How Do I Love Thee? (Sonnet 43)

Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s “How Do I Love Thee? (Sonnet 43)” was published in 1850 in Sonnets from the Portuguese, her collection of interrelated sonnets dedicated to her husband of four years, fellow poet Robert Browning. The poem has become a template for romantic poems that celebrate a love that is both passionate and enduring.

Although sometimes dismissed as a sentimental celebration of unconditional love, the poem works through a debate over the conflict between the heart and the soul, specifically the purpose and meaning of earthly love set against the wide promise of God’s transcendent spiritual love. The sonnet, grounded in Browning’s Protestant faith, reconciles the hungers of the human heart with the yearnings of the Christian soul. The poem established Browning’s reputation as a Romantic poet gifted in the lyrical expression of the power of love. This was unique (and controversial) for her era, High Victorian England, as these poems unapologetically reflected the yearnings and passions of a spirited and empowered woman.

Poet Biography

On March 6, 1806, Elizabeth Moulton-Barrett was born at Cohnadatia Hall, an estate near Durham in northeastern England. Browning was one of 12 children born to privilege, as her father owned a sugar plantation in Jamaica. Browning never received formal education, but early on she was a voracious reader, ransacking her father’s massive library. She read most of the writers of Antiquity (she completed a translation of several books of Homer’s Odyssey when she was only eight). She relished Shakespeare and wrote a volume of original poems modeled after his sonnets when she was only 10. Profoundly religious, she taught herself Hebrew to better ground her study of Judeo-Christian wisdom literature. In her mid-teens, however, she suffered a near-fatal lung infection and, just months later, a dramatic fall from a horse that nearly crippled her. She was treated, as was the custom, with large doses of morphine, which would become a lifelong addiction.

She began writing poetry in earnest in her 20s. Her father, a fiercely protective and dictatorial presence, kept his gifted daughter under his control—especially after his business collapsed in the Panic of 1837, and the family sold their estate and relocated to London. When her much beloved brother drowned in 1839, Browning became a recluse, devoting herself to the craft of poetry. In 1844, her collection Poems appeared and earned the attention of an emerging London poet named Robert Browning. Touched by the lyric grace and deftly sculptured lines, he corresponded with her, one poet to another, in letters that quickly became more and more emotional in nature.

When Browning’s father tried to interdict the budding romance and threatened to sever all communication with his daughter, the two poets married in secret in 1846 and moved to Florence, Italy. There, she flourished and became a national literary figure upon the publication of Sonnets from the Portuguese, which chronicled in a cycle of 44 sonnets her own extraordinary love story (initially fearful over censorship issues given the poems’ frank treatment of passion, the publishers suggested listing Browning as the translator of these anonymous poems from their original language). When William Wordsworth, the iconic architect of the Romantic movement, died in 1850, Browning was widely considered Wordsworth’s successor as England’s Poet Laureate. She was the first woman considered in more than three centuries, a title a woman would not hold in Britain until 2009.

Despite her continuing health issues, Browning enjoyed more than 17 years of marriage with Robert, including the birth of a son. She continued to publish, most notably Aurora Leigh (1856), a blank verse novel about the coming-of-age of a woman poet. Sickly since childhood and complicated by her addiction, she died quietly, according to urban legend, in the arms of her loving husband on June 29, 1861, at the age of 55. She was interred in the city’s English Cemetery; her grave, with its elaborate Greek-styled temple marker, became a pilgrim destination that reflects her status even today, based largely on this single poem, as one of the most beloved figures in British Romantic poetry.

Poem Text

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.

Browning, Elizabeth Barrett. “How Do I Love Thee? (Sonnet 43)” 1850. Academy of American Poets.

Summary

Browning’s Sonnet 43 eschews dramatic action, character, setting, and story—a speaker rhapsodizes eloquently about the dynamics of love. The premise of the poem is established by the opening challenge: The poet speaks to an unnamed “thee” and proposes to do nothing less than inventory all the ways the poet cherishes this lover. It is at face value a game: to apply reason to love and to pretend that love can be quantified. No names are mentioned, nor are any pronouns gender-specific. Thus, this becomes not a love letter from Elizabeth Barrett Browning to Robert Browning but rather a universal love letter. It is an intriguing challenge the poet sets: Let me count all the ways your love has impacted me and all the ways that I have responded to the generous gift of your love.

Immediately, however, the poet moves away from the conventional idea that the heart is the most reliable measure for the emotions. For the poet, it is the soul that has been reanimated by the experience of love: “I love thee to the depth and breadth and height / My soul can reach (Lines 2-3). The concept of the soul introduces into the poem’s argument the dimension of the supernal. It asks whether love of the earthly cheapens the love of the radiant otherworldly, specifically the love of God and the yearning for heaven posited as the reward awaiting Christians after death. In an argument that borders on heresy, the poet acknowledges this love rivals the yearning for the afterlife and for union with God, that is, the “ends of being and ideal grace” (Line 4).

In Lines 5 and 6, the poet acknowledges the depth of this love and how it sustains the poet in the day-to-day busyness of life. This love, the poet reveals, is not like the epic love stories of Antiquity but rather an extraordinarily ordinary love that is reassuringly there, night or day, “by sun and candle-light” (Line 6). The poet proclaims that this love is given freely as “men strive for right” (Line 7), a critical declaration in a Victorian culture that regarded socio-economic criteria as more important than the urgencies of the heart in establishing socially acceptable marriages (a conflict that Browning herself understood: Her father disinherited her after her elopement).

For the poet, love is akin to the grand ideals for which men strive. The poet loves purely “as they turn from praise” (Line 8), that is, without ego. For the poet, this love offers a long-delayed chance of redemption from the sorrows of childhood and ancient griefs that have long burdened the heart. The poet then infuses this love with the kinetic power of the religious. This love, the poet confesses, has reignited a kind of passion that recalls the reach of a child’s deep and unquestioning love of the saints themselves. However, that love is directed now to a person in real-time rather than to a distant figure in the afterlife.

If that argument edges toward heresy—that is, this love has displaced the faith formerly carried for the saints in heaven and God—the closing premise seeks to reconcile this love with the strength, resilience, and power of a Christian’s love for God. The poet rejects the idea of choosing between love here on earth and the love of things transcendent. Tapping into the rich energy of love does not demand rejecting God. Rather, the poet in the closing lines assesses this love within the frame of God: The poet and this lover will spend eternity together, but only if God chooses to bless their love by gifting them with eternity together: “if God choose / I shall but love thee better after death” (Lines 13-14). God will not just allow this love to defy the limits of time but, under his guidance, will make it even better. The poet argues that the heart’s love confirms God’s omnipotence and, because this love was a gift from God, love actually brings the poet closer to God.