“How Do I Love Thee?” is the second-to-last sonnet to appear in Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s famous sequence of love poems from 1850, Sonnets from the Portuguese. Browning composed this sequence of forty-four sonnets to memorialize her love for her husband, the fellow poet Robert Browning. Because of this biographical fact, many readers associate the speaker in all the poems with Browning herself. However, since poems like “How Do I Love Thee?” don’t feature specific biographical references to Browning’s life, it’s also possible to read the speaker as a more anonymous figure. This poem, which is also known as “Sonnet 43,” begins with the speaker addressing a rhetorical question to their beloved: “How do I love thee?” This question provides the motivation for what follows, which is essentially a list in which the speaker “count[s] the ways” of their love (line 1). Overall, the speaker describes their adoration in metaphysical terms that underscore the all-encompassing reach of love. The speaker also makes numerous religious references that frame romantic love as a spiritual passion. Though “How Do I Love Thee?” belongs in the same tradition as Shakespeare’s love sonnets, Browning used the Italian sonnet form first developed by the fourteenth-century poet Petrarch.

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