Hi, and Welcome
to our site on Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Poem, "How Do
I Love Thee?"
Click Here for the poem by itself,
here for the section on repitition and alliteration,
here for the rhyming patterns in the poem,
and
here for some links concerning the author
and the poem itself.
here for the test on this poem.
This poem, "How do I Love Thee," is an iambic pentameter poem, starting with an unaccented syllable, and then an accented syllable. It has five feet per line, thus the name "pentameter." It is also a lyric poem. Lyric poems are poems that have a lot of emotion, sparks your imagination, and has a melody, rather like a song. Some examples of lyric poems are hymns, sonnets, songs, light verses, and epigrams.
"How do I love Thee" has some
personification. The places where there are personification are
in lines 3 and 4, "My soul can reach, when feeling out of
sight/For the ends of Being and ideal Grace."
The similes in the poem are in lines 7 and 8, "I love thee
freely, as men strive for Right/ I love thee purely, as they turn
from Praise."
In this poem, there are a lot of repetition with the "t" and the "th" sound. Below, I have highlighted the spots where the "t" and the "th" sound shows. I also underlined some phrases that she uses a lot to emphasize the meaning of the poem.
This poem is an Italian sonnet, because of it's rhyming patterns, shown below. The poem has a masculine rhyme, which means that the rhyming word is a one syllable word, in general.
| How do I love thee? Let me count the ways. | A |
| I love thee to the depth and breadth and height | B |
| My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight | B |
| For the ends of Being and ideal Grace | A |
| I love thee to the level of everyday's | A |
| Most quiet need, by sun and candle-light. | B |
| I love thee freely, as men strive for Right; | B |
| I love thee purely, as they turn from Praise. | A |
| I love thee with the passion put to use | C |
| In my old griefs, and with my childhood's faith | A |
| I love thee with a love I seem to love | C |
| With my lost saints, - I love thee with the breath, | D |
| Smiles, tears, of all my life! - and, if God choose, | C |
| I shall but love thee better after death. | D |
Elizabeth
and Robert Browning--This has some information on some of
the sonnets that she has written, and also some information on
her life in general.
Elizabeth Barrett Browning--Biography, and Links to other Browning sites.
The Poetry Archives--This is very useful if you want to look up specific poems by Ms. Browning. Sorry, i cannot give you a link to the poems on there by Elizabeth Browning, because it is formatted using CGI, and that's different for each computer.
Women's Studies--Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Links about Browning Everything you ever wanted to know about Browning are probably featured on one of the sites linked at this page. Check it out.