How Do I Love Thee? (Sonnet 43) by Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Quick answer: How Do I Love Thee? (Sonnet 43) by Elizabeth Barrett Browning explained: the meaning of each way of loving, the Petrarchan form, and craft to borrow.
Few opening lines are as widely quoted, or as widely misread, as the question that begins Sonnet 43 from Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Sonnets from the Portuguese (1850). 'Let me count the ways' sounds like sentiment, but what follows is closer to an audit. The poem was written during her secret courtship with Robert Browning, while she was an invalid in her father's house, and it treats love as something measurable against the whole of a life, including its griefs.
The sequence's title was a deliberate screen, hinting the poems were translations rather than private confession. They were not. Sonnet 43 is autobiography passed through one of the strictest forms in English.
What the poem says
The speaker answers her own question with a numbered inventory. She loves to the full reach of her soul, the 'depth and breadth and height' it can attain when groping for the ends of being and ideal grace. She loves at the level of daily need, quiet as a lamp lit at evening, by 'sun and candle-light'. She loves freely, as men strive for what is right, and purely, as they turn from praise.
Then the ledger darkens. She loves with the passion she once spent on her old griefs, with her childhood's faith, with a love she seemed to lose 'with my lost saints', the dead she once trusted. The final movement offers everything, breath, smiles, tears, and wagers that, if God allows, she will love him better after death.
How it works
This is a Petrarchan sonnet, rhymed ABBA ABBA CDCDCD, and Barrett Browning uses the form against expectation. Where most Petrarchan sonnets turn at line nine to a new argument, hers refuses a clean volta; the anaphora of 'I love thee' bridges the octave and sestet, eight repetitions in fourteen lines, so the poem feels like one long crescendo rather than a question and answer.
The genius is in what the counting includes. Recycled grief, lapsed religious faith, dead loved ones: each 'way' of loving is built from a previous loss. The poem measures love not by roses but by the ruins it repurposes.
Why it lasts
Sonnet 43 survives its own fame because the sweetness sits on a base of real darkness. A poem that only counted joys would have died on greeting cards long ago; this one keeps the smell of the sickroom and the lost saints in it, and readers feel that weight even when they cannot name it.
It also matters historically. A Victorian woman publishing frank love poems, in a tradition where women were usually the silent objects of sonnets, quietly reversed three centuries of convention. Contest judges still reward that combination of strong feeling and strict structure, and this poem remains the model case; it is the balance Writory's scorers look for when they weigh emotion against craft.
What today's poet can steal
Steal the inventory. Take one abstract feeling and force yourself to count its concrete modes: how it behaves at breakfast, in argument, at a funeral. Repetition with variation ('I love thee' eight ways) gives a poem both spine and swell.
And steal the darkened ledger. Let at least one item in any list of praise be built from a loss. It is the grief in line eleven that makes the joy in line one believable.
What poets can take from this
- Answer a simple question with a numbered list, and make each item a different register of feeling.
- Use anaphora to build pressure, but vary what follows the repeated phrase every time.
- Include one way of loving, or grieving, that costs the speaker something to admit.
- Try a Petrarchan rhyme scheme (ABBA ABBA) and see how the embrace of the rhymes changes your pacing.
- End on a claim that reaches past the poem's present moment, as Browning reaches past death.
Try it yourself
Write a fourteen-line poem that answers one small question ('how do I miss you', 'how do I stay') with a counted list, where at least two of the answers are built from old griefs rather than joys.
Questions
What is the meaning of Sonnet 43, How Do I Love Thee?
The speaker measures her love in every dimension of her life: spiritual reach, daily routine, moral freedom, recycled grief and lost religious faith. It ends by hoping the love will continue, even improve, after death.
What form is How Do I Love Thee written in?
A Petrarchan (Italian) sonnet in iambic pentameter, rhymed ABBA ABBA CDCDCD. Unusually, the repeated phrase 'I love thee' runs across the octave-sestet divide, softening the traditional turn.
Why is the collection called Sonnets from the Portuguese?
The title suggested the poems were translations, giving Barrett Browning cover for very personal work. It was also a private joke: Robert Browning's pet name for her was 'my little Portuguese'.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working poets. Updated July 2026.
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