The speaker counts the ways she loves her beloved, from the spiritual to the everyday, and promises to love him even more after death.
How Barrett Browning's repeated declaration, images of height, depth and light, and religious language make love spiritual, everyday and eternal at once.
How to use the lesson's key quotations in an essay, with a short worked paragraph.
Key quotations: 'How do I love thee? Let me count the ways!', 'I love thee to the depth and breadth and height', 'My soul can reach', 'by sun and candlelight', 'I love thee freely, as men strive for Right', 'I love thee purely, as they turn from Praise', 'and with my childhood's faith', 'With my lost Saints', 'Smiles, tears, of all my life!', 'I shall but love thee better after death'.
Form: a Petrarchan sonnet in iambic pentameter rhyming ABBAABBA CDCDCD, the anaphora of I love thee, and enjambment, dashes and exclamations that make the list feel spontaneous before the final line's climax.
Context: one of the Sonnets from the Portuguese (written 1845–46, published 1850), written during Elizabeth Barrett's secret courtship with the poet Robert Browning; her long illness; the father who disinherited her when they married; and a title that disguised the sonnets as translations to protect their privacy.
Compares well with: She Walks in Beauty (devoted admiration), i wanna be yours (lists of devotion), Valentine (two very different declarations of love) and A Complaint (overflowing love against love lost).
