Sonnet 43

Elizabeth Browning

HOW DO I LOVE THEE?

About the poet

She was quite religious; something we can see in her poems.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning chose this title to give the impression that she had translated the work from the
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. The two eventually fell in love and decided to secretly elope to Italy in
1846, despite the father's resistance and anger. He ended up disinheriting his daughter.

Context 2
 TITLE
• How Do I Love Thee? (Sonnet 43)
• A tone of innocence is suggested by the title.
• Reader’s curiosity is perked up since it is a rather unusual question.
• Introduces the theme of love
• The question is asked in a conversational manner.
• The name ‘sonnet’ also establishes the theme of love since sonnets are usually love poems
.

• \

 THE FIRST LINE OF THE POEM IS THE TITLE! 3

STRUCTURE
THERE ARE TWO TYPES OF SONNETS IN LITERATURE:
PETRARCHAN AND SHAKESPEAREAN SONNET.
THIS IS A PETRARCHAN SONNET.

• OCTAVE = FIRST 8 LINES

• THEY INTRODUCE THE PROBLEM
• DEFINITE RHYME SCHEME
• SESTET= LAST 6 LINES
• THEY PROVIDE A SOLUTION
• DEFINITE RHYME SCHEME

• VOLTA = ON THE 9TH LINE

• A CHANGE OF TOPIC AND ATTITUDE

• WRITTEN IN IAMBIC PENTAMETER

THE STRUCTURE DIFFERENTIATES THE TWO TYPES

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OF SONNETS.
 • She begins by trying to describe the physical
How do I love thee? Let me count the ways. shape and size of her love.
•  Depth & breadth & height might seem
I love thee to the depth and breadth and height strangely cold ways of loving, a loveless
My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight spatial description capturing emotion in the
For the ends of being and ideal grace. language of mathematics. But see how she
starts measuring… then quickly says love
cannot be measured!
• The dimension of her love is the same size
and distance that her soul can reach. She is
pointing out that her love is infinite.
• Granted, that seems like hyperbole, but
love often feels like that. Like the universe,
no matter how far you can imagine her soul
reaching, love extends beyond this point (out
of sight). After the comma right in the middle
of line 3, Browning stretches
the hyperbole even further by creating an
image of herself feeling in the dark to
express how love extends beyond her grasp,
or ability to describe. Close your eyes and
grope the space around you – it’s easy to
relate to this image and understand how she
feels. Love fills up space right to the edges of
the known universe, and beyond: it extends
to the ends of Being and Ideal Grace. 
QUATRAIN 1 5
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.
QUATRAIN 2
• After this intensity of emotion, the tone
quiets down a bit as she uses soothing
imagery of candles.
• Use of Anaphora ‘I love thee’ to emphasize
on her love.
• She needs him like the things which are
needed everyday.
• ‘By sun and candle light’
• sun and candlelight are immediately
more concrete than the infinite expanse of
the soul. Nevertheless, they communicate
The Octave:
love’s constancy: loving someone by Browning is
both sun and candlelight means loving them describing the
through day and night, all the time: abstract concept
sometimes the feeling is huge,
overwhelming, like the sun; sometimes it of love in a
smolders comfortingly, like a candle in a universal way.
dark room. In the following
• The idea of loving ‘freely as men strive for
right’ means that loving him is almost
lines (the
natural for her; people tend to glorify great sestet), her
love stories but Browning does not want that personal
‘praise’. Thus , she loves him ‘purely’. experiences are
• Idea of pure love is repeated.
shared.
6

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.
QUATRAIN 3 AND THE RHYMING COUPLET (THE
SESTET)
As the poem progresses, the speaker tell us yet of
another way she loves ‘him’ but this time, her tone is
more sober. She hints at past disappointment with the
words ‘old grief’. This would most mean that the
speaker had once experienced losing someone or
something. This sudden touch of sadness really
changes the tone of the entire poem, as it goes from
joyful to sober.
Looking at her early life, Elizabeth did not have good
relations with her father and had to fight an illness,
maybe these are the grieves she talks about in her
poem.
Still the speaker is able to push forward and with
passion, channels her ‘old grief’ into something
positive and tells us the ways she loves her husband.
The intensity of her grief accentuates the extent of
her love; both are dominated by intense passion. She
loves him with a child’s pure faith too.
In these lines the use of the words “lose” and “lost”
within the same phrase instantly deepens the somber
and reflective mood of the sestet. The speaker goes
deeper into her past to tell us about the “love
she seemed to lose”. The use of the word “saints”
conjures a religious image, and one might believe
that she once suffered a loss of religious faith.
However, it was not faith in religion she lost but in a
particular saint who she admired in her childhood. 7
 .I love thee with the breath,
Moving on, the speaker continues to
Smiles, tears, of all my life; and, if God choose, describe how her love
I shall but love thee better after death. consumes her, body and soul.

Through her “smiles” and “tears” she

continues to love. The mention of
“breathe” indicates how important her
husband is to her. Her love
keeps her going forward in life, as if it is
necessary to be with him. In the last two
lines, the speaker makes the first direct
reference to God.
By mentioning his name, she clarifies
that she is still a pious person despite
any disappointments she may have
experienced in the past. She
prays to god to let her be able to love
her husband even after she’s dead,
which greatly emphasizes just how
much she loves him.

The Sestet (continued) 8


The speaker asks how she
loves her beloved and tries to
list the different ways in which
she loves him. Her love seems
to be eternal and to exist
everywhere, and she intends to
continue loving him after her
own death, if God lets her.
A Review
THEMES
1. Theme of Love: the most
apparent theme
2. Theme of Admiration: She
admires him with a child like
fervor.
3. Theme of Mortality: She is
determined to carry the love
beyond the grave.
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