The poem “Sonnet 43” by Elizabeth Barrett-Browning is
about love taken from The Sonnets From the Portuguese, a book first published
in 1850. The entire poem is actually the poet trying to answer the first line
of the poem, which is; “How do I love the?” The reader does not expect the poet
to answer this question, because it is not only a rhetorical question, but also
it seems almost impossible to answer this question. However, the poet does a
brilliant job doing that by “Counting the ways” of how she loves “thee”. The
main message of this poem is that the poet wants to describe her very powerful
feeling of love for someone. This poem causes the reader to almost explore the
poet’s passion for her feeling of love, due to the strong words used by the
poet and by the repetitive statement “I love thee”.
The poem starts by the poet asking a rhetorical question;
“How do I love thee?”, with poet counting the ways how she loves “thee” instead
of trying to explain how she loves “thee”. She does so because she cannot possible
explain her love, so she starts with listing some, perhaps the most passionate
ways of her love towards “thee”. The next few lines of the poem are the poet’s
way of trying to express a way of how she feels. She states “I love thee to the
depth and breadth and height”, which means she loves him in all possible
directions. She includes this line in the poem to explain that there is not one
direction in which she does not have the feeling of love. The poet then goes on
by explaining her constant feeling of love by stating that she loves “thee by
sun and candle-light”. This means her feeling of love for “thee” is a constant,
never ending feeling. The line simply means that her love is like light, it is
always there, and whether it is the sun providing the light at day or it is the
candle providing the light at night.
