How do i love thee
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151 Terms
Elizabeth Barrett Browning wrote the poem.
It is Sonnet 43.
It is taken from Sonnets from the Portuguese.
It was published in 1850.
It was written for Robert Browning, Elizabeth’s husband-to-be.
Robert Browning was a British poet who later married Elizabeth Barrett Browning.
He called her “my little Portuguese”.
The title is misleading because the poems were written by Elizabeth Barrett Browning in English, and “Portuguese” refers to Robert’s nickname for her.
She grew up in England in a wealthy family.
Her father owned a sugar plantation in Jamaica.
She suffered from a lung disease for most of her life.
She was 15 when she fell off a horse and injured her spine.
Her brother’s death by drowning while sailing deeply affected her.
They exchanged approximately 574 letters.
It is a lyric poem in the form of a sonnet.
It is an Italian or Petrarchan sonnet.
The poem contains 14 lines.
There are two quatrains.
Two tercets follow the quatrains.
The rhyme scheme is ABBA ABBA CDC DCD.
It comes from the Italian word sonetto.
It means “little song”.
A sonnet often explores love.
A volta is a turn or change in thought, perspective or feeling in a poem.
It is usually found at the end of the octave or at the beginning of the sestet.
“But” is one word that can introduce a volta.
Hyperbole is used throughout the poem.
It emphasises the intensity and limitless nature of the speaker’s love.
It is divided into an octave of eight lines and a sestet of six lines.
It changes from ABBA ABBA to CDC DCD.
“How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.”
She promises to count the different ways in which she loves her beloved.
She compares her love to depth, breadth and height.
Her soul can reach these dimensions.
“My soul can reach” and “the ends of Being and Ideal Grace” suggest spiritual love.
It suggests heaven, perfection and an ideal existence.
A question mark follows the opening question.
It introduces the central theme of love and allows the speaker to explain its many dimensions.
The opening lines create a loving, sincere and thoughtful tone.
The first quatrain presents love as vast, deep and spiritually limitless.
It is compared to an everyday need that is quiet but essential.
It suggests that her love is a constant, essential part of her life.
They symbolise light, warmth and comfort in different situations.
She loves him freely, without restriction.
They are striving for “Right”, suggesting justice and freedom.
She loves him purely, without seeking praise or recognition.
They turn away from praise.
The lines reflect freedom, purity and selfless love.
It uses visual imagery.
Love is a constant everyday need that should be freely and purely given.
The speaker mentions the faith she had during childhood.
She compares her love to the passion she experienced in her old griefs.
It refers to the deep sorrow she experienced in the past, possibly connected to the loss of loved ones.
It suggests the simple, sincere and unquestioning faith she had as a child.
She loves her beloved with the same devotion she once felt towards the saints she revered.
It symbolises the speaker’s fading or lost religious devotion.
Deep devotion and love dominate the sestet, alongside memories of grief and loss.
She uses the passion she once felt through grief and faith to express the depth of her present love.
It suggests that her love is sincere, devoted and almost religious in its intensity.
She appears to rediscover the passion and devotion that she thought she had lost.
The sestet emphasises deeply personal, spiritual and enduring love.
The phrase uses imagery and can be understood as a reference to past emotional suffering.
It develops from an attempt to measure love’s vastness into a deeply personal expression involving faith, grief and the hope of eternal love.
The sestet focuses on the speaker’s personal experiences, past emotions and belief that her love will continue after death.
It makes the poem more personal by connecting the speaker’s love to her past and her hopes for eternity.
She loves with her breath, smiles and tears, as well as with the passion and faith she describes earlier.
Her breath suggests that her beloved is as essential to her as the air she breathes.
Her smiles represent the happiness she shares with her beloved.
Her tears represent sorrow and the painful experiences of life.
Together, they represent the full range of her life and emotions, including happiness and sadness.
It suggests that her love encompasses every part of her life and every experience.
She hopes that she will love her beloved even more after death.
It suggests that she recognises God’s power over what happens after death and is uncertain about the future.
She believes that her love may continue and grow stronger after death.
The ending has a deeply loving, hopeful and spiritual tone, although it also acknowledges uncertainty.
The final line creates a feeling of hope that love can transcend death.
The theme of eternal love becomes strongest.
It reveals that she believes love may continue beyond physical life and that God has a role in the afterlife.
It concludes the poem with the powerful idea that love can grow even after death.
The ending expresses the speaker’s hope that her love will continue and become even stronger after death.
Hyperbole is used to exaggerate the vastness of the speaker’s love, together with imagery of dimensions.
She uses it to show that her love is so immense that it seems impossible to measure.
Hyperbole is deliberate exaggeration used for emphasis or effect.
“I love thee to the depth and breadth and height” is an example of hyperbole.
The phrase uses symbolism and visual imagery.
It symbolises warmth, comfort and love in different situations and at different levels of intensity.
Anaphora is used because the phrase is repeated at the beginnings of lines.
It emphasises the speaker’s devotion and creates a rhythm that reinforces the poem’s central theme of love.
Religious imagery presents the speaker’s love as sacred, spiritual and deeply devoted.
She uses imagery to make the intensity of her love easier for readers to imagine and understand.
The main theme is the depth and intensity of love.
Spiritual love is another important theme.
The tone is loving, sincere, passionate and hopeful.
She feels deeply devoted to him and loves him with her whole being.
The poem suggests that genuine love is limitless, selfless and capable of enduring beyond death.
The speaker describes her love through vast dimensions and suggests that it will continue even after death.
Faith helps the speaker express the purity and devotion of her love and her hope for life after death.
Its themes of devotion, emotional connection and enduring love remain meaningful to people across different generations.
The poem expresses a deep, unconditional love that embraces every aspect of life and hopes to continue beyond death.
It expresses love through powerful imagery, repetition, spiritual references and sincere emotion. Its universal message allows readers to relate to the speaker’s devotion.