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| La Pia de' Tolomei, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, 1860. |
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.
The particular rhythm that the words establish in the first line is a simplistic iambic pentameter constructed entirely of monosyllables: “How do I love thee? Let me count the ways”. This establishes from the beginning a false sense of security that the poem will be simple in it’s reading, and creates a fantastic contrast between a simple question which warrants a complex answer.
Browning describes her love for her husband-to-be as indescribable and immeasurable: “I love thee to the depth and breadth and height my soul can reach...” which embodies a sense of indeterminate quantity, much like the phrase ‘how long is a piece of string?’ So deep is her love for him, she says, that it rises to the spiritual level, indicated by the words ‘Being’ and ‘Grace’, significant because of their capitalisation.
In the next lines, her love for him is equalled to the level of a basic need to survive “by sun and candle-light”; day and night indicating that this does not stop even when she is sleeping. The octave wraps up by listing some of the ways she loves him: freely; without coercion and as intensely as men who fight for freedom, purely; without expectation of personal gain.
The spiritual level is revisited in lines 9-12, likening her love to the intensity of sacrifice for which Jesus suffered on the cross, and she reinforces her true love by rejecting her childish love of saints and projecting her betrothed as her new God to be worshiped.
“I love thee with the breath, smiles, tears of all my life!” This line echoes the traditional lines of a wedding vow, invoking love through the good times and the bad, and is a reminder that this sonnet is not wasted on unrequited love, but they are indeed betrothed. Browning loves her betrothed with a love that is never ending, again like the wedding vows ‘for as long as we both shall live’, and eternally “...if God choose, I shall but love thee better after death”.
Browning’s use of repetition of the phrase ‘I shall love thee’ through 8 lines of the sonnet reinforces the theme and emits her feelings of love as unmistakable. It is not mere affection that Browning is feeling, she has likened her love to a spiritual level while at the same time openly turning her back on her traditional faith, placing it instead on subjectivity.
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