Ways of Love

Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806-1861) wrote a series of forty-four sonnets, in secret, about the intense love she felt for her husband-to-be, Robert Browning (who was also an important Victorian poet). She called this series Sonnets From the Portuguese (published in 1850), a title based on the pet name Robert gave her: "my little Portuguese." Ways of Love as Sonnet 43 is the next-to-last sonnet in this series, making it an important part of the climax.

Sonnet 43 is a personal declaration of the poet’s intense love for her husband-to-be. Love is a complex, multi-layered and multi-faceted thing in this sonnet which tries to list the different ways in which the speaker loves. The ability to list, articulate, and communicate these different kinds of love is actually part of the way that she loves, which might make the sonnet itself one of the "ways" of loving!

The sonnet form forces the poet to wrap his thoughts in a small, neat package. The rhyme scheme of "Sonnet 43", which is based on the Petrarchan model, is as follows: the octave rhymes ABBA, ABBA; and the sestet rhymes CD, CD, CD. Sonnet 43 is in iambic pentameter. The distinct use of anaphora provides a rhythmic flow and reinforces the theme of love. The word "love" occurs ten times. What varies is the way the love works and how intense it actually is. The thing itself – the word "love" – always remains consistent, reminding us that the speaker 's love for her beloved is a constant and unchanging thing. The phrase "I love thee," repeated until it almost becomes unfamiliar, is the backbone of this sonnet even more than the rhyme scheme or meter. Browning also uses alliteration in the poem: soul, sight (Line 3); love, level (Line 5); purely, Praise (Line 8); lost, love (Line 12) and so on.

She begins describing her love using a spatial metaphor and then says that so intense is her love for him that it rises to the spiritual level:
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.
The speaker conflates her own existence with her feeling of love; the extent of her soul and the extent of her love are actually the same thing.

The poem becomes much more grounded and down-to-earth in the description of the next listed way to love -- "to the level of everyday 's/ Most quiet need." The everyday "need" for love may be "quiet," but it 's definitely there. "By sun and candle-light" also reminds us that the speaker here loves her beloved no matter what light she sees him in. The next two ways of love are enclosed in lines 7-8 where she says she loves him freely, without coercion and she loves him purely, without expectation of personal gain:
"I love thee freely, as men strive for Right
I love thee purely, as they turn from Praise."

The sestet, next, starts such:
I love thee with the passion put to use
In my old griefs, and with my childhood 's faith.
She is also implying in these lines that she loves him with an intensity of the suffering (as denoted by the word 'passion ') resembling that of Christ on the cross. The metaphor of "childhood 's faith" brings with it connotations of naïveté and simplicity, which the speaker claims to be attributes of her love. The two lines which follow are:
I love thee with a love I seemed to lose
With my lost saints –
So this kind of loving is also about faith. We also get the sense that she has a very complex internal emotional landscape. She has felt disillusionment ("lost saints"), loneliness, bitterness ("old griefs"), diasppointments and anger in the past, and all of these affect the way she feels love in the present. References to such less warm and fuzzy feelings lend a more realistic edge to a poem about intense and beautiful love. She also talks about her "childhood 's faith" as though it was in the far distant past, which suggests that this is a mature, older speaker, not a young girl experiencing her first crush.

The speaker next tells us that she loves her beloved "with the breath, / Smiles, tears of all my life!" Following from here, the speaker 's final claim in the poem is:
"and, if God choose, I shall but love thee better after death."
By turning to the eventuality of death at the end of the poem, the speaker acknowledges God 's ultimate power to be the only thing stronger than the love she has for her beloved. Still, she hopes that her love will only grow in the afterlife, instead of fading or changing.

In this sonnet, love is everything. Loving the beloved is the way that the speaker actually knows she exists. In fact, we think this speaker might go so far as to say "amo, ergo sum" – I love, therefore I am. She certainly wouldn 't be the speaker of the poem without her love, or her beloved! By asking "How do I love thee?" she also asks 'Who am I and what kind of love do I feel? ' It is very important to this speaker to find phrases, metaphors, and language that can encapsulate her love, so that she can communicate its complexity to the beloved – and to the reader.

The way the poem is written leaves the gender of both parties in the relationship completely ambiguous. This completes the sense of universality within the poem as any man or woman can relate to it. Maintaining the undefined character of the speaker is part of what makes it such a great love poem for the ages. Barrett Browning 's famous sonnet may be a very formal poem, but it 's also straightforward and relatively accessible. One need not bring one 's mountaineering gear to climb this poem; it 's more like a short walk along the beach.

References: to such less warm and fuzzy feelings lend a more realistic edge to a poem about intense and beautiful love. She also talks about her "childhood 's faith" as though it was in the far distant past, which suggests that this is a mature, older speaker, not a young girl experiencing her first crush. The speaker next tells us that she loves her beloved "with the breath, / Smiles, tears of all my life!" Following from here, the speaker 's final claim in the poem is: "and, if God choose, I shall but love thee better after death." By turning to the eventuality of death at the end of the poem, the speaker acknowledges God 's ultimate power to be the only thing stronger than the love she has for her beloved. Still, she hopes that her love will only grow in the afterlife, instead of fading or changing. In this sonnet, love is everything. Loving the beloved is the way that the speaker actually knows she exists. In fact, we think this speaker might go so far as to say "amo, ergo sum" – I love, therefore I am. She certainly wouldn 't be the speaker of the poem without her love, or her beloved! By asking "How do I love thee?" she also asks 'Who am I and what kind of love do I feel? ' It is very important to this speaker to find phrases, metaphors, and language that can encapsulate her love, so that she can communicate its complexity to the beloved – and to the reader. The way the poem is written leaves the gender of both parties in the relationship completely ambiguous. This completes the sense of universality within the poem as any man or woman can relate to it. Maintaining the undefined character of the speaker is part of what makes it such a great love poem for the ages. Barrett Browning 's famous sonnet may be a very formal poem, but it 's also straightforward and relatively accessible. One need not bring one 's mountaineering gear to climb this poem; it 's more like a short walk along the beach.