19 pages • 38 minutes read
Elizabeth Barrett BrowningHow Do I Love Thee? (Sonnet 43)
Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1850A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Further Reading & Resources
Related Poems
"Sonnet 44" by Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1850)
The closing work from the cycle of love poems published as Sonnets from the Portuguese, the poem brings together the idea of two lovers finding their way to a stable relationship. The poem compares this love to a garden that, through the tender and diligent care of her lover, will always flower, season after season. The poem reflects Browning’s belief in the reassuring existence of the love she has found.
"I, being born a woman and distressed" by Edna St. Vincent Millay (1923)
What Browning’s sonnet marginalizes, the body and the senses, Millay makes central. Influenced by the Portuguese cycle, Millay, a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet, echoes Browning’s Petrarchan structure here but infuses the theme of an empowered woman who hymns a committed and reassuring love with an uncompromising and (for the time) shocking celebration of a woman’s sensual hungers. Unlike Browning, Millay tests the tension between what her brain tells her to do (convention) and what her body demands she do.
"Sonnet 131 (I’d sing of Love in such a novel fashion)" by Petrarch (c. 1356)
Perhaps the template for what became the Petrarchan sonnet, this example reveals how Browning followed the rhythmic and rhyming elements of the classic Renaissance sonnet but resisted Petrarch’s desperate emotional emptiness. Here the elegant sonnet is basically a wish that if the poet had been given a chance to love his distant and inaccessible woman, he would have written stunningly original love poems. Browning’s Sonnet 43 can be read as an answer to this poet’s plaint of discontent.
Further Literary Resources
"Elizabeth Barrett Browning and the Energy of Fandom" by Eric Eisner (2007)
This article, first published in the prestigious Victorian Review, explores the years during which Elizabeth, then a promising poet with an increasing reputation, received letters from a little-known poet named Robert Browning whose admiration for her work ignited their love story. The article provides a critical historical context to approach the cycle of poems in the Portuguese collection, which catapulted Elizabeth into national celebrity.
Dared and Done: The Marriage of Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning by Julia Markus (1995)
Still considered the finest (and most reliable and least sensationalized) biographical account of the much-storied relationship that provides Sonnet 43 with its historical grounding, the work balances the biographical and historical data points with line-by-line analysis of the Portuguese sonnets. The argument finds Sonnet 43 as less a love poem and more a “contested textual space that tests the logic of the heart and realities of the soul” and concedes to the omnipotence of God.
"Elizabeth Barrett Browning: A Poet’s Quest for Ultimate Reality" by Linda M. Lewis (2005)
Sonnet 43 is most often treated as a separate piece, Browning’s defining achievement. This essay explores the full range of Browning’s work and finds a consistent theme in her exploration into the dynamics of the soul, a reflection of her era’s fascination with the dynamic between established Christian doctrines and the revelations of the new sciences. This article, later published in Lewis’ full-dressed book-length study, reveals Browning as a thoughtful philosophical intellect, an ultra-transcendentalist, and a singular expression, given her era, of an independent woman.
Listen to Poem
Oscar-winner Dame Helen Mirren delivers the poem humbly, taking the greatest measure in the sonnet’s deliberate uses of pauses, and gathering emotional momentum quietly, rather than grandly, toward that closing prayer.
Related Titles
By Elizabeth Barrett Browning
