The sonnet is usually read as a declaration of romantic love to Robert Browning. I have read some interpretations on it, but wasn’t convinced by all the academicism. I saw another current running underneath it: a woman who has been confined by illness, by her father, by the limits imposed upon her body and by the expectations surrounding her, suddenly discovers an enormous appetite for life.
And that makes the opening almost startling:
“How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.”
She spends the entire sonnet trying to measure something that has become immeasurable.
The remarkable thing is that she doesn’t describe Robert very much. We don’t really get a portrait of him. Instead, she describes the dimensions of her own capacity to love:
“I love thee to the depth and breadth and height
My soul can reach…”
That is where I think it becomes particularly interesting.
The beloved may be the object of the love, but perhaps he is also the occasion through which something already imprisoned inside her becomes possible.
She had been living in an extraordinarily restricted physical and emotional world. Her father controlled the family, including her relationships; her health had made her life largely confined to her room. And yet her intellectual and imaginative life was enormous. She wrote, read, translated, corresponded, and lived intensely through language.
Then Robert Browning enters.
And suddenly the language of the sonnet becomes spatial: depth. breadth. height.
It is almost as though a woman whose physical world had become very small suddenly discovers that her inner world has no walls.
And there is another line I find fascinating:
“I love thee with the passion put to use
In my old griefs…”
She doesn’t say that Robert has given her passion.
She says she already possessed passion, but it had previously been invested in grief.
That’s very close to the idea of something being born inside her and then deposited, so to speak, upon someone outside herself.
The energy was already there.
Love gave it somewhere to go.
And then:
“I love thee with a love I seemed to lose
With my lost saints…”
Her childhood religious faith had apparently been deeply important to her, and she experienced its loss as another deprivation. So the sonnet is almost constructing a bridge between different kinds of devotion:
faith → grief → love → life.
And then comes the extraordinary ending:
“I shall but love thee better after death.”
Even death cannot defeat the force she is describing.
So there is a paradox here: the poem appears to be about giving herself to another person, but in the process she discovers the enormous size of herself.
And I think that may be why it is so compelling, for although health history was complicated, and we can’t medically attribute her improvement to Robert Browning. But something undeniably changed in her life after their relationship began.
She eventually escaped her father’s control, married Robert secretly, left England with him, and lived in Italy. And yes, she experienced a dramatic transformation in her circumstances. She became a mother and had a son, Pen, despite having spent years being regarded as extraordinarily fragile.
There is something almost symbolic about that.
A woman who had been treated as though life itself were too dangerous for her eventually gave birth to another life.
And perhaps that is why I wouldn’t reduce Sonnet 43 to a conventional Victorian love poem.
It can be read as a poem about reclaimed vitality.
Robert Browning may have been the person she loved, but the force of life that rushed toward him was hers.
He may simply have given her permission to discover that it had never gone out.
And there is one more beautiful complication: she doesn’t rebar her love to a hero rescued her.
She says, essentially:
Look how much I am capable of loving.
It turns the sonnet from a declaration of dependence into something much closer to an awakening. Robert did not create the enormous soul we encounter in the sonnet. He gave it room.
Perhaps that is one of the deepest forms of love: not filling someone, not rescuing someone, not becoming their whole world, but making enough space for the world already inside them to unfold.
And I notice how little the sonnet actually tells us about Robert himself. She doesn’t praise his eyes, his face, his voice, his charm. Instead, almost the entire poem is occupied by the expansion of her own inner landscape:
“the depth and breadth and height
My soul can reach…”
It is as though Robert becomes the horizon against which she finally discovers her own dimensions.
And this makes the final movement even more powerful:
“I love thee with the passion put to use
In my old griefs…”
There it is again: the passion was already hers.
The woman who had been confined to a room, controlled by her father, weakened by illness, and deprived even of the ordinary freedoms of adult life possessed this astonishing reservoir of feeling. Robert didn’t manufacture it. He encountered it and, apparently, had the wisdom not to make it smaller.
That may be why their relationship seems so transformative.
He seems to have said, in effect:
“Your world is enormous. Come, let us live in it.”
And perhaps that is why Sonnet 43 feels almost too large for a love poem.
She is not merely saying “I love you.”
She is discovering, through loving him, how much life was still alive inside her.
The real subject may be hidden in every measurement she makes:
the dimensions of a soul finally given space. I like people who love. They love life and the opportunity of coming to this world no matter what.
And like a tiny plant emerging from a crack that has accumulated a minuscule amount of nutrients, life always finds its way.