1How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.
2I love thee to the depth and breadth and height
3My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight
4For the ends of being and ideal grace.
5I love thee to the level of every day’s
6Most quiet need, by sun and candle-light.
7I love thee freely, as men strive for right;
8I love thee purely, as they turn from praise.
9I love thee with the passion put to use
10In my old griefs, and with my childhood’s faith.
11I love thee with a love I seemed to lose
12With my lost saints. I love thee with the breath,
13Smiles, tears, of all my life; and, if God choose,
14I shall but love thee better after death.
“How do I love thee? Let me count the ways” is a sonnet by the 19th-century poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning. It is her most famous and best-loved poem, having first appeared as sonnet 43 in her collection Sonnets from the Portuguese (1850). Although the poem is traditionally interpreted as a love sonnet from Elizabeth Barrett Browning to her husband, the poet Robert Browning, the speaker and addressee are never identified by name. In this guide, we use female pronouns for the speaker and male pronouns for the beloved, but the poem itself does not specify these genders and is open to other interpretations.
How much do I love you? I'll count all the ways I do. I love you to the edges of my soul, when it reaches out for the unseen goals of eternity and oneness with God. I love you as you need to be loved every day, whether during the day or the evening. I love you by my free choice, like those who choose to do the right thing. I love you without self-regard, like those who don’t brag about their own accomplishments. I love you with the passion I used to feel for my old sufferings, and for the religion of my childhood. I love you with a love I thought I had lost when I lost faith in my saints. I love you with my every breath, smile, and tear, and I will for the rest of my life. And if God brings us to heaven, I’ll love you even more in the afterlife.
In “How Do I Love Thee?” true love is depicted as long-lasting and even eternal. However, the poem also reveals a tension between love as an attachment to earthly life and the things of this world, and love as something that transcends life on earth.
By evoking her religious faith so often, the speaker likens her romantic love for her beloved to a religious or spiritual feeling. At first it seems as if her love for this person on earth might be as powerful as love for God. But while the speaker acknowledges the strength of her romantic feelings here and now, she also expresses the wish that both she and her lover will eventually transcend their earthly lives and go to heaven together, where their love will be, with God’s help, “better after death.” Romantic love, for her, is ultimately closely linked to and perhaps even indistinguishable from love for God.
The poem thus argues that true love is eternal, surpassing space, time, and even death. Although the poem is often read biographically, as an address from the poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning to her husband, this depiction of eternal and all-powerful love could also apply to any human love, since the speaker and addressee are both unnamed in the poem itself.
From the poem’s first lines, the speaker describes her love in terms that sound spiritual or religious. For example, she asserts: “I love thee to the depth and breadth and height / My soul can reach.” Crucially, it is her “soul” that is expanding as a result of her love. Love, for her, engages the soul as well as the body. She also explains that her love helps her “feel” “the ends of being and ideal grace.” “The ends” here connotes the “goals” of existence—which, for the speaker, is the attainment of “ideal grace.” The speaker is clearly evoking the religious meaning of “grace” as a gift from God. If her love gives her grace, then she means that it is bringing her closer to God.
The speaker also writes that she loves her beloved “with [her] childhood’s faith” and “with a love [she] seemed to lose / With [her] lost saints.” Her “childhood’s faith” and her “lost saints” presumably refer to the Christianity in which she was raised. The speaker’s description of her “lost saints” suggests that perhaps she has experienced a loss of faith as an adult, but this new romantic love restores her faith in God and gives her back the love she had “seemed to lose.”
The speaker’s love is undeniably grounded in earthly life; she seems to imagine that she will spend “all [her] life” with this person and devote all her “breath,” “smiles,” and “tears” to them. At the same time, however, she also imagines that her love will continue even after this time. She hopes that, “if God choose,” she and her lover will go to heaven and she will be able to love this beloved "better after death." This implies that the speaker sees romantic love as something that, with faith in God, can continue after death and indeed even deepen.
Ultimately, the speaker’s romantic love does not compromise her love for God. Rather, she likens her romantic love to a religious experience that helps her recapture her “childhood’s faith” and brings her closer to God and “ideal grace.” She prays that God’s salvation in heaven will perfect her earthly love (making it “better after death”) and render it eternal. In this way, the poem argues that romantic love is closely related to—and indeed perhaps transforms into—love for God.
In what is arguably one of the most famous opening lines of a poem in English literature—“How do I love thee? Let me count the ways”—the speaker embarks on a project of listing the ways in which she loves her beloved. The poem thus begins as a means of attempting to justify love in rational terms. By expressing her desire to “count the ways,” the speaker suggests that her love can be explained on an intellectual level. At the same time, however, she admits that love is actually something more profound, spiritual, and dictated by fate. In this sense, her opening determination to “count the ways” in which she loves slowly succumbs to an understanding that love is often not a rational feeling and can’t be explained.
The speaker sets out to “count the ways” in which she loves, and this organizational structure shapes the form of the rest of the poem. Over the course of the poem, the speaker names seven ways in which she loves her partner. This might at first look like a counter-intuitive or overly argumentative format for a love poem, and by framing her declarations in this unusual way, the speaker implies that love can be measured and “counted.”
In particular, she suggests that her love for her partner is reasoned and rational because it is grounded in the everyday, mundane actions of life: “I love thee to the level of every day’s / Most quiet need, by sun and candle-light.” This love isn’t necessarily the stuff of legends or dramatic romances; rather, it exists in mutual bonds of day-to-day care. The speaker also explains that she loves her beloved "purely, as [men] turn from praise,” implying that her love isn’t based on pride or self-aggrandizement. By focusing on these virtues of purity and self-sacrifice, she implies that love can be measured simply in the degree of care one gives the other person.
And yet, even as the speaker declares that her love can be “counted,” she frequently uses language that implies her love is something huge, all-encompassing, and resistant to bounds or limits. For instance, she declares: “I love thee to the depth and breadth and height / My soul can reach,” which sounds potentially infinite. The idea of infinity continues into the end of the poem, when the speaker expresses the desire that she and her beloved will love after death in the afterlife—which is to say, infinitely, because in Christian theology, salvation leads to eternal life in heaven.
“How Do I Love Thee?” begins by declaring that it is possible to “count” the ways in which one loves. But it ends by looking forward to heaven and the afterlife, a time in which it will no longer be possible to measure love, because love will be infinite. In this way, the poem first imagines love as something rational or measurable, but ends by asserting that love sometimes can’t be explained by reason or measured, no matter how hard one might try to do so.
Throughout the poem, the speaker frequently describes love as a free choice based on admiration for a lover’s qualities. Reading the poem biographically, this is a significant choice for a poet, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, who had little choice in her own life: she lived at home until her forties under the power of a controlling and restrictive father. It is thus not surprising that the poem places a high value on choice and freedom as romantic values. For this speaker, love is not just a source of joy or even spiritual fulfillment; it's also a means of achieving freedom within constraining circumstances.
The speaker states: “I love thee freely, as men strive for right.” She thus explicitly frames her love as something that is not coerced or influenced by anyone else, but rather as something that comes from her own agency and free choice. By comparing her love to an effort to “strive for right,” she also connects romantic love to a broader set of ethical values and goals. That is, her love is something that empowers her and gives her the agency to make her own decisions about her life, rather than relying on someone else.
What's more, the poem is written in a first-person voice that gives the speaker an air of authority and reinforces this theme of agency. For instance, she declares “Let me count the ways,” an imperative sentence that puts her firmly in control of the poem’s narrative. She makes frequent use of the “I” and “me” pronouns, which further adds to this sense that the speaker is asserting her own voice and feelings in the poem. The list of ways in which the speaker loves her beloved is also structured like a list of arguments or supporting points, from her opening assertion that she will “count the ways.” The speaker is thus depicted as articulate and confident in defending her choice of partner.
Additionally, the speaker emphasizes that her love is a free choice in her adulthood, as compared to her lack of agency in childhood, when she was told what and how to worship. For example, she claims that she has transferred her “passion” from her “childhood’s faith”—the religion she was taught as a child—and “put [it] to use” in her love for her partner. She admits that she “seemed to lose” her love for her “lost saints,” but now this new love has made her faith more powerful because it is a love of free choice.
Ultimately, the poem makes a powerful equation between love, choice, and freedom. The speaker emphasizes that she loves “freely” and that her affection for her partner is a result of her own assessment of his value. It is not a value imposed from external authority like her “childhood’s faith,” but is rather an expression of her own agency. “How Do I Love Thee?” is a poem that emphasizes the speaker’s power and agency in making her own romantic choices. This is a particularly bold claim for a woman of Elizabeth Barrett Browning's time, when women often lacked the opportunity to exercise agency over their own lives.
How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.
The speaker begins with a rhetorical question, or aporia: "How do I love thee?" Her use of the pronoun "thee" (an old-fashioned form of the second-person pronoun "you") immediately positions the poem as an apostrophe, or direct address, from the speaker to her beloved. (Since the poem is often read biographically, as an address from the poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning to her husband, we use female pronouns for the speaker and male pronouns for the addressee in this guide. Note, however, that the poem itself does not actually specify their genders.) In the nineteenth century, the word "thee" tended to signal greater intimacy and familiarity with someone. From the first lines of the poem, then, the speaker signals her close and intimate connection to the person she is addressing.
The speaker then answers her own rhetorical question—"How do I love thee?"—by declaring: "Let me count the ways." This is an assertive, declarative sentence that positions the speaker as firmly in charge of the poem's narrative, an impression furthered by her frequent use of "I" and "me" pronouns throughout. By expressing her intention to "count the ways," the speaker seems to be announcing an argument or defense of why she loves her beloved. By stating that she will "count the ways," the speaker shows that she believes that love is something that can be measured or counted. She thus sets up the expectation that this poem will take the form of an organized list of the reasons why she loves her beloved—almost like an argument or rational debate rather than a spontaneous expression of feeling.
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.
Unlock all 329 words of this analysis of Lines 2-4 of “How do I love thee? Let me count the ways (Sonnets from the Portuguese 43),” and get the Line-by-Line Analysis for every poem we cover.
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Get LitCharts A+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.
“How do I love thee?” is a poem noticeably lacking in symbols, perhaps because it often relies instead on expressions of feeling or evocations of God and spirituality.
Lines 5-6 thus stand out for their more humble tone, focusing on everyday objects rather than abstract concepts like love and the soul. Specifically, the speaker refers to her love for her beloved “by sun and candle-light”:
I love thee to the level of every day’s
Most quiet need, by sun and candle-light.
On a literal level, the “sun” refers to daylight, while “candle-light” refers to the use of candles to provide light in the evening in an era when there was no access to electricity and artificial light. “Sun and candle-light” are thus symbols of the speaker’s love for her partner at all times, during both the hours of sunlight and the hours of darkness. This pair of symbols emphasizes the poem’s idea of true love as constant and unconditional, since it shows that the speaker's love is always present.
More profoundly, however, “sun and candle-light” might also be read as symbols for life and death. This reading is supported by the speaker’s claim later in the poem that she will love her beloved “better after death,” suggesting that her love will persist into the afterlife. The seemingly banal and everyday image of love by “sun and candle-light” might then also become a symbol for eternal true love that overcomes death itself.
The poem uses assonance several times throughout, usually to reinforce connections between words and highlight the literal meanings of the lines.
The strongest instance appears in lines 3-4, when the speaker makes repeated use of the long /e/ sound:
My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight
For the ends of being and ideal grace.
The sonic resonances across these two lines give the impression of poetic harmony and unity. This is fitting for a poem that emphasizes the speaker's strong sense of connection with her beloved and with her faith. The lines depict a union between two people as well as a union between the speaker's "soul" and what she calls "ideal grace," a religious term referring to the idea of salvation and oneness with God. The poem's use of assonance thus formally mirrors its concern with themes of spiritual and romantic unity.
Similarly, the repeated use of the word "thee"—itself an example of anaphora in the repetition of the phrase "I love thee"—is also a form of assonance. In lines 6-9, for example, the long /e/ sound appears frequently, often in the repetition of those words:
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
The impression is of a repeated chorus of /e/ sounds across these lines. This adds not only to the speaker's sense of unity with her beloved but also to the impression that her addressee—the "thee" commonly thought to be her husband—is present everywhere, both in the poem and in the real world.
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Get LitCharts A+Select any word below to get its definition in the context of the poem. The words are listed in the order in which they appear in the poem.
"Thee" is an old-fashioned word meaning "you." In the nineteenth century, calling someone "thee" often indicated familiarity or intimacy, so it is fitting that the speaker refers to her beloved using this term.
“How do I love thee?” is a sonnet—which is no surprise, since it first appeared in a collection titled Sonnets from the Portuguese (1850). Because it is a sonnet, the poem has 14 lines. So far, so conventional.
However, “How do I love thee?” isn’t a traditional English sonnet, which typically has three sections of four lines called quatrains, followed by a final, two-line couplet. Instead, “How do I love thee?” is an Italian or Petrarchan sonnet. (This form of sonnet is called “Petrarchan” after the great medieval Italian lyric poet Petrarch, but he didn’t invent the form.)
In contrast to the English sonnet, the Italian sonnet is divided into two sections: a section of eight lines, called an octave; and a section of six lines, called a sestet. The English sonnet typically has a “turn,” or change of subject, in the final two lines, whereas the Italian sonnet will not necessarily have a turn.
In this poem, the second section—the sestet—does introduce a new subject: the speaker’s sense of the division between the love she feels now and the juvenile loves of her “childhood’s faith” and “old saints.” She then ends the poem looking forward to yet another transformation over time, from the love of her life to the hope of love in the afterlife. In this sense, the form of the Italian sonnet allows the speaker to introduce new themes and subjects, while maintaining a greater sense of flow and continuity between the lines than an English sonnet might allow her.
The choice of the Italian sonnet form is also significant given that Barrett Browning titled her poetry collection Sonnets from the Portuguese. This title gave the impression that perhaps the poet had translated the work from a lost original, allowing her a way of avoiding the scandal or stigma of authorship that could sometimes attach to women poets. By using a “continental” rather than English sonnet form, the poet may have been trying to give the impression that the poem is of an exotic or foreign origin.
The poem is written in iambic pentameter, the traditional meter of both the English and Petrarchan sonnet forms. Each line of the poem consists of 10 syllables, broken up into five two-beat metrical feet. In turn, each metrical foot in iambic pentameter consists of one unstressed syllable followed by one stressed syllable, as in lines 2-3:
I love | thee to | the depth | and breadth | and height
My soul | can reach, | when feel- | ing out | of sight
Here the stress falls evenly, over every other syllable. This is typical, as “How do I love thee?” generally follows a very regular meter. However, there are some moments in which even this highly metrically regulated poem breaks the iambic meter. One example occurs in the very first line of the poem:
How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.
Although it would be possible to read this line as “How do I love thee?” this iambic stress of syllables sounds a bit odd, as if the speaker is questioning whether or not she really does love the speaker. Instead, it seems more likely that the first metrical foot should be read as a trochee, a stressed syllable followed by an unstressed syllable: “How do I love thee?” The emphasis on “how” the speaker loves seems a more natural fit with a poem that is concerned with the “how” of loving and endeavors to “count the ways” in which the speaker loves. This departure from the meter might also fit with the speaker’s understanding of love as eternal and all-powerful, and thus capable of occasionally breaking through the metrical structure that guides the poem.
Because “How do I love thee?” is a Petrarchan rather than an English sonnet, it follows a different rhyme scheme than, say, a sonnet by Shakespeare. An English sonnet typically follows the rhyme scheme of ABAB CDCD EFEF GG, in which four rhyming quatrains are followed by a rhymed couplet. However, the Petrarchan sonnet consists of a rhyming octave followed by a rhyming sestet, for the rhyme scheme of:
ABBA ABBA CDC DCD
At the beginning of the sonnet, the rhymes are fairly regular and predictable. "Height" (line 2) and "sight" (line 3), as well as "day's" (line 5) and "praise" (line 8) are elegantly matching rhyme sounds that offer a sense of sonic regularity and symmetry in the poem's first eight lines.
In the following sestet, however, the rhymes are not always as predictable. "Use" (line 9) and "lose" (line 11), for example, is more of a slant rhyme, with sounds that don't entirely match with one another. This impression of possible misalignment is appropriate, because the speaker is describing the sense of temporal distance and discontinuity she feels between the love she "seemed to lose / With my lost saints" and the passion she has "put to use" now for her beloved.
Otherwise, however, the poem's very regular rhyme scheme mirrors the poem's preoccupation with themes of unity and wholeness, providing a sonic match for the sonnet's ideal of true love as perfect understanding and harmony.
The speaker of “How do I love thee” is often identified with Elizabeth Barrett Browning, the author of the poem. The addressee of the love poem is then usually assumed to be Robert Browning, her husband.
This biographical reading certainly lends depth and interest to readers' understanding of the poem. Barrett Browning suffered from illness and spent much of her adult life in her childhood home, under the control of her father. She dramatically escaped in order to elope with Browning when she was in her 40s, an unusually late age for marriage in the 19th century. This understanding of Barrett Browning’s history makes it significant that she places so much emphasis on freedom and choice in love, given the restricted life that she led when she lived for so long in her father’s house. It also lends new context to the poem’s reference to the speaker’s “old griefs” and loss of faith in the religion of her childhood.
At the same time, however, this is not the only way to read the poem, since the speaker and addressee are never identified by name. The poem’s themes of unconditional, unselfish, and eternal love remain applicable to many other contexts outside Barrett Browning’s life, which perhaps accounts for the poem’s enduring popularity over the centuries.
"How do I love thee?" is not set in a specific physical environment or historical context. Biographically, it might be read as a love poem from the 19th-century poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning to her husband Robert Browning. In this case, it's possible to regard the poem as set in the mid-19th century, around the date that the poem was published (1850), a reading lent strength by some period details like the reference to "candle-light." However, the poem does not necessarily need to be read that way. In fact, the speaker frequently makes reference to eternity, suggesting that she sees the poem as depicting a love that continues outside the bounds of a particular time or place.
Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806-1861) was a poet of the Victorian era, or the period of the 19th century in which the United Kingdom was ruled by Queen Victoria. Her poems were very popular at the time, and attracted the attention of Robert Browning, a prominent poet in his own right. He wrote to her, “I love your verses with all my heart, dear Miss Barrett,” and they secretly married years after their first meeting. During the years of their marriage, Browning and Barrett Browning greatly influenced one another’s poetry. For instance, one of Browning’s volumes of poetry, Men and Women (1861) had a title taken from a line in Barrett Browning’s Sonnets from the Portuguese (1850).
Other famous writers of the Victorian era who admired Barrett Browning’s work include the poets William Wordsworth and Alfred Tennyson, author of famous poems like “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud” (1807) and “The Charge of the Light Brigade” (1854), and the novelist William Makepeace Thackery, author of Vanity Fair (1848).
Barrett Browning also had particularly important relationships with other women writers. As a young woman, she had read and greatly admired Mary Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Women (1790). While living in Europe, she met George Sand, the pioneering French woman novelist who wrote under a male name. In turn, Barrett Browning’s work—especially her long poem Aurora Leigh (1856), which tells the semi-autobiographical story of a woman writer—was a source of inspiration for later women poets and activists like Emily Dickinson and Susan B. Anthony.
Elizabeth Barrett Browning wrote in the mid-19th century, during the Victorian period of British history. Queen Victoria ruled Great Britain from 1837 to 1901. That period witnessed profound transformations in British society, economic organization, and culture. It was the era in which Great Britain arguably peaked in its international prominence and influence, as the British Empire extended across much of the known world. The British economy, meanwhile, benefited significantly from the Industrial Revolution, as inventions like the train, the telegraph, and the telephone transformed people's ability to travel and communicate with one another.
In some ways, the Victorian period was an era of greater democracy that granted more political power to ordinary people. The 19th century saw the growth of the labor movement, more working-class people gaining the right to vote, and higher incomes and standards of living. At the same time, however, industrialization led to new social ills, like widespread urban poverty and slum living, overcrowding due to the massive growth of the British population, and disease epidemics.
A similar paradox attended the role of Victorian women like Barrett Browning. Increasingly, women could gain respect and prestige as authors of novels, poetry, and prose in their own right. At the same time, Victorian women were still very constrained in their ability to work and lead independent lives in a society that regarded them as the property of their husbands and fathers. Barrett Browning's increasing interest in women's rights was marked by her reading of feminist thinker Mary Wollstonecraft, her notably egalitarian marriage with Robert Browning, and her more liberated life on the European continent, where she socialized with other women authors and spent much of her life in middle age.
Another Take on "How Do I Love Thee?" — A solid, line-by-line analysis of the poem from Owlcation.
The Original Manuscript — Read the poem in Barrett Browning's handwriting, courtesy of the British Library.
The Scandal of 1846 — An informative article about the marriage and scandalous elopement of Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Robert Browning.
The Peanuts Version — Listen to a charming version of the poem read aloud on "Be My Valentine, Charlie Brown."
Elizabeth Barrett Browning 's Life Story — A great introduction to the poem and biography of Elizabeth Barrett Browning.