Both Millay(sonnet29) and Browning(sonnet43) have experienced true love and have shown what it is by defining it in relation to life

and nature. Explore how this true love is conveyed to us in the two sonnets.

Section I (Lines 1-8) Summary Get out the microscope, because were going through this poem line -by-line. Line 1 How do I love thee? Let me count the ways. The speaker poses the question that's going to drive the entire poem: how does she love "thee," the man she loves? She decides to count the ways in which she loves him throughout the rest of the poem. (For an explanation of why we think the speaker is female and the beloved is male, see the "Speaker" section.) Now, this all might seem pretty straightforward after all, the line is simply "How do I love thee? Let me count the ways." But we'd like to point out that deciding to "count" the ways you love someone does seem a bit, well, calculating. The speaker's initial decision to count types of love is intriguing. For her, love is best expressed by making a list, and that just seems weird to us. However, since she wants to "count the ways" and she seems to have forgotten the actual numbers we'll try to help her out by putting them back in! As you read on, we'll keep a count of Ways of Loving. Lines 2-4 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. The speaker describes her love using a spatial metaphor: her love extends to the "depth" and "breadth" and "height" that her soul can "reach." It's interesting to think of love as a threedimensional substance filling the container of her soul. Notice also that her love extends exactly as far as her soul in all directions maybe her love and her soul are the same thing. Cool, eh? The next part of the sonnet is a little bit trickier: "when feeling out of sight / For the ends of Being and ideal Grace" (3-4). This is an ambiguous passage, but we like to interpret this as the

speaker "feeling for" the edges of her "Being" that are just "out of sight" just the way that you try to feel for a glass of water on your bedside table that's just beyond your peripheral vision. As she's trying to feel the full extent of her soul, she realizes that she loves "thee" in every part of it to the "depth and breadth and height" that it reaches. To put it another way, when the speaker is trying to figure out ("feeling") how far her soul (her "Being") extends in the world, she realizes that her love for the beloved extends just as far (that's all the "depth and breadth and height" stuff in line 3). Notice that if you put the "feeling" together with the "reach," this metaphor is very reliant on images of touch. We get the sense that the speaker is stretching out with both arms, trying to explain how broad and wide and deep her love is. It's a much more poetic version of saying "I love you THIS MUCH" with your arms flung wide. Anyway, this spatial love is the first of the "ways" of loving that the speaker lists.

Lines 5-6 I love thee to the level of everyday's Most quiet need, by sun and candle-light. The poem becomes much more grounded and down-to-earth in the description of the next way to love. As the speaker explains, she loves her beloved "to the level of everyday's / most quiet need." This is a reminder that, even though she loves him with a passionate, abstract intensity (see lines 2-4), she also loves him in a regular, day-to-day way. Even though it's not directly described, we get a sense of everyday domestic living here the reality of wanting to be with someone all the time in a low-stakes kind of way. This is a "married-and-hanging-out-watching-TV-on-the-couch-each-night" kind of love, instead of a "Romeo-and-Juliet-are-going-to-die-tomorrow" kind. It's important, however, that this doesn't mean the love is any less significant. The everyday "need" for love may be "quiet," but it's definitely there. The speaker completes the description of this everyday love with two images of light: "by sun and candle-light." Basically, this is just a way of saying "in the day and at night," but it also reminds us that the lovers are looking at each other all the time and that the speaker here loves her beloved no matter what light she sees him in. If you're counting, this everyday love is the second of the "ways" of loving that the speaker lists.

Lines 7-8 I love thee freely, as men strive for Right; I love thee purely, as they turn from Praise. The first half of each of these lines is extremely simple: "I love thee freely" and "I love thee purely." Those seem like pretty good ways to love after all, you wouldn't want love to be forced or impure, right? The tricky part comes in the second half of each line, where the speaker describes something else that's supposed to happen "freely" or "purely." First, the speaker tells us, "I love thee freely, as men strive for Right" (7). If you turn this around for a moment, the speaker is implying that "men strive for Right" in a "free" way. That is, trying to be morally good isn't something anyone has to do it's something they choose to do of their own free will. Isn't it? Well, in a way it is, because everything we do is a choice, but in another way, people try to do the right thing because they think they ought to. So, if the speaker's love is just as "free" as being ethically good, then maybe it's not quite as free as we thought. Maybe it's something she feels she has to do, even when she doesn't want to. The poem is getting edgy! Next, the speaker tells us, "I love thee purely, as they turn from Praise." That is, her love is "pure" in the way that being modest and refusing everyone else's admiration is pure. Perhaps the speaker is also implying that she's not proclaiming her love in order to be applauded by her readers. She's not seeking praise for writing a great poem about love; she loves without wanting any reward or commendation. If you're counting, "freely" is the third way and "purely" is the fourth way of loving that the speaker lists. Lines 9-10 I love thee with the passion put to use In my old griefs, and with my childhood's faith. First we'll need to explain what "old griefs" are. Think of an incident in your past that you still feel really angry about. Consider the intensity of your feelings when you think about this incident you know, the sort of thing that absolutely has you gnashing your teeth and spitting and swearing and absolutely seething with bitter fury. No, no, we're not thinking of any particular personal example...*ahem*. Where were we? Oh, right, "old griefs." Incidents like that one the teeth-gnashing one are your "old griefs." Now imagine if you could use all the "passion" and intensity of that bitter feeling and convert it somehow into love. That's what the speaker is talking about.

It's a little like when people say "you could power this whole city with the energy he spends playing Mario Kart on his new Wii." The speaker of this poem is saying "I love you with all the energy I used to spend being bitter about stuff in my past." Of course, what we worry about is: how effectively is this bitterness being converted into love, anyway? Maybe some of the bitterness on one side of the metaphor is, well, oozing over onto the other side. This poem is starting to get interesting! The speaker also claims that she loves her beloved "with my childhood's faith." We're going to have to do another thought exercise to explain this one Remember how thoroughly you believed in stuff when you were a kid? You know, stuff, like the Tooth Fairy and Santa Claus, and your mom's ability to fix anything you broke, and your dad's ability to answer any question, and the way you believed that adults mostly knew what they were doing and everybody followed the rules. That's your "childhood's faith." Now imagine if you could divert that kind of energy into loving someone. Yes, our speaker loves her beloved in that way, too. Of course, just as the previous metaphor seems to inject an odd kind of bitterness and anger into the world of love, this metaphor seems to bring with it connotations of navet and simplicity. If you're counting, the "old griefs" way of loving is number five, and the "childhood's faith" way is number six. Lines 11-12 I love thee with a love I seemed to lose With my lost saints The "lost saints" aren't misplaced Catholic statues. Instead, they're the people you used to believe in that you don't have faith in anymore. You know, heroes who let you down, whether they're famous people (Roger Clemens? Britney Spears?) or just friends or family members who you once had a really high opinion of and now, well, they seem merely human. So this kind of loving is also about faith: what if you could take the love you had for your heroes, before you were disillusioned about them, and channel that into loving someone? That's the kind of love the speaker is describing here.This is the seventh kind of love mentioned in the poem, but who's counting? Lines 12-13 I love thee with the breath, Smiles, tears, of all my life!

The speaker tells us that she loves her beloved "with the breath, / Smiles, tears of all my life!" (12-13). What does that mean? Well, obviously she loves him with every smile that crosses her face her happiness is always an expression of loving him, even when she's smiling about something else. But it's not just her happy moments that go into loving him; it's the sad ones, too (the "tears") and even the regular, unemotional moments the continuous "breath" of life. Even breathing in and out seems to be a way of loving in this poem. If you count "breath," "smiles," and "tears" separately, these are ways number eight, nine, and ten of loving described in the poem.

Lines 13-14 and, if God choose, I shall but love thee better after death. Now that the speaker has claimed every single breath she takes is an expression of love for her beloved, what's left? Well, what about the time when she's not breathing? You know, when she's dead? The speaker's final claim is that, if God lets her, she's going to love her beloved even more intensely "after death." Of course, the poem isn't totally clear about whether the speaker or the beloved is the one who's going to die. That's left ambiguous, but it could really be either or both of them the point is that, even in death, this speaker is going to find a new way of loving. We'll just call this "afterlife" way of loving "number eleven," since it's the eleventh and final way to love that appears on the list given in this poem. Love Symbol Analysis In this sonnet, love is everything. Loving the beloved is the way that the speaker actually knows she exists. Trying to list the different types of love that she feels, and to work out the relationships between these different kinds of love, becomes a new way of expressing her affection and admiration for "thee."

Line 1: The speaker begins by posing a question that the entire sonnet will go on to answer: "How do I love thee?" It's interesting that the interrogative word here is "how," rather than "why" or "when." This is not really a rhetorical question, because the speaker does answer it, but it operates in a similar way to rhetorical questions because it introduces the poem and gets the reader thinking. Lines 2-4: The speaker uses a spatial metaphor to describe the extent of her love, comparing her soul to a physical, three-dimensional object in the world. These three lines also introduce a lot of sound play into the sonnet. In line two, three words have a "th" sound, and a fourth word ("height") comes close. These breathy syllables soften the line, making it more difficult to fit it into a traditional iambic pentameter rhythm. In fact, throughout the poem there's an excess of "th" sounds, some of them voiced (like the "th" in "thee") and some of them unvoiced (like the "th" in "depth"). It might be interesting to think about how the two different kinds of "th" sounds fall into patterns in the poem. In lines three and four, the poet uses assonance, repeating long "e" vowel sounds in words like "reach," "feeling," "Being," and "ideal." This repeated long vowel sound adds a brighter, livelier quality to the poem. It also reminds us of what the speaker calls the beloved "thee." There's also an internal rhyme between the word "feeling" in the middle of line three and the word "Being" in the middle of line four. This extra rhyme, along with the rhymes at the ends of the lines, ties the poem together more tightly. Lines 5-6: These are some of the only lines in this poem that actually use concrete imagery "sun and candle-light" and even then, it's only images of different kinds of light, not necessarily definite objects. Even more so than other poems, this is an extremely abstract, vague lyric that seems to take place out of this world. Lines 7-9: These lines use anaphora, beginning with the same phrase, "I love thee," as do lines two, five, and eleven. This parallel structure emphasizes that the poem is in many ways a catalog or list of ways of loving, rather than an extended argument or scene like some other poems. Lines 12-14: We can't help but think that claiming you're going to love someone "better after death," whether it's your death or their own, is something of a hyperbole.

Grief and Loss Symbol Analysis

By including references to her feelings of grief, bitterness, and the loss of innocence, the speaker of this poem gives her love a more realistic edge. The love she feels for "thee" is beautiful and intense, but it's also the follow-up to a series of less warm and fuzzy feelings. She's felt disillusionment, loneliness, and anger in the past, and all of these affect the way she feels love in the present. Lines 9-10: These are the first lines in which the speaker mentions her past "griefs." To emphasize the difficult nature of the grief the speaker has felt, these lines use a subtle chiasmus of sounds, using an "f" and an "s" sound and then repeating them in the reverse order: "griefs [...] childhood's faith." In both places, it's actually difficult to read the lines clearly, forcing you to over-enunciate and stress this line more than you naturally would. Lines 11-12: In these lines, the speaker's loss of her "saints" is counterbalanced by the over-thetop alliteration of four initial "l" sounds and the sibilance of five "s" sounds: "I love thee with a love I seemed to lose / With my lost saints" (11-12). How do I love thee? Let me count the ways. (Sonnet 43) Theme of Admiration Love is closely linked with admiration in "How do I love thee?" This is partly because the speaker admires her beloved as well as loving him, but it's also because her love for him seems to have replaced several other kinds of more childish admiration that she had for other people around her. Questions About Admiration 1. Does the speaker of "How do I love thee?" look up to or admire her beloved? Is she placing the beloved on a pedestal? Explain. 2. Who are the speaker's "lost saints" (12)? There are a few good ways to answer this question, so don't feel pressured to come up with the "right" answer. 3. At one point in this poem, the speaker says that she loves with her "childhood's faith" (10). In what or whom did she have faith? Why? Does she still have that same faith? Chew on This Try on an opinion or two, start a debate, or play the devils advocate. Although the speaker of "How do I love thee?" felt admiration for her childhood heroes, her adult love is a transformation of that admiration into affection. (Sonnet 43) Theme of Love Love is a complex, multi-layered and multi-faceted thing in "How do I love thee?" In fact, the entire poem is concerned with finding, describing, and listing different ways of loving someone.

Whether these different ways of loving complement or conflict with one another as they overlap is an open question! Questions About Love 1. How many kinds of love can you identify in "How do I love thee?" 2. Why would it be useful or pleasant to count the ways that you love someone? Does counting the ways you love increase the love (because you're talking about it) or decrease the love (because you're tallying it up as though you were balancing your checkbook)? 3. Which kind of love described in the sonnet seems most familiar to you? Which seems strangest? Why? 4. Are the ways of loving described in the poem all different, or are they simply different ways of talking about the same thing? Explain. Chew on This Try on an opinion or two, start a debate, or play the devils advocate. In "How do I love thee?", the most pure and perfect love possible is created by bringing together many different ways of loving. (Sonnet 43) Theme of Language and Communication "How do I love thee?" is a poem about its own poetic nature, a list and catalog of all the different ways of loving that the speaker experiences. It's very important to this speaker to find phrases, metaphors, and language that can encapsulate her love, so that she can communicate its complexity to the beloved and to the reader. Questions About Language and Communication 1. Who is the intended audience of this sonnet? That is, who do you think is supposed to be reading it and overhearing the speaker list the ways that she loves? Is it "thee"? Is it another group of people? Is it just for herself? 2. Why does listing kinds of love count as performing the act of loving? To put it another way, this sonnet is meant to be a "love poem," something you can give to somebody you've got the hots for to show them how you feel. What's romantic about making a list? 3. Why is the word "love" repeated so frequently in this poem when it would be easy for the poet to find synonyms for it? Why use the same language over and over instead of varying it? Chew on This

Try on an opinion or two, start a debate, or play the devils advocate. In "How do I love thee?", the constant, almost numbing repetition of the word "love" challenges the reader's familiarity with that term, making the word and the feeling strange and new (Sonnet 43) Theme of Identity In "How do I love thee?", the speaker defines herself entirely through the ways in which she loves someone else. Love for another becomes the foundation of her existence. In fact, we think this speaker might go so far as to say "amo, ergo sum" I love, therefore I am. She certainly wouldn't be the speaker of the poem without her love, or her beloved! Questions About Identity 1. What do we actually know about this speaker's personality and characteristics? What do we actually know about her beloved, the person only referred to as "thee"? 2. Why aren't there any markers of gender (his, her, she, he) in this poem? How would the poem change if we could be sure of the speaker's and the beloved's gender? 3. How is the speaker's identity connected to her experience of love? Chew on This Try on an opinion or two, start a debate, or play the devils advocate. The speaker conflates her own existence with her feeling of love; the extent of her soul and the extent of her love are actually the same thing. (Sonnet 43) Theme of Mortality The speaker in "How do I love thee?" is determined to carry her love for "thee" beyond the grave, as long as God lets her. In fact, something as violent and destructive as death will only heighten her passion she hopes! Questions About Mortality 1. Why does this sonnet reference death at all? Why might the speaker be thinking about death in the context of describing the ways that she loves? 2. Whose death is being referred to in the final line of the sonnet the speaker's or the beloved's? Chew on This

Try on an opinion or two, start a debate, or play the devils advocate. By turning to the eventuality of death at the end of the poem, the speaker acknowledges God's ultimate power over her love. (Sonnet 43) Love Quotes How we cite the quotes: (line) How do I love thee? Let me count the ways. (1)

The important question in this poem is not whether the speaker loves her beloved or how much it's how the love itself actually works. This is a poem that will try to dissect love by identifying all the different types of it, charting and listing them. It's almost a scientific taxonomy of love! I love thee to the depth and breadth and height My soul can reach (2-3)

It's interesting that the speaker's love for her beloved is almost exactly the same thing as her own soul. In these lines, the speaker almost creates a diagram showing how her love and her soul interact. If her soul were represented by a circle and her love by another circle, how would the two circles interact? That's right they'd be the same. Whoa. I love thee to the level of everyday's Most quiet need (5-6)

We often think of love as an off-the-charts wild passion, but in these lines Barrett Browning reminds us that it can also be "level." You can think of a thermometer taking the temperature of the speaker's love. It's not that she has a high fever, representing passion; she has a perfect 98.6 degree temperature, representing a healthy affection. I love thee freely, as men strive for Right; I love thee purely, as they turn from Praise. (7-8)

Do men actually try to do good deeds "freely," or do they feel forced to behave ethically? Do men actually act humble and reject extra praises from people in a "pure" way? If the answer to either of these questions is no, then the speaker's love might not be as free or pure as the lines first suggest.

(Sonnet 43) Admiration Quotes How we cite the quotes: (line) 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. (2-4)

The kind of love described in this passage almost sounds more like admiration and esteem loving someone to the greatest "height" that your soul can go. I love thee with a love I seemed to lose With my lost saints (11-12)

The speaker's love for "thee" is the kind of love she had for her childhood heroes and other people she admired. Either she has lost these people because they died, or she's been disillusioned about them. (Sonnet 43) Language and Communication Quotes How we cite the quotes: (line) How do I love thee? Let me count the ways. (1)

This poem almost has a topic sentence the speaker explains her project, counting ways that she loves, in the first line. The ability to list, articulate, and communicate these different kinds of love is actually part of the way that she loves, which might make the sonnet itself one of the "ways" of loving! I love thee with the breath, Smiles, tears, of all my life! (12-13)

Every act that the speaker takes in her life every smile, every tear, every inhale and exhale communicates her love for "thee" to the world. (Sonnet 43) Identity Quotes How we cite the quotes: (line)

How do I love thee? (1)

In this sonnet, the speaker establishes her own identity by thinking about the relationship that she has with her beloved. By asking "How do I love thee?" she also asks "Who am I and what kind of love do I feel?" I love thee with the passion put to use In my old griefs, and with my childhood's faith. (10-11)

In these lines, the speaker hints at other aspects of her personality besides her love for "thee." She has "old griefs," things in her past that she's bitter about. She's also separated from the innocent faith in the world that she was able to feel as a child. All this suggests that she's a bit more mature and jaded than you might expect the speaker of a love poem to be. if God choose (13)

Throughout this poem, the speaker seems all-powerful, conquering everything around her with her love. However, at the very end of the poem, she admits that there are limits to her power: she will only be able to keep loving "thee" after death if God allows her to do so. (Sonnet 43) Mortality Quotes How we cite the quotes: (line) if God choose, I shall but love thee better after death. (13-14)

God's power over the body and soul in death seems to be the only thing that the speaker of this sonnet acknowledges as stronger than the love she has for her beloved. Still, she hopes that her love will only grow in the afterlife, instead of fading or changing. (Sonnet 43) Questions Bring on the tough stuff - theres not just one right answer. 1. How would the poem be different if the opening line was "Why do I love thee?" 2. How many ways of loving does the speaker identify? Do these ways of loving overlap, conflict, or complement one another? Explain.

3. Why do you think "How do I love thee?" is such a popular love poem? What features of the sonnet might make it more accessible or universal than other love poetry? 4. How would the poem affect readers differently if the beloved was referred to as "you" instead of as "thee"? What if the beloved was given a first name Romeo, Robert, etc.? How do I love thee? Let me count the ways. (Sonnet 43) Resources Best of the Web Videos "How Do I Love Thee?" Music Video This music video combines a song version of Barrett Browning's sonnet with a montage of photos, some of the author, some of other images. "How Do I Love Thee?" Amateur Mini-Documentary This video gives some biographical information and background on Elizabeth Barrett Browning and her famous poem. Audios Barry Drogin's Duet of "How Do I Love Thee?" Composer Barry Drogin's musical version of the sonnet, turning it into a duet. Images Traquair Illustration for Sonnet 43 This 1897 image by artist Phoebe Anna Traquair celebrates Elizabeth Barrett Browning's most famous sonnet by illuminating it in the style of a medieval manuscript. Historical Documents Illuminated Edition of Sonnets from the Portuguese This illuminated edition of Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Sonnets from the Portuguese was made in the "Arts and Crafts" style by Phoebe Anna Traquair between 1892-1897. You can view all the illustrations and illuminations at this free website, hosted by the National Library of Scotland. Books Sonnets from the Portuguese at Project Gutenberg The complete text of Elizabeth Barrett Browning's famous sonnet sequence, available for download or online reading.

Sonnets from the Portuguese at Poet's Corner Full text of all the sonnets, indexed by number and first line, hosted by poetscorner.org. The Complete Sonnets from the Portuguese The complete text of all 44 of Elizabeth Barrett Browning's original Sonnets from the Portuguese, available online, hosted by Amherst College. Websites Biography of Elizabeth Barrett Browning This biography from poets.org gives useful background information on Barrett Browning and links to the full text of some of her other poems. Materials on Elizabeth Barrett Browning from The Victorian Web This website provides a collection of references related to Barrett Browning, including a biography, list of works, criticism of some of her poetry, and other information.