How do I love thee? Let me count the ways
Elizabeth Barrett Browning
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.
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.
“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). Although the poem is traditionally interpreted as a love sonnet from Elizabeth Barrett Browning to her husband, the poet Robert Browning, the speaker and addressee are never identified by name. In this guide, we use female pronouns for the speaker and male pronouns for the beloved, but the poem itself does not specify these genders and is open to other interpretations.
Summary
How much do I love you? I'll count all the ways I do. I love you to the edges of my soul, when it reaches out for the unseen goals of eternity and oneness with God. I love you as you need to be loved every day, whether during the day or the evening. I love you by my free choice, like those who choose to do the right thing. I love you without self-regard, like those who don’t brag about their own accomplishments. I love you with the passion I used to feel for my old sufferings, and for the religion of my childhood. I love you with a love I thought I had lost when I lost faith in my saints. I love you with my every breath, smile, and tear, and I will for the rest of my life. And if God brings us to heaven, I’ll love you even more in the afterlife.
Themes
Romantic vs. Spiritual Love
In “How Do I Love Thee?” true love is depicted as long-lasting and even eternal. However, the poem also reveals a tension between love as an attachment to earthly life and the things of this world, and love as something that transcends life on earth.
By evoking her religious faith so often, the speaker likens her romantic love for her beloved to a religious or spiritual feeling. At first it seems as if her love for this person on earth might be as powerful as love for God. But while the speaker acknowledges the strength of her romantic feelings here and now, she also expresses the wish that both she and her lover will eventually transcend their earthly lives and go to heaven together, where their love will be, with God’s help, “better after death.” Romantic love, for her, is ultimately closely linked to and perhaps even indistinguishable from love for God.
The poem thus argues that true love is eternal, surpassing space, time, and even death. Although the poem is often read biographically, as an address from the poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning to her husband, this depiction of eternal and all-powerful love could also apply to any human love, since the speaker and addressee are both unnamed in the poem itself.
From the poem’s first lines, the speaker describes her love in terms that sound spiritual or religious. For example, she asserts: “I love thee to the depth and breadth and height / My soul can reach.” Crucially, it is her “soul” that is expanding as a result of her love. Love, for her, engages the soul as well as the body. She also explains that her love helps her “feel” “the ends of being and ideal grace.” “The ends” here connotes the “goals” of existence—which, for the speaker, is the attainment of “ideal grace.” The speaker is clearly evoking the religious meaning of “grace” as a gift from God. If her love gives her grace, then she means that it is bringing her closer to God.
The speaker also writes that she loves her beloved “with [her] childhood’s faith” and “with a love [she] seemed to lose / With [her] lost saints.” Her “childhood’s faith” and her “lost saints” presumably refer to the Christianity in which she was raised. The speaker’s description of her “lost saints” suggests that perhaps she has experienced a loss of faith as an adult, but this new romantic love restores her faith in God and gives her back the love she had “seemed to lose.”
The speaker’s love is undeniably grounded in earthly life; she seems to imagine that she will spend “all [her] life” with this person and devote all her “breath,” “smiles,” and “tears” to them. At the same time, however, she also imagines that her love will continue even after this time. She hopes that, “if God choose,” she and her lover will go to heaven and she will be able to love this beloved "better after death." This implies that the speaker sees romantic love as something that, with faith in God, can continue after death and indeed even deepen.
Ultimately, the speaker’s romantic love does not compromise her love for God. Rather, she likens her romantic love to a religious experience that helps her recapture her “childhood’s faith” and brings her closer to God and “ideal grace.” She prays that God’s salvation in heaven will perfect her earthly love (making it “better after death”) and render it eternal. In this way, the poem argues that romantic love is closely related to—and indeed perhaps transforms into—love for God.
Love vs. Reason
In what is arguably one of the most famous opening lines of a poem in English literature—“How do I love thee? Let me count the ways”—the speaker embarks on a project of listing the ways in which she loves her beloved. The poem thus begins as a means of attempting to justify love in rational terms. By expressing her desire to “count the ways,” the speaker suggests that her love can be explained on an intellectual level. At the same time, however, she admits that love is actually something more profound, spiritual, and dictated by fate. In this sense, her opening determination to “count the ways” in which she loves slowly succumbs to an understanding that love is often not a rational feeling and can’t be explained.
The speaker sets out to “count the ways” in which she loves, and this organizational structure shapes the form of the rest of the poem. Over the course of the poem, the speaker names seven ways in which she loves her partner. This might at first look like a counter-intuitive or overly argumentative format for a love poem, and by framing her declarations in this unusual way, the speaker implies that love can be measured and “counted.”
In particular, she suggests that her love for her partner is reasoned and rational because it is grounded in the everyday, mundane actions of life: “I love thee to the level of every day’s / Most quiet need, by sun and candle-light.” This love isn’t necessarily the stuff of legends or dramatic romances; rather, it exists in mutual bonds of day-to-day care. The speaker also explains that she loves her beloved "purely, as [men] turn from praise,” implying that her love isn’t based on pride or self-aggrandizement. By focusing on these virtues of purity and self-sacrifice, she implies that love can be measured simply in the degree of care one gives the other person.
And yet, even as the speaker declares that her love can be “counted,” she frequently uses language that implies her love is something huge, all-encompassing, and resistant to bounds or limits. For instance, she declares: “I love thee to the depth and breadth and height / My soul can reach,” which sounds potentially infinite. The idea of infinity continues into the end of the poem, when the speaker expresses the desire that she and her beloved will love after death in the afterlife—which is to say, infinitely, because in Christian theology, salvation leads to eternal life in heaven.
“How Do I Love Thee?” begins by declaring that it is possible to “count” the ways in which one loves. But it ends by looking forward to heaven and the afterlife, a time in which it will no longer be possible to measure love, because love will be infinite. In this way, the poem first imagines love as something rational or measurable, but ends by asserting that love sometimes can’t be explained by reason or measured, no matter how hard one might try to do so.
Love as Choice and Freedom
Throughout the poem, the speaker frequently describes love as a free choice based on admiration for a lover’s qualities. Reading the poem biographically, this is a significant choice for a poet, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, who had little choice in her own life: she lived at home until her forties under the power of a controlling and restrictive father. It is thus not surprising that the poem places a high value on choice and freedom as romantic values. For this speaker, love is not just a source of joy or even spiritual fulfillment; it's also a means of achieving freedom within constraining circumstances.
The speaker states: “I love thee freely, as men strive for right.” She thus explicitly frames her love as something that is not coerced or influenced by anyone else, but rather as something that comes from her own agency and free choice. By comparing her love to an effort to “strive for right,” she also connects romantic love to a broader set of ethical values and goals. That is, her love is something that empowers her and gives her the agency to make her own decisions about her life, rather than relying on someone else.
What's more, the poem is written in a first-person voice that gives the speaker an air of authority and reinforces this theme of agency. For instance, she declares “Let me count the ways,” an imperative sentence that puts her firmly in control of the poem’s narrative. She makes frequent use of the “I” and “me” pronouns, which further adds to this sense that the speaker is asserting her own voice and feelings in the poem. The list of ways in which the speaker loves her beloved is also structured like a list of arguments or supporting points, from her opening assertion that she will “count the ways.” The speaker is thus depicted as articulate and confident in defending her choice of partner.
Additionally, the speaker emphasizes that her love is a free choice in her adulthood, as compared to her lack of agency in childhood, when she was told what and how to worship. For example, she claims that she has transferred her “passion” from her “childhood’s faith”—the religion she was taught as a child—and “put [it] to use” in her love for her partner. She admits that she “seemed to lose” her love for her “lost saints,” but now this new love has made her faith more powerful because it is a love of free choice.
Ultimately, the poem makes a powerful equation between love, choice, and freedom. The speaker emphasizes that she loves “freely” and that her affection for her partner is a result of her own assessment of his value. It is not a value imposed from external authority like her “childhood’s faith,” but is rather an expression of her own agency. “How Do I Love Thee?” is a poem that emphasizes the speaker’s power and agency in making her own romantic choices. This is a particularly bold claim for a woman of Elizabeth Barrett Browning's time, when women often lacked the opportunity to exercise agency over their own lives.
얼마나 제가 당신을 사랑하냐고요
제가 그대를 얼마나 사랑하냐고요? 그 방법들을 세어볼게요.
저는 당신을 내 영혼이 닿을 수 있는 깊이와 넓이와 높이만큼
사랑해요, 내 시야를 넘어서 존재와 이상적이 아름다움의 끝을
느끼게 된다고 해도요
저는 당신을 일상의 가장 조용한 필요에서 사랑해요,
낮이나 밤이나 말이에요.
저는 당신을 자유롭게 사랑해요, 권리를 위해 투쟁하는 사람들처럼.
저는 당신을 순수하게 사랑해요, 그들이 칭찬에 변하듯이.
저는 당신을 사랑해요 나의 오래된 고민에 사용하던 열정으로,
그리고 나의 어린 시절의 믿음으로.
나는 당신을 사랑해요 내가 잃은 것처럼 보였던 사랑으로
나의 죽은 성인들과 함께요. 나는 당신을 사랑해요 나의 숨결과,
미소와, 눈물과, 나의 모든 생명으로; 그리고, 만약 신이 허락하신다면,
나는 당신을 죽은 후에 더 많이 사랑할 것입니다.
엘리자베스 배럿 브라우닝은 8세 때 그리스어로 쓰인 <Homer>(호메로스)를 읽고 14세에는 첫 시를 발표할 만큼 천재성을 보였지만 15세에 말에서 떨어져 척추를 다치는 불의의 사고를 당하고 말았습니다. 그 후 그녀는 수년 동안 집안에서 누워지내야만 했습니다. 그러나 그녀는 병상에 있는 와중에도 <An Essay on Mind>(1826)등 여러 시집으로 널리 알려졌습니다. 그녀의 저서 <Poems>(1844)는 그녀에게 큰 성공을 가져다주었고, 로버트 브라우닝(Robert Browning)의 존경을 이끌어냈습니다. 그들은 편지로 사귀기 시작한 뒤 곧 사랑에 빠졌고 1846년 부모 몰래 결혼해 이탈리아로 떠납니다. 그 후 그녀는 15년 동안 이탈리아에 살면서 남편과 함께 행복한 창작 생활에 몰두합니다.
엘리자베스 배럿 브라우닝의 "How Do I Love Thee?"는 병약한 몸으로 시를 쓰는 데만 몰두하던 시인이 자신의 운명적 사랑 로버트 브라우닝(Robert Browning)을 만나 깊은 사랑에 눈 뜨면서 가지게 된 감정을 섬세하고 지적인 화법으로 표현합니다.
시에서 화자는 사랑의 방법에 대해 설명합니다. Depth, breath, height와 같은 표현을 사용해 자신의 사랑이 얼마나 깊은지를 표현합니다. 화자는 자신의 사랑이 본인이 어린 시절에 느꼈던 믿음(faith)과 같다고 말합니다. 이 어린 시절의 사랑에 대한 믿음이란 조건도, 보상도 바라지 않는 맹목적이고 순수한 성질을 가집니다. 화자는 그러한 믿음으로 상대를 사랑한다고 말합니다. 화자의 너무나도 강렬한 사랑은 죽음의 경험을 넘어 그녀의 숨결, 웃음, 그리고 화자가 가진 모든 생명을 통한 사랑입니다. 화자는 죽어서도 이 사랑을 지속할 것이라 맹세합니다.