Summary | How Do I Love Thee? | Elizabeth Browning

Summary | How Do I Love Thee?

How Do I Love Thee is a sonnet that presents the idea of love as powerful and encompassing all. It expresses the poetic persona's passionate feelings for her husband Robert Browning. The poem has a flexible rhyme and a positive language. The poem opens with a rhetorical question. The interrogative mark at the end of the end of the first line makes the poem seem light hearted and playful.

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 She tries to count the ways in which she can express her passionate love for her husband. She brings out the quiet intensity of love by saying her love is deeper and broader and higher than where her soul can reach. She then compares love to weighty important concepts like 'Being and ideal grace'. Then she brings out the quiet intensity of love through a domestic picture she paints by sun and candle light. Love is positive and a powerful force that expresses the endurance of love through old griefs and her love enables her to reach otherwise impossible extremes. The speaker sees her love as something tangible but instinctive or even spiritual. She sees love as a life changing force. Elizabeth sees her lover as a spiritual saviour. She is not totally without faith. She asserts that if God controls her future then she hopes to be reunited with her lover in the afterlife. Thus the poem reflects the passionate love for her husband that is above all other things and is eternal as she ends the poem saying that she will love him better after death.

What does love after death suggest?

  In the poem 'How Do I Love Thee?', the poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning has expressed her passionate love for her husband Robert Browning. The poet expressed her true and passionate love for her husband, she goes on to the spiritual world where she talks of love after death. Her faith in God makes her extend her love even after death by saying that if God chose, she would love him still better after death.

Elaborate on the central idea of the "How Do I Love Thee?".

   Elizabeth Browning, a prolific writer, has written a number of poems. Her poems are extremely beautiful and captivating. In the poem 'How Do I Love Thee?' the poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning has expressed her passionate love for her husband Robert Browning. The poet expresses her true and passionate love for her husband in numerous ways. She has presented the idea of love as powerful and all encompassing. Her love enables her to reach otherwise impossible extremes. She sees her lover as something tangible, instinctive or even spiritual. She sees love as powerful, positive and life changing force. All the comparisons used to express her love evokes the same feeling in the reader. Thus, the poem reflects the passionate love for her husband that is above all other things and is eternal as she ends the poem saying that she will love him better after death.