee to the depth and breath and height” and the third line “My soul can reach, when feeling
out of sight”, where ‘height’ and ‘sight’ rhymes. This creates a flow to the poem, giving it a
sense of purity and also she might be suggesting a sense of completeness in love. While reading
poems, most people find it calming to (unconsciously) see the rhymes. When they are analyzing
the poem, people will see that she chose her words with care and put a lot of thought into it. This
is a very important key factor to a poem. The word “love”, is repeated frequently in the sonnet,
increasing the message. Also, the fact that she never uses any synonyms for love makes us
realize that what she feels is love. That there is no other words that can be used to describe this,
because love is such an abstract word and also is a very difficult word to describe.

In the end, Barrett Browning achieved what she wanted. She brought out to the world the
tremendous, abstract subject of love, and with great success. She warms up our hearts by
showing her passion to her beloved, how openly and freely she trusts him. After reading this
poem it’s hard to forget it. It also might leave a smile on your face. We are left with the enviable
feeling of love, stuck in our hearts and the belief that love can last, if we fight for it. It’s quite a
magical sonnet, exploring the abstract power of love.
REFERENCE

https://owlcation.com/humanities/Analysis-of-Poem-How-Do-I-Love-Thee-by-Elizabeth-
Barrett-Browning

https://www.gradesaver.com/sonnet-43-how-do-i-love-thee-let-me-count-the-ways/study-guide/
themes

https://englishlanguageliterature.wordpress.com/2011/03/24/model-poetry-response-on-sonnet-
43/