How Do I Love Thee? (Sonnet 43)

Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1850

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Summary

Background

Poem Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Literary Devices

Form

Sonnet 43 is a classic expression of a Petrarchan sonnet. An autodidact in the literatures of Antiquity and the High Renaissance, Browning understood the mechanics of a Petrarchan sonnet. The 14 lines, standard in a sonnet, are divided into two sections: The first eight lines (the octave) set the basic situation and raise a critical question that is then answered in the sonnet’s closing six lines (the sestet).

In Browning’s Petrarchan sonnet, the octave introduces the premise: a lover inquiring about the depth of this love. The poet offers the response. The octave is posed as a challenge to the poet. The question relies on the strategy of subjecting the emotions, in this case love, to the logic of the intellect. Hence, the octave replies without irony or apology the several ways the poet loves the person referred to only as “thee.” In the octave, the poet presents a compelling inventory: This love is enduring, unselfish, pure, righteous, and a boundless source of comfort day in and day out. The repetition of the phrase “I love thee” in quick succession (Lines 5, 6, 7), a poetic device known as anaphora, creates the feeling of urgency and a sense of asserting the credibility of the evidence offered.

The sestet responds to the challenge of the octave by elevating the argument into the sweep of the transcendent. Certainly, the octave provides ample evidence to answer the query. In the sestet, however, the poet elevates the argument by raising the complication of the soul and the position of secular love in a cosmos created and sustained by a Creator. It is the sestet that introduces the vocabulary of Christianity and offers the affirmation of the omnipotence of the Creator God. Thus, the sestet answers what the octave hints: For all its emotional energy, righteous motivations, and saving grace, this love is best defined as a sacred dynamic.

Meter

Browning’s sonnet follows the anticipated metrical patterns of a Petrarchan sonnet. Each line is set to iambic pentameter, although lines play subtle variations on that metrical pattern to avoid monotony and to give critical words emphasis. In addition, the poem uses the device known as enjambment—the continuation of an idea from one line to the next without using end punctation—to prevent the sonnet from collapsing into predictability.

Generally, the lines are each executed in pairs of unstressed/stressed sounds, five such beat units to each line. For instance:

I love thee with a love I seemed to lose (Line 11)

Or

I shall but love thee better after death (Line 14).

The metrical patterns are additionally reinforced by the rhyme scheme of a Petrarchan sonnet. In the octave, the lines rhyme ABBAABBA; in the sestet, CDCDCD. Although the poem uses one pair of sight rhymes (words that look like they should rhyme but really do not (as in Line 10’s “faith” and Line 12’s “breath”), the overall impression of the sonnet is a carefully timed, rhymed poem. In a poem about passion, that rigidly measured meter provides a reassuring sense that the heart is uninhibited, but the mind maintains intellectual restraint. Thus, the meter controls the exuberance of the love the poet is sharing, making that passion seem more considered.

Voice

The cycle of poems gathered in Sonnets from the Portuguese traced the evolution of Browning’s growing passion for Robert Browning. The speaker, that is, the voice that controls the poem, fits Elizabeth, and “thee” is Robert. The poem, the penultimate in the collection, expresses the confidence and passion of a love that has emerged, tested by trial, and is now a celebration of new life beginnings. The voice then is smart—accepting the patently absurd challenge to measure her love, she eagerly, grandly, inventories exactly how wide, deep, and resilient that love is. The voice is at once flush with passion and yet calm, considered, and poised. This is an adult in love. The optimism and the joyful hope expressed in the enumeration of all the ways Elizabeth loves Robert reveals the strength and resiliency of that bond.

Because the poem never introduces either name, and because the poem avoids the narrow identification of even gender pronouns, however, the poem allows that voice to speak for all lovers, all couples, and the joyful faith that this love is selfless, pure, and transcendent. In that, the poem can apply to anyone in love. The only prerequisite for defining the voice in the poem is the embrace of the transcendent realm, some guiding notion of an afterlife in the loving and generous control of an omnipotent deity. Accept that, and the sonnet speaks in a widest registry, perhaps one reason it has become a much beloved standard in English-language poetry.