"How Do I Love Thee?" is Sonnet 43 in Elizabeth Barrett Browning's sequence Sonnets from the Portuguese. Its meaning stays close to its words. The speaker loves completely, in every dimension she can name, and hopes that love will continue after death. The opening question is not a real doubt. It sets up a count, and the count measures love in more than one way: by the reach of the soul, by daily habit, by moral choice, by old grief, and finally by the length of a whole life.
This article gives the full text first, then the circumstances of its writing, then a close reading that moves through the poem a few lines at a time, and then the form that holds it together.
In This Article
- The Full Text of Sonnet 43
- Where the Poem Comes From
- The Opening Question and the First Measure
- Everyday Need and Freely Chosen Love
- Old Griefs, Childhood Faith, and Lost Saints
- Breath, Smiles, Tears, and the Final Promise
- How the Form Carries the Count
- Key Takeaways
- Frequently Asked Questions
- Love Beyond Measure and Death
The Full Text of Sonnet 43
The poem was first published in 1850 and has been in the public domain for well over a century. Here are all fourteen lines, for reference while you read the analysis below.
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.
Where the Poem Comes From
Elizabeth Barrett wrote the sonnets in the sequence during her courtship with the poet Robert Browning. Their correspondence began in January 1845, when he wrote to praise her collection Poems (1844). They married in September 1846 and left England for Italy soon afterward. The sequence first appeared in the 1850 edition of her Poems, which is why the poem is often cited as Sonnets from the Portuguese 43.
The title was a veil. It suggested that the poems were translations from a foreign language, which kept a little distance between the author and such personal material. The phrase is usually linked to Robert Browning's pet name for her, "my little Portuguese," drawn from her earlier poem "Catarina to Camoens," in which a dying woman speaks to the Portuguese poet Camões.
It is tempting to read the sonnet as a diary entry addressed to Robert. The safer claim is narrower. The sequence follows a speaker who begins in doubt about whether she deserves to be loved and whether she has the strength to love back. Sonnet 43 comes near the end of 44 poems, so its confidence has been earned across the sequence. The speaker who once hesitated can now count without stopping, and that position in the sequence explains why the poem sounds so certain.
The Opening Question and the First Measure
The first line asks a question and answers it in the same breath: "Let me count the ways." The question is rhetorical. No one in the poem is waiting for a reply, and the speaker never shows confusion about whether she loves. Instead the question works as an invitation to a list, and "count" promises something orderly, almost like an inventory.
That promise is kept and broken at once. The poem does enumerate, but the first item already defeats counting. "I love thee to the depth and breadth and height" uses three physical dimensions, the language of measuring a room or a container. The repeated "and" slows the line down and makes each dimension land separately, so the love seems to fill all the space it can.
The next lines set the limit of that space, and the limit is spiritual: "My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight / For the ends of being and ideal grace." The soul here is stretching toward something it cannot see. "The ends of being" can mean the purpose of existence. "Ideal grace" points toward divine favor or perfection. The speaker loves as far as her soul can reach in its most searching moments of prayer or thought.
This first measure is the largest in the poem. It defines spiritual love by the edge of human reach. From here, the count moves somewhere unexpected: down to the smallest scale.
Everyday Need and Freely Chosen Love
After the soul's farthest reach, line 5 drops to "the level of every day's / Most quiet need." The word "level" sets this measure against the "height" of line 2. Where the first image was vertical and straining, this one is flat and steady, like ground you walk on. The enjambment across "day's / Most quiet need" also pulls the reader gently into the next line, the way one ordinary day leads into another.
"By sun and candle-light" fills that daily measure with time. Love runs through daylight and through the evening hours lit by a candle. The image is domestic and specific to a household before electric light. It keeps the poem's large devotion tied to rooms, meals, and routine, which makes the claim of total love easier to believe.
Lines 7 and 8 then shift from time to ethics, and they do it in two matched sentences:
- "I love thee freely, as men strive for right."
- "I love thee purely, as they turn from praise."
"Freely" means the love is chosen, not forced by duty or circumstance. The comparison to people striving for justice makes love a moral commitment, something worked at. "Purely" is defined by refusal: people who do right and then decline praise for it. The love asks for nothing back.
These two lines are the most balanced in the poem, each beginning with the same three words and turning on "as." Their symmetry gives the octave a firm ending before the speaker turns to her own past.
Old Griefs, Childhood Faith, and Lost Saints
Line 9 marks the start of the sestet, and the measure changes again. So far, the speaker has measured love by space, by daily time, and by moral comparison. Now she measures it by her own history: "I love thee with the passion put to use / In my old griefs, and with my childhood's faith."
The phrase "put to use" is practical, almost economical. The intensity she once spent on grief has not vanished; it has been redirected. That is a striking way to describe romantic love. The poem does not say love erased sorrow. It says the same capacity for feeling, once trained by loss, now serves a new purpose.
"My childhood's faith" adds a second inheritance. A child's belief is often wholehearted and unquestioning, and the speaker claims that quality for her present love. These lines make the past part of the present: the woman who loves now is made of everything she has already felt.
Lines 11 and 12 extend the thought: "I love thee with a love I seemed to lose / With my lost saints." The verb "seemed" matters. The love only appeared to be lost, and it has returned. Who the "lost saints" are is left open. They may be people the speaker loved who have died, revered and now gone. They may also be the objects of an earlier religious fervor that faded as she grew up. The poem allows both, and the phrase carries grief as well as recovery.
Breath, Smiles, Tears, and the Final Promise
In the middle of line 12, the count reaches its widest point: "I love thee with the breath, / Smiles, tears, of all my life." The list has no "and" between its parts, so the items arrive quickly, one on top of the other. Breath is the most basic sign of being alive. Smiles and tears are its opposite moods. Together they stand for the whole of a life, joyful and sorrowful, which makes this measure total in a way the earlier ones were not.
Then comes the qualification: "and, if God choose." The phrase is set off by commas, a small pause before the last line. The verb is in the subjunctive mood, the form English uses for wishes and possibilities. The speaker does not claim to know what happens after death. She places her hope inside God's will.
The final line reads, "I shall but love thee better after death." "But" here means "only" or "simply." If God allows it, death will bring nothing except an improvement in her love. The promise of love after death is bold, yet the condition just before it keeps it humble. In line 14, the shift to "I shall" moves the poem from present tense into the future, the only place left for the count to go.
How the Form Carries the Count
The poem follows the Italian, or Petrarchan, sonnet pattern: an eight-line octave and a six-line sestet. Many Petrarchan sonnets use the break between them for a sharp reversal of argument. This one uses it for a shift in time. The octave stays in the present, with ideals, days, and moral choices. The sestet reaches back to grief and childhood, then forward to death and beyond.
Repetition does most of the structural work. After the opening question, the words "I love thee" repeatedly begin clauses, a device called anaphora. Each repetition starts a new item in the count, so the reader always knows where one measure ends and the next begins. That steady return is what makes the poem sound like an act of declaring, not of persuading.
The lines are mostly in iambic pentameter: five feet following a predominantly unstressed–stressed pattern. The final line can be scanned as “i SHALL | but LOVE | thee BET | ter AF | ter DEATH,” with vertical bars separating feet. Capitals mark the underlying metrical beats, not instructions to force every spoken stress. Browning occasionally varies the pattern, notably with the successive stresses of “breath, / Smiles, tears.” The poet also varies where the sentences stop. Lines 7 and 8 end cleanly at the line's end, which gives the close of the octave its firmness. In the sestet, sentences spill across line endings, and line 12 breaks in the middle to begin a new declaration. The final sentence begins midway through line 12 and continues through line 14, spanning three lines. Like the declaration in lines 2–4, it carries a single statement across several lines.
Read as a whole, Sonnet 43 moves from present declarations through remembered experience to future hope. The repeated "I love thee" holds those changes together until "I shall" carries the final declaration beyond the speaker's lifetime.
Key Takeaways
- The speaker presents love as spiritual, everyday, freely chosen, and enduring.
- The opening question launches a declaration rather than expressing sustained uncertainty.
- Domestic light and bodily experience make the poem's expansive devotion tangible.
- Its Petrarchan structure moves from present devotion toward remembered faith and future hope.
- The final promise imagines love beyond death while remaining conditional on God's will.
Frequently Asked Questions
What Kind of Poem Is "How Do I Love Thee" by Elizabeth Barrett Browning?
Sonnet 43, "How Do I Love Thee?," is an Italian, or Petrarchan, sonnet: fourteen lines of mostly iambic pentameter divided into an octave and a sestet. It is also a love lyric, spoken in the first person to a beloved addressed as "thee." It belongs to a sequence of 44 sonnets that traces a courtship from hesitation to confidence.
What Does Elizabeth Barrett Browning Say About Love?
In Sonnet 43 Elizabeth Barrett Browning presents love as something that fills every part of a life, from the soul's highest aspirations to quiet daily needs. She treats it as freely chosen and selfless, and she suggests that past grief and faith can feed a present love. She also hopes it can outlast death, though she leaves that to God.
Why Is Sonnet 43 So Famous?
EBSCO’s discussion of Sonnet 43 identifies it as one of the most quoted love poems in English literature. Its repeated declarations are easy to remember and to read aloud. Its fame also rests on the way it pairs a simple, direct statement of love with careful, layered images.
What Is the Rhyme Scheme of Sonnet 43?
The rhyme scheme is ABBAABBA CDCDCD: ABBAABBA in the eight-line octave and CDCDCD in the six-line sestet. The C rhymes are "use," "lose," and "choose." The D rhymes are "faith," "breath," and "death," with "faith" forming a slant rhyme with the other two.
What Does "Lost Saints" Refer to in the Poem?
The poem does not say, and the phrase is usually read in two ways. It may mean loved ones who have died. The poet's mother died in 1828, and her brother Edward died in 1840, but the poem does not identify them as the "lost saints." It may also mean the figures of an earlier, more devout faith that the speaker drifted away from. Either way, the love once attached to them returns in her love for the beloved.
Love Beyond Measure and Death
The count ends not with a number but with a hope: "I shall but love thee better after death." The speaker can name the ways she loves now; what lies beyond her life remains subject to "if God choose." That distinction lets confidence and humility coexist in the final promise.