How Do I Love Thee? (Sonnet 43)

Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1850

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Poem Analysis

Themes

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Themes

The Resilience of Love

Love lasts. It seems a simple premise yet one that takes issue with conventional wisdom. Love is love exactly because its impact is sudden, inexplicable, irrevocable, and ephemeral. That is what makes love the emotional miracle it is. If Sonnet 43 is a love poem, it challenges one of the defining assumptions about love. As a powerful expression of intense emotion, conventional wisdom assumes, love cannot maintain that energy. The reality of its impermanence is in fact what gives love its wallop. Its own brevity makes love that most special of emotions. After all, the verb of choice is to fall in love, not step lightly or carefully. Love is tectonic, and because of that, love inevitably fades, as all strong emotions must, from the weight of its own intensity.

Within that dynamic, the best lovers can hope is that love cools into commitment and the consolation of companionship. However, the argument in the poem is the opposite of love’s inevitable cooling: Because love charges and recharges the “depth and breadth and height” (Line 2) the soul can reach, and because it animates the soul even when the object of such intensity is “out of sight” (Line 3), love perseveres. The poem argues against basic logic, that any force must bend to the reality of time: “I love thee,” the poet emphatically asserts, “to the level of every day’s / Most quiet need” (Lines 5-6). That endless, restless pursuit of novelty and the search for new epiphanies the poet dismisses, asserting rather that love is resilient; it endures through time, through the joys and sorrow, the agonies and the ironies, the busyness and routines of every day. In that discovery of love’s resilience, the poet finds the serenity, the confidence, and the joy that animates every line.

The Power of Choice

“I love thee freely, as men strive for right” (Line 7). The importance of that critical observation, that the poet is free to love, can be lost to a contemporary audience. The modern reader might assume that a person’s heart responds to individual urgencies, that the heart knows no laws nor respects socio-economic boundaries nor kowtows to any authority greater than its own. A person falls in love by choice—a powerful and fundamental manifestation of free will that reflects a person’s commitment to any ideal, whether it be political empowerment, economic equality, or religious freedom. Like those ideals, love is a goal freely and eagerly embraced because it is good and right on its own merits.

In Victorian England, defined as it was by a rigid de facto caste system, regarded marriage as a manifestation of those very same socio-economic boundaries. Marriages among the wealthy were brokered for the best interests of the families and posterity, and for decidedly unemotional issues, such as property rights and inheritances. Women were regarded as elements and commodities in those negotiations. Choice had little to do with love. Women were expected to accept a place within the domestic sphere and find satisfaction in attending to the husband’s needs and raising his (the pronoun was anything but ironic) children. Given that the poet here is a woman in Victorian England and given, within Browning’s specific biography, that she was controlled and directed by an authoritarian father who refused to acknowledge the rights of his very grown daughter (she was approaching 40 when she eloped), the assertion that love is freely given upends that culture’s presumption that love and relationships were simply not elements of the same equation. As a sort of Declaration of Emotional Independence, then, Sonnet 43 established what would become the special privilege of generations of introspective confessional poets, male and female: the right to love, wonderfully, perhaps, disastrously, maybe, but to love as the heart directs. The heart, Browning argues here, has a mind of its own.

The Omnipotence of God

In the end, Browning’s love sonnet becomes an intense expression of devotion to the Christian God. Although the sonnet is light on its theological undergirding, the vocabulary of the poem reflects the poet’s anchorage in the Christian faith. The poet talks about the loss as childhood gave way to adulthood in the reassuring nearness of the saints, exempla of moral and ethical behavior presumed in heaven and there to act as guides to direct behavior on earth. The happy idea of saints, so fetching to a child’s sense of enchantment and magic, is lost as adulthood introduces, to borrow from the poet, the griefs inevitable in the maturation into adulthood. As others reveal their disappointing flaws, they render the idea of a heaven teeming with templates of moral and ethical behavior at best a desperate fantasy, at worst a cruel irony.

Thus, in finding love here on earth, the poet appears ready to jettison the emotional baggage of the spiritual life itself. I love thee, the poet argues, with all the intensity I once invested in my faith. The poem implies that secular love can somehow displace or make irrelevant the once powerful pull of sacred love. If the poet edges toward endorsing such radical atheism, the closing lines affirm the greater theme of the poem: The love found in the limited time people have on earth is a reflection and a celebration of God’s omnipotence. God allows strangers to meet and to define their way to an enriching love. However, that love must ultimately bend to mortality. With God’s influence, earthly love will affirm the majesty of eternity: “if God choose / I shall but love thee better after death” (Line 13-14). The revealing word is “if”—an indication of the poet’s realization of the limits of human understanding and insight.