payment page
Study Tools
Overview
“How Do I Love Thee?” is a hugely famous sonnet written by the 19th-century British poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning
. Also known as “Sonnet 43,” this poem appeared near the end of Browning’s collection from 1850, Sonnets from the Portuguese. Browning composed this sequence of forty-four sonnets to memorialize her love for Robert Browning, her marriage to whom resulted in a permanent break from her tyrannical father. Notably for a sonnet sequence written in English, Browning used the Italian sonnet form of Petrarch rather than the form later innovated by Shakespeare.Read a summary & analysis, an analysis of the speaker, and explanations of important quotes from “How Do I Love Thee? (Sonnet 43).”
