How do I love thee? [Sonnet 43]

By Elizabeth Barrett Browning

"How do I love thee? Let me count the ways" is one of the most famous love poems in the English language. Because it's so famous, many readers mistakenly attribute the poem to that master sonneteer, William Shakespeare. However, "How do I love thee?" was written centuries after Shakespeare – in fact, it's only been around for a little over 150 years. Prominent Victorian poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning first published the poem in 1850.

The poem was part of a sonnet sequence called Sonnets from the Portuguese. The title of the sequence is intentionally misleading; Barrett Browning implied to her readers that these were sonnets originally written by someone else in Portuguese and that she had translated them, whereas in reality they were her own original compositions in English. "My little Portuguese" was actually an affectionate nickname that Elizabeth's husband used for her in private. The sequence is comprised of 44 sonnets, with "How do I love thee?" appearing in the striking position of number 43, or second-to-last, making it an important part of the climax.

Most critics agree that Barrett Browning wrote the sonnets, not as an abstract literary exercise, but as a personal declaration of love to her husband, Robert Browning (who was also an important Victorian poet). Perhaps the intimate origin of the sonnets is what led Barrett Browning to create an imaginary foreign origin for them. But whatever the original motives behind their composition and presentation, many of the sonnets immediately became famous, establishing Barrett Browning as an important poet through the 19th and 20th centuries. Phrases from Barrett Browning's sonnets, especially "How do I love thee?," have entered everyday conversation, becoming standard figures of speech even for people who have never read her poetry.

How do I love thee?

[Sonnet 43 Text of the Poem]

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 everyday'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.

Summary

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.

Commentary

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. )
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 three-dimensional 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 naïveté 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.

Symbol Analysis

Love

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

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-the-top 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).

THEMES

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!

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.

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.

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!

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!

“How do I love thee”