How do I love thee?
by Elizabeth Barrett Browning
How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.
I love thee to the depth and breadth and height
My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight
For the ends of being and ideal grace.
I love thee to the level of every day's
Most quiet need, by sun and candle-light.
I love thee freely, as men strive for right.
I love thee purely, as they turn from praise.
I love thee with the passion put to use
In my old griefs, and with my childhood's faith.
I love thee with a love I seemed to lose
With my lost saints. I love thee with the breath,
Smiles, tears, of all my life; and, if God choose,
I shall but love thee better after death.

Summary
The speaker asks how she loves her beloved and tries to list the different ways in which she loves him. Her love seems to be eternal and to exist everywhere, and she intends to continue loving him after her own death, if God lets her.

In this sonnet, love is everything. Loving the beloved is the way that the speaker actually knows she exists. Trying to list the different types of love that she feels, and to work out the relationships between these different kinds of love, becomes a new way of expressing her affection and admiration for "thee."

  • Line 1: The speaker begins by posing a question that the entire sonnet will go on to answer: "How do I love thee?" It's interesting that the interrogative word here is "how," rather than "why" or "when." This is not really a rhetorical question, because the speaker does answer it, but it operates in a similar way to rhetorical questions because it introduces the poem and gets the reader thinking.
  • Lines 2-4: The speaker uses a spatial metaphor to describe the extent of her love, comparing her soul to a physical, three-dimensional object in the world.
  • These three lines also introduce a lot of sound play into the sonnet. In line two, three words have a "th" sound, and a fourth word ("height") comes close. These breathy syllables soften the line, making it more difficult to fit it into a traditional iambic pentameter rhythm. In fact, throughout the poem there's an excess of "th" sounds, some of them voiced (like the "th" in "thee") and some of them unvoiced (like the "th" in "depth"). It might be interesting to think about how the two different kinds of "th" sounds fall into patterns in the poem.
  • In lines three and four, the poet uses assonance, repeating long "e" vowel sounds in words like "reach," "feeling," "Being," and "ideal." This repeated long vowel sound adds a brighter, livelier quality to the poem. It also reminds us of what the speaker calls the beloved – "thee."
  • There's also an internal rhyme between the word "feeling" in the middle of line three and the word "Being" in the middle of line four. This extra rhyme, along with the rhymes at the ends of the lines, ties the poem together more tightly.
  • Lines 5-6: These are some of the only lines in this poem that actually use concrete imagery – "sun and candle-light" – and even then, it's only images of different kinds of light, not necessarily definite objects. Even more so than other poems, this is an extremely abstract, vague lyric that seems to take place out of this world.
  • Lines 7-9: These lines use anaphora, beginning with the same phrase, "I love thee," as do lines two, five, and eleven. This parallel structure emphasizes that the poem is in many ways a catalog or list of ways of loving, rather than an extended argument or scene like some other poems.
  • Lines 12-14: We can't help but think that claiming you're going to love someone "better after death," whether it's your death or their own, is something of a hyperbole.

Grief and Loss

By including references to her feelings of grief, bitterness, and the loss of innocence, the speaker of this poem gives her love a more realistic edge. The love she feels for "thee" is beautiful and intense, but it's also the follow-up to a series of less warm and fuzzy feelings. She's felt disillusionment, loneliness, and anger in the past, and all of these affect the way she feels love in the present.

  • Lines 9-10: These are the first lines in which the speaker mentions her past "griefs." To emphasize the difficult nature of the grief the speaker has felt, these lines use a subtle chiasmus of sounds, using an "f" and an "s" sound and then repeating them in the reverse order: "griefss faith." In both places, it's actually difficult to read the lines clearly, forcing you to over-enunciate and stress this line more than you naturally would. [...] childhood'
  • Lines 11-12: In these lines, the speaker's loss of her "saints" is counterbalanced by the over-the-top alliteration of four initial "l" sounds and the sibilance of five "s" sounds: "I love thee with a love I seemed to lose / With my lost saints" (11-12).