How Do I Love Thee

Reading Response: "How Do I Love Thee"

Antiria Jenkins

ENG 125 Introduction to Literature

Instructor: Julie Pal-Agrawal

August 27, 2012

The poem I've chosen to write about is "How Do I Love Thee" by Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Born in 1806, Elizabeth Barrett Browning was a female who developed a love for poetry following a spinal injury that occurred in 1821 from a terrible fall. Browning's "Sonnets from the Portuguese" was published in two volumes titled Poems. In "How Do I Love Thee" Browning declares her spiritual and pure love for her fiancé, Robert, expressing the depth of her love, an attempt to describe the indescribable and the comparison to known feelings and interactions. In this poem, I've found three interesting and engaging elements that have helped me understand this piece of literature: symbolism, word choice (diction) and imagery.

According to Frost, "there are three things, after all, that a poem must reach: the eye, the ear, and what we may call the heart or the mind. It is most important of all to reach the heart of the reader" (Clugston, 2010). In "How Do I Love Thee" Elizabeth Barrett Browning has certainly reached the heart of the readers, especially me. In this sonnet, love is everything and Browning tries to compare and symbolize the love she has for "thee" to many different things. For example, in line 1, she poses the question, "How do I love thee?" (Browning, 1845), which symbolizes that her love is not material, but is given purely and freely to Robert as she explains and reveals the depth of her love for him.

Browning uses a strong word choice throughout the poem. In line 9, she states "I love with a passion put to use" (Browning, 1845) which indicates how deeply in love she is. By using the word "passion" she helped me become more understanding of the type of love she has for "thee". Another word choice used that caught my eyes is line 2and 3 when she says, "I love thee to the depth and breadth and height my soul can reach, when feeling out of sight" (Browning, 1845). From this I gather that she has an endless, eternal love and no matter where she or her soul is, she will always love Robert.

Another literary element Browning uses in "How Do I Love Thee?" is imagery. Imagery is used in lines 5 and 6 when she says, "I love thee to the level of every day's most quiet need, by sun and candlelight" (Browning, 1845). In my opinion, Browning is expressing that she love "thee" from morning to night...from the time she wake up until the time she goes to sleep. This also conveys that humans can't