I love thee to the depth and breadth and height my soul can reach.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning wrote this line in one of the love sonnets she composed during her courtship with fellow poet Robert Browning. Their relationship began through correspondence in the mid-1840s and culminated in their secret marriage in 1846, after which they left England for Italy. The sonnets—intensely personal yet shaped in the Petrarchan tradition—were later published as *Sonnets from the Portuguese* (1850), a title chosen to present the poems with a veil of privacy. The line comes from Sonnet 43, the sequence’s most famous declaration of expansive, measured devotion.

The speaker tries to quantify love by mapping it onto physical dimensions—“depth and breadth and height”—as if affection could be measured like space. Yet the measuring instrument is the soul, suggesting love exceeds ordinary limits and reaches toward the infinite. The phrase “my soul can reach” implies both aspiration and constraint: love extends as far as the self is capable of spiritual and moral growth. In the sonnet’s larger movement, this expansive love is not merely romantic feeling but a total commitment that encompasses daily life, ethical striving, and even the hope of permanence beyond death.