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.
On This Page: Summary · Background · Analysis and Themes · Form and Technique · Notable Lines · In Popular Culture · Related Poems
Summary
The speaker asks how she loves the person she is addressing, and answers her own question by listing the ways.
She loves to the furthest reach her soul can stretch; she loves in the quiet routine of ordinary days, by daylight and candlelight alike; she loves freely and purely, as a matter of moral choice rather than reward. She loves with the intensity she once spent on old sorrows and on the religious faith of her childhood, and with a devotion she thought she had lost along with loved ones now dead. She loves with every breath, smile, and tear of her whole life — and, if God allows it, she expects to love even more fully after death.
The poem sets out to count love’s forms and ends by showing that love cannot be counted at all.
Background
Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806–1861) was one of the most celebrated poets of the Victorian age. This sonnet is the forty-third of the forty-four that make up Sonnets from the Portuguese, written around 1845–46 during her secret courtship with the poet Robert Browning and published in 1850.
Despite the title, the poems are not translations: they are entirely her own, and the “Portuguese” was a private screen — drawn partly from Robert’s pet name for her, “my little Portuguese” — that let her publish these intensely personal poems behind a fiction of distance.
The biography presses hard on the poem. Barrett Browning had been ill and semi-reclusive for years, living under the rule of a father who forbade his grown children to marry. She had also known severe loss — most devastatingly the drowning of her brother Edward in 1840 — grief that deepened her seclusion and shook the religious certainty of her youth. When she and Robert eloped to Italy in 1846, she was effectively disowned.
All of this matters here, because the love the sonnet describes is not the bright optimism of a young first romance; it is a love built, late and against the odds, out of a life already marked by sorrow.
Analysis and Themes
The poem is so familiar — the wedding reading, the line nearly everyone can half-quote — that it is easy to miss how strange and how shadowed it actually is. It opens like a tidy counting exercise and becomes something that defeats counting; and the love it catalogues is assembled less from happiness than from grief, loss, and faltering faith.
A Count That Defeats Itself
“Let me count the ways” promises an enumeration — something finite, listable, almost arithmetical. But the very first “way” already reaches past measurement: she loves to the “depth and breadth and height / My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight.” The dimensions are spatial, but the feeling immediately goes “out of sight,” beyond the reach of any ruler. From there the ways multiply — the phrase “I love thee” tolls eight times — but they never resolve into a total. The counting conceit is a trap the poem springs on itself: it sets out to quantify love and proves, line by line, that love overflows every quantity. By the end the only honest measure left is one that cannot be measured at all — more love, even, after death.
A Love Built from Grief
This is the part the poem’s sweet reputation tends to hide. The love here is made out of old pain. She loves with “the passion put to use / In my old griefs,” with “my childhood’s faith,” and — most striking of all — with “a love I seemed to lose / With my lost saints.” Those “lost saints” are the loved ones death had taken and the religious certainties that loss had worn away. What the poem describes, then, is not fresh young feeling but love reconstructed: she redirects toward a living man the whole force of devotion she had once given to the dead and to a faltering faith. For someone who had buried family and spent years as a near-invalid, loving Robert is a resurrection of feeling she thought was gone for good. The poem’s tenderness is hard-won, salvaged out of mourning rather than untouched by it.
Better After Death
Most love poems treat death as the threat at the edge of the frame. This one turns it into the final intensifier: “I shall but love thee better after death.” Death is not a limit on the love but the condition under which it deepens. And the small conditional that precedes it — “if God choose” — is doing real work. Barrett Browning does not simply assert that her love is immortal; she submits its immortality to divine grace, humbly, as something granted rather than owned. The sonnet that began by trying to measure love hands over its very eternity to God in its last breath. Human devotion and religious faith do not merely coexist here: the one is poured into the other.
Form and Technique
“Sonnet 43” is a Petrarchan (Italian) sonnet: fourteen lines of iambic pentameter, divided into an octave rhyming ABBA ABBA and a sestet rhyming CDCDCD. The governing technique is anaphora — the repeated “I love thee,” sounded roughly eight times — which turns the poem into a litany or a vow, a rhythm of affirmation closer to prayer than to argument.
Against that steady repetition, Barrett Browning runs her sentences over the line endings, so the feeling keeps spilling past the form’s neat boundaries; the emotion is always overflowing the container built to hold it. The volta, or turn, is gentle rather than abrupt, sliding from the soul’s vast reach toward the intimacy of the close. And the central conceit — answering “how” with a count — gives the poem a deceptively logical scaffolding, against which the sheer immeasurability of the love registers all the more sharply. In the final lines the dashes fracture the meter into something breathless, as if the speaker can no longer keep the feeling in orderly rows.
Notable Lines
Three moments carry the poem’s opening conceit, its quiet centre, and its closing leap.
How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.
Line 1
Probably the most famous opening in English love poetry. It frames the whole sonnet as an act of counting — the very thing the poem will spend its fourteen lines quietly disproving.
I love thee to the level of every day’s
Lines 5–6
Most quiet need, by sun and candle-light.
The turn from cosmic scale to the domestic. After reaching for the limits of the soul, the poem grounds love in the plainest fabric of ordinary life — a constant presence by daylight and by candlelight, in good times and dark ones alike.
Smiles, tears, of all my life! — and, if God choose,
Lines 13–14
I shall but love thee better after death.
The close gathers a whole life’s feeling — smiles and tears together — and then, with a humble conditional, hands its eternity over to God. Death becomes not the end of the love but the point at which it grows.
In Popular Culture
Few single lines of poetry have travelled as far.
A line that became a catchphrase: “How do I love thee? Let me count the ways” long ago slipped its moorings to become everyday shorthand for devotion, endlessly quoted, parodied, and borrowed. Its second clause alone has titled pop songs across the decades — among them numbers called “Let Me Count the Ways” by The Temptations (1976) and Yoko Ono (1980).
The love story on stage and screen: The courtship behind the sequence became a popular drama in its own right. Rudolf Besier’s play The Barretts of Wimpole Street (1930) dramatized Elizabeth’s romance with Robert Browning and her tyrannical father, and was twice filmed by Hollywood, in 1934 and again in 1957.
Related Poems
If this sonnet speaks to you, these three make natural companions.
- Sonnet 14 (“If thou must love me”) by Elizabeth Barrett Browning: The great counter-statement from the same sequence — a plea to be loved “for love’s sake only,” not for any quality that time might change.
- Sonnet 116 by William Shakespeare: The other towering English sonnet on a love that defies time and circumstance, insisting that true love “alters not” — a natural foil to Barrett Browning’s vision of love outlasting the grave.
- Remember by Christina Rossetti: Another Victorian sonnet that sets love against death — though Rossetti chooses release and gentle forgetting where Barrett Browning chooses eternal increase.