Browning’s ‘How do I love thee?’
Petrarchan Sonnet from the Portuguese
Elizabeth Barrett Browning's speaker in "How do I love thee?" counts the ways that she loves her beloved: there are four ways in the octave and four ways in the sestet.
The sonnet “How do I love thee?” is number 43 in Sonnets from the Portuguese. It is a Petrarchan sonnet with the rime scheme ABBAABBA in the octave and CDCDCD in the sestet.
The Octave
In the octave, the speaker is musing about how much she loves her beloved, and she asks the question, “How do I love thee? ” Then she proceeds to answer the question, so the reader becomes aware the speaker is not literally addressing her beloved, but she is addressing the thought or perhaps even an image of that beloved.
She thus says, “Let me count the ways.” She loves him with all her soul, as that soul strives for an idealism that has to be left up to faith. The soul searches in all directions through “depth and breadth and height” for this idealism, which she speaker calls “the ends of Being and ideal Grace.”
The speaker has begun with the sublime, ethereal level of her love by invoking how she loves her beloved on the spiritual level; then, she brings herself quickly back to the mundane activities of daily life by saying that another way she loves him is through even the smallest daily act whether that act is performed during the daylight hours or during the night, “by sun and candle-light.”
She asserts that her love for her beloved is spontaneous and “freely” given; therefore, she loves him in the way mankind loves freedom and acts correctly in striving to secure and maintain that freedom. She then claims that her love is as pure as those who are humble when praised.
In the octave, the speaker has signified four ways she loves her beloved: spiritually, materially, “freely,” and “purely.”
The Sestet
In the sestet, the speaker counts three definite ways and one possible way that she will love him throughout eternity. She loves him with the same ardor that used to grip her when she faced difficulties, but this “passion” is tempered by the fact that that love is also similar to the love that childhood provided her, an opposite kind of emotion from the one that caused her “old griefs.” This love includes the polar opposites of fear and love, with love tempering the fear in a balanced and useful way.
She also loves the beloved with a kind of respect and admiration that she thought she had outgrown; this group of people could be a fairly large one, including friends, teachers, relatives, and even religious “saints,” the term she uses. But the key word is that she “seemed” to lose this love, but with her beloved, that love is returned to her.
The next way she loves her beloved she asserts in a breathless, almost ecstatic pronouncement: “— I love thee with the breath, / Smiles, tears, of all my life! —“ Placed between dashes that signal an emphasis of expression, this assertion captures the excitement and underscores the passion in the speaker’s claim, while it prepares the reader, or listener, for the last breathtaking claim that “if God choose, I shall but love thee better after death.”
So in the sestet, the speaker again professes four ways in which she loves the beloved: with a passion of meeting former challenges but tempered by a childlike faith, with a kind of love she thought she had lost, and with her whole being. But most importantly for this speaker, she has faith that she will love this beloved eternally.
