How Do I Love Thee? (Sonnet 43)

"Sonnet 44" by Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1850)

The closing work from the cycle of love poems published as Sonnets from the Portuguese, the poem brings together the idea of two lovers finding their way to a stable relationship. The poem compares this love to a garden that, through the tender and diligent care of her lover, will always flower, season after season. The poem reflects Browning’s belief in the reassuring existence of the love she has found.

"I, being born a woman and distressed" by Edna St. Vincent Millay (1923)

What Browning’s sonnet marginalizes, the body and the senses, Millay makes central. Influenced by the Portuguese cycle, Millay, a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet, echoes Browning’s Petrarchan structure here but infuses the theme of an empowered woman who hymns a committed and reassuring love with an uncompromising and (for the time) shocking celebration of a woman’s sensual hungers. Unlike Browning, Millay tests the tension between what her brain tells her to do (convention) and what her body demands she do.

"Sonnet 131 (I’d sing of Love in such a novel fashion)" by Petrarch (c. 1356)

Perhaps the template for what became the Petrarchan sonnet, this example reveals how Browning followed the rhythmic and rhyming elements of the classic Renaissance sonnet but resisted Petrarch’s desperate emotional emptiness.