A close reading of Elizabeth Barret Browning’s 1891 poem titled, “How do I love thee?” reveals that it is also constant, boundless, and eternal. This paper would argue that Browning’s poem is a reckoning of the attributes of true love.
The poem, “How do I love thee is a petrachan sonnet made up of the traditional 14 lines divided into two sections of rhyming octave and sestet, with ABBA ABBA CDC DCD rhyming pattern, written in iambic pentameter (Houghton). The speaker of the poem is probably the poet, who is possibly responding to her lover’s demand for an account of her love for him. In the first line, the poet repeats the question, perhaps, startled and surprised that he doubts her love: “How do I love thee?”
Nevertheless, in the same line, she quickly recovers her composure and says to him, “Let me count the ways.” In line 2-3, she uses a metaphor and cascading polysyndeton with enjambment to declare her love as expansive and as boundless as her soul can reach: “To the depth and breadth and height my soul can reach.” She continues, still in line 3, to assure him that her love is not fickle or dependent on proximity but remains undiminished even when he is far away: “when feeling out of sight”. According to Houghton, lines 3-4 use assonance of the long /e/ sound to emphasize the union of her soul with that of her lover: “My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight.” “ For the ends of being and ideal grace.”
Furthermore, in line 4, the poet makes a supernatural leap to the divine in an overflow of love that can no longer be contained, and her words take on a religious allusion when she declares that the end of every creature and every ideal is to be in the grace of God: “For the ends of being and ideal grace.” Similarly, in lines 5- 6, the poet uses enjambment and bright imagery to continue elaborating on her boundless love, insisting that her love meets the need of each day and it does not cease, “by sun or candlelight”, the sun and candle light symbolizing the extending of her love through night and day.
The poet repeats the phrase, “I love thee” at the beginning of lines 7, 8 and 9, this is an anaphora that demonstrates the intensity of her love. She also declares that she loves him freely “just as men freely strive for justice,” in other words, she loves him because it is the only right thing to do. “Even as men turn from praise,” means that she does not seek any personal gain by loving him, she is not after what she can get, but rather gives her love without any strings attached.
Subsequently, in line 9 there is a shift in her tone and her declarations of love take on a more personal and unhappy shade, she declares that she loves passionately and forever even when disappointed. Love always involves suffering and heartbreaks and the true test of love is to accept all the failures and imperfections of the beloved since, “Love bears all things, believes all things, and endures all things (New Jerusalem Bible 1Corinthians 13:7).”
Likewise, in line 11-12, she proclaims that just like some saints falter but are not discouraged, but rather continue to strive to love God, so too does she love. In lines 12-13 enjambment, she affirms that her love encompasses all the elements of her life such as her breath, her smile and her tears; no condition can alter her love. In the last line, she asserts that her love is eternal and forever because she would love him even more when she is dead. This is an allusion to the Christian belief of life after death: “and, if God choose, I shall but love thee better after death.”
In conclusion, Elizabath Barret Browning’s poem, “How do I love thee?” can be read as a tally of the intrinsic attributes of true love, since every true love needs the property of constancy that makes it dependable and strong, unaltered by the ravages of time. Furthermore, by its very nature, true love is an unlimited free gift of self to another and finally, true love is forever and eternal, undiminished by death.
by Chinwuba Iyizoba
Authors-choice: Hope & Revival 
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