Love in Elizabeth Browining's 'How Do I Love Thee?' (sonnet 43)

The author uses different ways and topics to convey it feelings and to make the readers symphatize with her.

Elizabeth Browning used first person to write “Sonnet 43” so you can feel identified with her and her feelings of love and hapiness. “How do I love thee? Let me count the ways” This is a really powerful line to start the poem because by reading it you can already know what the poem is going to talk about. It also demostrates how sure the author was about her feelings. “I love thee to the deph and breadth and height”. Here she is trying to express her love (something intangible and abstract) through tradicional and rational measures contrasting it with the fourth line “ For ends of Being and Ideal Grace”, wich talks about something more religious and espiritual. The relationship between the author and her lover is really strong because she needs him as “sun and candle light”, this means that she needs him as much as she needs basic thing. This line can also be interpreted as day (sun) and night (candle light) meaning that her love lasts forever. “I love thee freely, as men strive for right”. By this you can notice that loving this person is an author’s choice as she is free and she can decide whatever is right for her.

A powerful topic in Sonnet 43 is Religion and its importance on Browning’s relationship. By reading it you can realize that the author is a very religious person. “I love thee with a love I seemed to lose with my lost Saints” This could refer to someone she has loved before but she lost it or maybe she lost her faith once but now, by finding the right person for her she started believing again. “I love thee with the breath, smiles, tears, of all my life” The love that she feels make her feel alive and happy. I feel like she loves this person as much as she loves God and this is shown in the last line “If God choose, I shall but love thee better after death”, she trusts on God and she knows that her love is unconditional and eternal.

In conclusion, I think Elizabeth Browning with this poem tried to connect two important topics (love and religion) so the readers could feel identified and could understand how are both connected in some way.