How Do I Love Thee? (Sonnet 43) Elizabeth Barrett Browning, short summary and analysis

 How Do I Love Thee? (Sonnet 43)

Elizabeth Barrett Browning

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.

Short summary and analysis 

* “How do I love thee? Let me count the ways” is a sonnet by the 19th-century poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning. It is her most famous and best-loved poem, having first appeared as sonnet 43 in her collection "Sonnets from the Portuguese" (1850). 

* The poem “How Do I Love Thee?” ,  begins by declaring that it is possible to “count” the ways in which one loves.

* But it ends by looking forward to heaven and the afterlife, a time in which it will no longer be possible to measure love, because love will be infinite.

* In this way, the poem first imagines love as something rational or measurable, but ends by asserting that love sometimes can’t be explained by reason or measured, no matter how hard one might try to do so.

* The poem thus argues that true love is eternal, surpassing space, time, and even death. 

* Although the poem is often read biographically, as an address from the poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning to her husband, this depiction of eternal and all-powerful love could also apply to any human love, since the speaker and addressee are both unnamed in the poem itself.

*In particular, the poet suggests that her love for her partner is reasoned and rational because it is grounded in the everyday  actions of life: “I love thee to the level of every day’s / Most quiet need, by sun and candle-light.” 

* The speaker also explains that she loves her beloved "purely, as men turn from praise,” implying that her love isn’t based on pride or self-aggrandizement.

* By focusing on the virtues of purity and self-sacrifice, she implies that love can be measured simply in the degree of care one gives the other person.

*The poem is written in a first-person voice that gives the speaker an air of authority and reinforces this theme of agency. 

*For instance, the poet  declares “Let me count the ways,” an imperative sentence that puts her firmly in control of the poem’s narrative.

* The poet makes frequent use of the “I” and “me” pronouns, which further adds to this sense that the speaker is asserting her own voice and feelings in the poem.

* The list of ways in which the speaker loves her beloved is also structured like a list of arguments or supporting points, from her opening assertion that she will “count the ways.” The speaker is thus depicted as articulate and confident in defending her choice of partner.

* Ultimately, the poem makes a powerful equation between love, choice, and freedom. 

*The speaker emphasizes that she loves “freely” and that her affection for her partner is a result of her own assessment of his value. It is not a value imposed from external authority like her “childhood’s faith,” but is rather an expression of her own agency.

*“How Do I Love Thee?” is a poem that emphasizes the speaker’s power and agency in making her own romantic choices. This is a particularly bold claim for a woman of Elizabeth Barrett Browning's time, when women often lacked the opportunity to exercise agency over their own lives.

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Themes 

* Romantic 

In “How Do I Love Thee?” true love is depicted as long-lasting and even eternal. However, the poem also reveals a tension between love as an attachment to earthly life and the things of this world, and love as something that transcends life on earth.

* Love 

In what is arguably one of the most famous opening lines of a poem in English literature—“How do I love thee? Let me count the ways”—the speaker embarks on a project of listing the ways in which she loves her beloved. The poem thus begins as a means of attempting to justify love in rational terms. 

* Spiritual Love

By evoking her religious faith so often, the speaker likens her romantic love for her beloved to a religious or spiritual feeling. At first it seems as if her love for this person on earth might be as powerful as love for God.