Elizabeth Barrett Browning (the Speaker)

The speaker of "Sonnet 43" is Elizabeth Barrett Browning herself—or a lyric persona closely aligned with the biographical poet, blurring the line between author and speaker. Writing within the Sonnets from the Portuguese (1850), she embodies a woman in the full intensity of mature love, employing the Petrarchan sonnet form (fourteen lines, an octave followed by a sestet) as both a vessel and a space for emotion that pushes against formal limits. She serves as an introspective philosopher, passionate lover, and devout believer. Rather than cataloguing the external qualities of the beloved, she turns inward, measuring love against the invisible architecture of the soul: "the depth and breadth and height / My soul can reach." This inward focus defines her—she is a poet of interiority, mapping feelings with the precision of a surveyor charting unmapped territory.

Though the poem is short, its emotional trajectory is genuine and purposeful. The speaker begins with a near clinical question—"How do I love thee?"—as if intending to take inventory. This opening gesture is an act of humility; she does not assume she can answer easily. What follows is a deepening exploration. The early measurements ("to the depth and breadth and height / My soul can reach") are spatial and abstract. As the poem progresses, it transitions into moral and ethical registers: she loves "freely," "purely," loves "with the passion put to use / In my old griefs." Her motivation is not conquest or performance but the drive to understand and articulate the totality of a feeling that seems to surpass ordinary language. By the sestet, she shifts from enumeration to confession, revealing that loving this person has restored something lost—a childhood faith she once mourned. The culminating motivation is spiritual surrender: love, she concludes, is not merely earthly but destined by divine will to outlast death itself.

• The opening question ("How do I love thee? Let me count the ways"): This rhetorical pivot underpins the entire poem. Framing love as something to be counted indicates that the speaker values precision and honesty over vague sentiment.
• The spatial measurement ("to the depth and breadth and height / My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight"): The phrase "out of sight" is vital—she situates love in dimensions beyond sensory perception, establishing the poem's spiritual vocabulary right from the start.
• The confession of restored faith ("I love thee with a faith I seemed to lose / With my lost saints"): This line is the poem's most emotionally vulnerable moment. The speaker acknowledges a prior spiritual desolation, crediting the beloved with healing it—a remarkable inclusion in a love poem.
• The closing couplet ("and, if God choose, / I shall but love thee better after death"): The conditional "if God choose" does not indicate doubt; it expresses theological deference. The speaker's confidence is unwavering—she acknowledges that even eternity is subject to divine authority, not that her love might fail.

With the Beloved: The unnamed "thee" is the gravitational center of the poem. The speaker's entire emotional and spiritual inventory—grief, joy, moral aspiration, childhood faith—is directed toward him. The relationship showcases total surrender without self-erasure; she offers the fullness of her past and her soul, meaning the beloved receives not a diminished or idealized version but the complete self.

With God: God appears only at the poem's conclusion, yet His presence retrospectively sanctifies everything that precedes it. By citing divine will as the force that may carry her love "better after death," the speaker situates her human devotion within a theological context. The earlier mention of "lost saints" implies a woman who once felt spiritually abandoned; the message is that human love has become a pathway back to faith, with God recognized as the silent guarantor of love's permanence.