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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 days 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.
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.
*Speaker
We want to be very careful never to assume that the author of a poem is the same thing as the speaker meaning that Elizabeth Barrett Browning, the Victorian poet you're studying here, isn't the same as the "I" who asks "How do I love thee?" Still, the fact that Barrett Browning wrote this sonnet for her husband, Robert, leads us to believe that the speaker of the poem is best interpreted as female, while the beloved is best interpreted as male. However, the way the poem is written leaves the gender of both parties in the relationship completely ambiguous.
That's part of what makes it such a great love poem for the ages anybody can send it to anyone else, without even changing a word. That gives you some idea of how undefined the character of this speaker is. The speaker here, like the speaker in most sonnets, is a shadowy and uncertain figure. We don't know any concrete character details about her. But there are two things we're pretty sure of: she really loves someone, and she's really interested in listing and describing all the different kinds of love she feels for him. We also get the sense that she has a very complex internal emotional landscape; she loves someone intensely, but she also has "old griefs" things she's bitter about and "lost saints" people she's lost her faith in and feels disillusioned about. She also talks about her "childhood's faith" as though it was in the far distant past, which suggests that this is a mature, older speaker, not a young girl experiencing her first crush.
The individual sonnets don't actually have titles, and so we do what we must when a poem is untitled: we call it by its first line. So this sonnet, number 43 in the sequence Sonnets from the Portuguese, is known by its first line, "How do I love thee? Let me count the ways" or "How do I love thee?" for short. And that pretty much says it all: the poem is a list of ways that the speaker loves her beloved. It's interesting to notice the way that the poet balances this list structure with a traditional sonnet structure, which requires a surprising turn at the end.