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

Symbols & Motifs

The Soul

It is a given that the poet and the lover are soul mates. The poet confesses in Lines 2 and 3 that the love felt for the significant other is measured only by the reach of the soul itself. The idea of soul mates has become a catch-all phrase to suggest that the meeting between the two was destined and that their union was inevitable. Within this secular reading, the soul is a symbol that suggests an element of love that defies time. In the sonnet, however, the poet uses the symbol of the soul not as a symbol at all but as a real element of the human psyche, a gift from a real God who monitors the reach, depth, and breadth of a soul that is itself on loan from that same God. The poem invokes the concept of the Christian soul without the contemporary secularization of it into an abstract.

Here the soul elevates the love rather than expresses the love. Because the soul is the property of an all-seeing God, its involvement in the affairs of the heart makes that love cosmic in its implications. That the energy of the poet’s feelings can be quantified as grace (Line 4) further underscores the elevated import of the soul. Soul mates here suggest that love is sanctified. To fall in love with the heart is to surrender to the moment and an impulse driven equally by lust, ego, boredom, practicalities, or curiosity. To fall in the love with the soul suggests that the lovers align in a relationship that much as Christianity itself defies the selfish, empties the moment of its import, and makes ironic the practical.

Sunlight/Moonlight

Conventionally, the repetitive passage of time marked by sunlight to moonlight, day to night, reflects the tedium of a love that has settled into complacency, routine, and even boredom. The sonnet states the opposite. The poet affirms that this love animates every day, marked “by sun and candle-light” (Line 6). Here the poet challenges the traditional symbol of time passing as a mark of love’s inevitable wearing out.

The poet uses the idea of love mapped out by the metrics of day and night to suggest that this love grows in time and sustains itself. The poet cannot conceive of a day—or night—not made more radiant or affirmative by this love’s kinetics. Within this argument, every day and night offers the poet a new opportunity to feel love’s reassuring energy and, in turn, to embrace each day as yet another chance to love. Of course, the sonnet does not treat the obvious realities of long-term relationships—the poet does not mention the familiar elements of real-time relationships, such as cleaning the house, doing the laundry, preparing meals, sitting up with a sick child, or simply maintaining a level of civil conversation day in and day out. It is enough for the poet to feel that love can animate those daily moments and elevate them from tedious to luminous.

Thee

Despite the intensity of emotions and the vulnerability the poet exposes in exploring the dimensions of love, the poem uses the word “thee” to create a distance between the reader and the poet.

By not including Robert Browning’s name or even “he,” the poem opens up and speaks to any heart enflamed with an enduring and illuminating love. However, this begs the question of why the poet did not address the poem to “you.” The poem is a response apparently to a question posed by a nameless other, “thee,” interested, perhaps playfully, perhaps not (is the poet’s love being challenged for its authenticity and its depth?), in the poet measuring their love. The word “thee” repeated nine times in 14 lines creates not an intimacy, as if the reader is eavesdropping on a conversation between lovers, because “thee” was hardly a pronoun with conversational legitimacy even in Browning’s time. “Thee” is a Shakespearean pronoun, an archaic expression that casts the love poem within the elevated feelings of the High Renaissance when Petrarchan sonnets first appeared. In addition, “thee” is associated with the heightened rhetoric of the church, appropriate for prayers and liturgical rituals.

“Thee” provides the poet with a strategy of both enhancing the love and distancing the poet from the object of that love. “Thee” maintains a level of respect and denies the poet the appearance of being anything but serious in the expression of love. “Thee” elevates the poem and aligns it—as do the references to grace, the saints, and God—to the grandeur and seriousness of devotional poetry. “Thee” makes the poem less a playful game between childish lovers and more a considered response to a difficult philosophical query. The pronoun gives the sonnet its roots in the emotional discourse of the Renaissance and the Church, but it casts about the poet a feeling of seriousness and maturity.