How Do I Love Thee? (Sonnet 43)

Study Guide

Literary Devices

Meter

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Literary Devices Meter

Browning wrote “How Do I Love Thee?” in iambic pentameter, which has long been the preferred choice for English-language sonnets. Lines in iambic pentameter consist of five iambs, and each iamb has an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed syllable, as in the word “to-day.” The reason for iambic pentameter’s popularity among sonneteers is that its length strikes an ideal balance: at once avoiding the sing-song quality of shorter lines and shirking the prose-like sound of longer lines. Iambic pentameter thus helps maintain an appropriately heightened sense of poetic language. In “How Do I Love Thee?,” Browning makes fairly strict use of iambic pentameter, though she does introduce some metrical variations that give the poem rhythmic complexity. As a characteristic example of the poem’s meter, consider the opening four lines:

How do / I love / thee? Let / me count / the ways.
I love / thee to / the depth / and breadth / and height
My soul / can reach, / when feel- / ing out / of sight
For the / ends of / be-ing / and i- / deal grace.

The first line opens with a trochee (stressed–stressed) before switching to iambic meter, which Browning then maintains strictly in the next two lines. But this rhythm gets interrupted in the fourth line, which opens with a series of three trochees and concludes with two iambs. These variations enrich the speaker’s language, preventing it from getting too regular and predictable.