Sonnet 43

How do I love thee? Let me count the ways... So begins one of the most whispered lines in the English language, a question posed by Elizabeth Barrett Browning to her future husband, Robert Browning, in 1845. The poem that emerged is neither sappy nor sentimental. It is a rigorous, almost mathematical accounting of devotion that builds from earthly passion toward something the speaker calls "the depth and breadth and height / My soul can reach." Written in iambic pentameter with the clean architecture of the Italian sonnet form, Sonnet 43 performs what it preaches: it counts the ways, lists them, and then admits the list is insufficient. The final couplet transcends the material entirely, promising to love better after death than the living ever can. Barrett Browning transforms romantic love into a spiritual exercise, and she does so with such plainspoken clarity that readers have been carrying these fourteen lines in their heads for nearly two centuries. It is the poem people read at weddings, memorize in high school, and return to when language fails them. It endures because it refuses to make love small.