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- Elizabeth Barrett Browning's sonnet sequence was written before she married Robert Browning to express her intense love for him.
- Sonnet 43 is the most famous of the 44 sonnets.
- In it, Browning attempts to define her love. The opening of the poem suggests it arises from a question: ‘How do I love thee? Let me count the ways!’
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- The opening line ‘How do I love thee?’ suggests an intimate conversation between lovers.
- ‘Depth’, ‘breadth’ and ‘height’ are weighty concepts which suggest her love is comprehensive and allows her to reach impossible extremes.
- Poem of comparisons – ‘Most quiet need’ and ‘men strive for Right’ are two very different ideas. One is simple and one is complex showing the intensity of her feelings.
- Replaced her faith in God with her love for her husband – ‘lost saints’.
- Final words – ‘I love thee better after death’ suggests even death will not part them. Their love is eternal.
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- Made up of 14 lines and a regular but flexible rhyme scheme.
- The word love is repeated for emphasis and love is compared to holiness ‘lost saints.’
- The way that the lines are broken up by punctuation at the end could represent breathlessness and passion.
- The poem is autobiographical and reflects the struggles that she went through to be with her true love, Robert Browning.
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- Elizabeth Barrett Browning lived a fairly lonely existence until the age of forty, when she met and fell in love with her husband Robert (also a famous poet).
- She was absolutely besotted with Robert. Her father disinherited her after the marriage (as he did with all his children), so from that point onwards, Robert was her world.
- Sonnet 43 was part of a collection of poems that initially, Barrett Browning was hesitant to publish. They were intensely personal, focusing on her love for her new husband, and were not intended to be made public.
- However, her husband insisted they were the best sequence of English-language sonnets since Shakespeare's time and urged her to publish them.
- To offer the couple some privacy, she decided to publish them as if they were translations of foreign sonnets written by poets from other countries. By doing this, she could publish her intensely personal feelings without people realising!
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