A Critical Analysis of How do I love thee?

Let me count the ways

‘How do I love thee? Let me count the ways’ is one of the most famous opening
lines in all of English love poetry. The poem is a famous one – or at least its first
line is – but the poet who wrote it is less famous now as a poet in her own right,
and more familiar as the husband of Robert Browning, whom she courted through
a series of extraordinary love letters in the 1840s. It was not always this way.

Once upon a time, Robert Browning was the struggling obscure poet
and Elizabeth Barrett Browning was the one who, upon Wordsworth’s death in
1850, was considered for the post of Poet Laureate. But after Barrett Browning’s
untimely death in 1861, Robert Browning’s star rose while the posthumous
reputation of his wife declined.

Many people mistakenly attribute the title of the poem to Shakespeare, and even
a notable film, 10 Things I Hate about You – which borrowed its plot loosely from
Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew – used as its ‘Shakespearean’ tagline:
‘How do I loathe thee? Let me count the ways.’

But the poem is not one of Shakespeare’s addressed to the Fair Youth, but rather
a love poem written about Barrett Browning’s own beloved, Robert. The poem
was first published in a sonnet sequence, Sonnets from the Portuguese, in 1850,
though the poems that make up the sequence were written around five years
earlier. It’s a little-known fact that the first ever sonnet sequence in English was
written by a woman, and throughout history the sonnet sequence has tended to
be associated with male poets: Petrarch, Sir Philip Sidney, Shakespeare, George
Meredith. And although Barrett Browning’s title sounds as though she is
translating poems written by some Portuguese sonneteer, that title Sonnets from
the Portuguese was in fact a little in-joke: ‘Portuguese’ was Robert’s affectionate
nickname for Elizabeth, so these sonnets are from her and her alone: sonnets
from Robert’s beloved ‘Portuguese’.
In terms of its form, upon closer analysis we realise that Barrett Browning’s poem
is not even a Shakespearean sonnet but a Petrarchan one,
rhymed abbaabbacdcdcd. She uses anaphora – repetition of the same few words
at the beginning of successive sentences or clauses – to explore, in summary, the
various forms that love can take, and the many ways in which she loves Robert.
Robert is figured as almost Christ-like: he inspires in Elizabeth ‘a love I seemed to
lose / With my lost saints’, as if love for him has taken the place of religious
worship. There is a strong religious vein to the poem: ‘My soul’, ‘my childhood’s
faith’, ‘lost saints’, culminating in the final declaration of hope in the afterlife:
‘and, if God choose, / I shall but love thee better after death.’ After all, ‘I love you’
was a cliché when Barrett Browning took up her pen, and she was confronted
with the same problem which has plagued love poets since time immemorial –
something that Carol Ann Duffy tackled through creating a collage of quotations
from famous love poems. Barrett Browning found a way to create a tender love
poem that is infused with spiritual language, to suggest a love that is pure
(‘childhood’s faith’) and deep (‘the ends of being and ideal grace’).

‘How do I love thee? Let me count the ways’ remains a widely anthologised love
poem, but deeper analysis of its form and further delving into its origins reveal
something that is much more than just a ‘soppy’ love poem. The poem fuses
devotional verse with the language of love poetry to produce something the
Victorians took to their hearts, which has remained a mainstream favourite
among anthologists and fans of classic love poetry.