Stanley Waltz
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1861. 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 feeling out of sight. For the ends of being and ideal grace. I love thee to the level of every day’s. Most quiet need, by sun and candle-light. I love thee freely, as men strive for right.
‘How Do I Love Thee? Let Me Count the Ways,’ or ‘ Sonnet 43’ is one of Browning’s most famous poems. She is a renowned Victorian poet who managed to achieve acclaim in her lifetime.
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 feeling out of sight. For the ends of being and ideal grace. I love thee to the level of every day’s. Most quiet need, by sun and candle-light. I love thee freely, as men strive for right; I love thee purely, as they turn from praise.
“How do I love thee? Let me count the ways” is a sonnet by the 19th-century poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning. It is her most famous and best-loved poem, having first appeared as sonnet 43 in her collection Sonnets from the Portuguese (1850).
The question that opens the poem—“How do I love thee?”—is an example of aporia, the expression of real or pretended doubt in order to make a point. Browning employs aporia as a rhetorical device to emphasize the intensity of love that the speaker feels for her beloved.
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 feeling out of sight. For the ends of being and ideal grace. I love thee to the level of every day’s. Most quiet need, by sun and candle-light. I love thee freely, as men strive for right; I love thee purely, as they turn from praise.
“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.
