How Do I Love Thee? (Sonnet 43): Historical & Literary Context

Love Poetry

“How Do I Love Thee?” belongs to an ancient and revered poetic tradition dedicated to the expression of romantic love. In fact, the oldest poem ever found in writing was a love poem. During excavations in the Mesopotamian region, a well-preserved clay tablet was discovered containing a love song addressed to a certain King Shu Shin. Love poetry has appeared in every human civilization both before and after. The Ancient Egyptians wrote love poems, as did the Greeks and the Romans. Perhaps one of the most famous love poems from the ancient world is “The Song of Songs” (also known as “The Song of Solomon”), an erotic poem that appears at the end of the Hebrew Bible. Love poetry continued to thrive in medieval and early modern Europe. The most famous English-language love poet from these periods is undoubtedly William Shakespeare, whose sonnets addressed to a “fair youth” and a “dark lady” plumb the complex depths of love and attraction. But Browning’s own poem most takes after the work of the fourteenth-century Italian poet, Francesco Petrarch. Petrarch’s numerous love poems to a woman he called “Laura” inaugurated the very sonnet form on which Browning based “How Do I Love Thee?”

Women in Victorian England

Browning lived during the Victorian period, which was a time of massive economic growth and societal change in England. As industrialization churned on into the nineteenth century and people flocked from the country to the city, British urban centers became crowded and subject to poverty and disease. Even so, working-class people enjoyed expanded voting and labor rights and an overall increase in their standards of living. Women both did and did not benefit from these economic and social shifts. For even though many aspects of daily life were changing, Victorian morality remained rigidly conservative and patriarchal. Men—whether fathers, husbands, or brothers—continued to exert control over women’s lives. As such, although women did participate more vocally in public life, their independence remained highly circumscribed and mostly constrained to the domestic sphere. However, a robust movement for women’s rights can be traced throughout the nineteenth century, beginning with Mary Wollstonecraft’s influential 1792 book, A Vindication of the Rights of Women. Wollstonecraft’s work made a significant impression on Browning, who lived her first thirty-nine years under a tyrannical father. Browning’s feelings about women’s rights were further strengthened after she eloped to the European Continent, where she lived a more liberated life.