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Elizabeth Barrett Browning's sonnet sequence was written before she married Robert Browning to express her intense love for him. Sonnet 43 is the most famous of the 44 sonnets. In it, Browning attempts to define her love. The opening of the poem suggests it arises from a question: "How do I love thee? Let me count the ways!"

Attitudes, themes and ideas

Sonnet 43 presents the idea of love as powerful and all-encompassing; her love enables her to reach otherwise impossible extremes:

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.

As well as the use of lists to imply the comprehension of her love, "feeling out of sight" tells us that the speaker sees her love not as something tangible but instinctive or even spiritual.

The poem is autobiographical: it refers to "my old griefs". (Browning had strong disagreements with her parents and was eventually disinherited.) The passion she applied to these "griefs" has been applied more positively to her love, demonstrating that she sees love as a positive, powerful and life-changing force.

Barrett Browning mentions her loss of religious faith in this sonnet: "I love thee with a love I seemed to lose/With my lost Saints!" Her lover becomes a spiritual saviour. She is not totally without faith, however: "if God choose,/I shall but love thee better after death". Here she asserts the idea that if God controls her future then she hopes to be reunited with her lover in the afterlife.

Like Sonnet 43 the Shakespearean Sonnet 116 is part of a larger sonnet sequence, and insists on the endurance of love.

Structure

Sonnet 43 is the length of a traditional sonnet (14 lines) but otherwise does not follow the rules. There is a fairly regular rhyme scheme, but this is flexible, and Browning often makes use of assonance (for example "Praise" and "Faith"), which is striking because the poem is about defining the perfect love, and yet the poem...