How Do I Love Thee? (Sonnet 43)

Browning’s Sonnet 43 celebrates love that is unconditional, redemptive, pure, selfless, and eternal; it transcends the boundaries of time. It is love in the ideal, uncontested by the realities of the daily routine of relationships and the inevitable imperfections in such a relationship exposed over time. It is tempting of course to complete the poem with the idea that Elizabeth Barrett Browning was lucky to have found her heart’s so-much content. The poem, however, defies such boundaries. The poem is addressed to “thee” not to Robert Browning, and there are no gender-specific pronouns to limit the poem to these two.

Much broader in its argument than one fortunate woman’s celebration of a love she has happened to find, the poem moves to a debate between the heart and the soul. The poet, whether Browning or any Christian confronting the hunger of the heart, inevitably ponders whether this earthly love is a manifestation of God’s benevolence or a test to see whether, under such emotional pressure, the Christian can make the appropriate and soul-saving choice: The Christian resists as temptation the lure of the Other and maintains the lifelong pilgrimage directed to earning the rich rewards of the afterlife.

The vocabulary in the poem is grounded in Christianity. Love is measured not by the reach of the heart but rather by the soul (Line 3) and “ideal grace” (Line 4). When the poet struggles to explain the power of this love, she compares it to the love that Christians devote to the saints in heaven. When the poet appears to equate the heart with the soul (Lines 11 and 12), the poet asserts that the heart acts under the direction of God. The poet acknowledges the reality that deconstructs as heretical any embrace of the earthly. Whatever manifests the heart—parents, a lover, a spouse, children—ultimately ends. Even if the poet and this magnificent “thee” celebrate their love every day, there comes a time when one of them must watch the other one die. It is that uncertainty and anxiety that compels the sonnet’s closing two lines. The logic is as clever as it is redemptive. It is not that the poet has replaced the heart with the soul but rather that love is an expression of the soul, not the heart, and thus a celebration of God’s power. The poet acknowledges, as every practicing Christian does, this love is all in His hands. If this love is the gift of God, then God will ensure that love continues after death, sundering the complicated bindings of mortality: “if God choose / I shall but love thee better after death” (Lines 13-14). God, not the poet, directs the way of this love.

The poem thus becomes less a love sonnet and more a Christian devotional, that is, an expression of an imperfect human aspiring to find in the experience of the everyday an avenue to the unparalleled glories of God’s Kingdom. The heart does not supersede nor make irrelevant the soul; rather the heart illuminates the soul and affirms the power and glory of God.