How Do I Love Thee? (Sonnet 43): Themes

The All-Encompassing Reach of Love

The octave of Browning’s sonnet broadly emphasizes the all-encompassing reach of love. Love affects every aspect of the speaker’s life. For instance, they assert that their love is closely linked to the “level of every day’s / Most quiet need” (lines 5–6). Yet even as the speaker’s love permeates the most banal aspects of their daily life, it also transcends everyday experience. They make this point clear in lines 2–4:

I love thee to the depth and breadth and height
My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight
For the ends of being and ideal grace.

These lines describe something we might call a metaphysical space—that is, a space that goes beyond normal, physical space. The speaker’s love has a “depth,” “breadth,” and “height” that cannot be mapped out with physical measurements. Instead, the speaker estimates the dimensions of this space in terms of how far their “soul can reach” as it extends itself to “the ends of being.” We can’t grasp the magnitude of this space in any precise way. However, the sheer length of this three-line sentence gives us an intuitive understanding of how capacious such as space must be. Thus, the speaker’s love encompasses everything from the drudgery of the common day to the furthest bounds of “ideal grace.”

Love as an Expression of Freedom

At the end of the sonnet’s octave, the speaker makes the point that the adoration they feel for their beloved is a matter of choice, and therefore of freedom. The speaker articulates this idea somewhat explicitly in line 7: “I love thee freely, as men strive for right.” To love freely is to love for reasons of the heart rather than for reasons related to social, economic, or political obligation. As such, the speaker asserts the sovereignty of their love. Interestingly, the speaker underscores this notion of sovereignty in the second half of the line. When they say they love freely “as men strive for right,” their use of the word right doesn’t just refer to what’s morally or factually correct. Instead, their use of right relates to the legal definition of the word, which refers to something to which a person is entitled or else has a just claim. For example, democracies theoretically serve to protect the rights of their citizens and so preserve their individual freedoms. So, if the speaker pursues love “as men strive for right,” they are saying that the act of devotion is itself an expression of their individual rights—which is to say, of their freedom.

Love as a Spiritual Passion

There exists a long tradition of love poetry that attributes a spiritual power to love. Ideas about the spirituality of love take different forms. However, the basic idea is that one person’s love for another person can serve as a reflection or expression of a yet greater and purer form of love. The speaker of Browning’s sonnet powerfully references this tradition in the sestet (lines 9–14):

I love thee with the passion put to use
In my old griefs, and with my childhood’s faith.
I love thee with a love I seemed to lose
With my lost saints. I love thee with the breath,
Smiles, tears, of all my life; and, if God choose,
I shall but love thee better after death.

As the speaker moves from the octave to the sestet, they turn from metaphysical abstraction to more concrete and personal reflection. One of the central points highlighted in this shift is the fact that the speaker had a strong sense of faith when they were a child, but that at some point in their development that faith was tested. The speaker indicates that their spiritual sense of love seemed to dissipate alongside all their “lost saints.” However, the love they now feel for their beloved has somehow renewed that same form of love. Romantic love and spiritual love are therefore inextricably linked, which may explain why the speaker insists at the poem’s end that their love will survive death.

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