How Do I Love Thee? (Sonnet 43)

Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1850

A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.

Download PDF

Summary

Background

Poem Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Literary Devices

Background

Literary Context

Sonnet 43 follows the template for a Petrarchan sonnet, a genre of lyrical poetry defined more than four centuries before Browning by Italian poet Francesco Petrarca (1304-1374) in the earliest decades of the Renaissance. Sonnet 43, however, both is and is not a Petrarchan sonnet. Although structurally the poet follows the conventional formal expectations—14 lines of iambic pentameter following the rhyme scheme ABBA ABBA CDECDE—thematically the poem breaks radically from its own defined literary context.

Petrarch believed that the sonnet, Italian for “little song,” was the perfect vehicle for exploring love and the dynamics of affection and yearning. Across more than 20 years, Petrarch would pen more than 350 sonnets, each a love poem for a woman known to contemporary readers only as Laura. Given that Petrarch studied for the priesthood, his love sonnets are infused with the aura and elevation of Christian vision. So far, this sounds similar to Browning. However, Petrarch never had so much as a conversation with the woman he worshipped. Thus, the classic Petrarchan sonnet centers on unrequited love, a fusion of ideal love and deep sorrow. That Browning would take that literary model and use it to create sonnets that celebrate a fulfilling and immediate passion gives the Petrarchan sonnets of hers a radical buoyancy and sensuous energy.

If Browning altered the emotional energy of the Petrarchan sonnet, she also brought a woman’s perspective to a genre that men dominated for three centuries. Browning’s publishers, although certain of the literary merit of her sonnets, feared the poems were too risqué and that there would be a public backlash over the idea of a woman sharing such intimate emotions, thus the charade that Browning was the translator of poems from Portuguese Antiquity.

Historical Context

Much as with the tradition of the Petrarchan sonnet, Elizabeth Barrett Browning was more apart from than a part of her own Victorian historical context.

It is a revealing sidenote that in the second-floor bedroom of Emily Dickinson ("Hope Is the Thing With Feathers," "If I should die," "There's A Certain Slant of Light") in distant Amherst, Massachusetts, there hung a sketch of Browning. Browning’s poems charged Dickinson, some 20 years her junior, with excitement at the possibilities Browning’s celebrity gifted to young female poets. Like Dickinson, Browning was self-taught, and her emotional evolution was shaped by an overprotective father who struggled to keep his talented and sensitive daughter apart from a world the father perceived as a threat. Like Dickinson, Browning suffered a profound emotional wounding that spiraled into years of seclusion—Dickinson from the departure of a minister she had long loved from a distance, and Browning from the drowning death of her loving brother.

However, there are critical differences that define Browning’s historical context. Unlike Dickinson, Browning emerged from seclusion under the profound experience of love. Her relationship with Robert Browning ("My Last Duchess," "The Last Ride Together," "Porphyria's Lover") was the stuff of Hollywood: The story of Browning’s defiance of her father and her elopement with the dashing poet Robert Browning became both a celebrated Broadway play and later a film, The Barretts of Wimpole Street. Unlike Dickinson, Browning published during her lifetime and enjoyed a national celebrity that eclipsed her husband’s fame, penning works like Aurora Leigh (1856) and her famous collection Sonnets from the Portuguese (1850). She also used her writing skills as a platform for discussing social issues, such as championing the abolition of American slavery, the regulating of child labor at home, and extending universal voting rights to women. Because of her sonnets that explored the reality of the feminine heart, she would influence a generation of British and American women poets, in addition to Dickinson, most notably Christina Rossetti ("Remember," "Goblin Market") and Edna St. Vincent Millay ("The Ballad of the Harp-Weaver," "Lament"). Through her courageous participation in the national debate over an assortment of hot button issues, Browning defines her hybrid historical context, underscored by the emotional vulnerability and unapologetic vigor of Sonnet 43 itself: Browning was a Victorian by temperament but a Romantic at heart.