How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.
I love thee to the depth and breadth and height
My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight
For the ends of Being and ideal Grace.

These lines open Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Sonnet 43 from Sonnets from the Portuguese, a sequence written during her courtship with fellow poet Robert Browning in the mid-1840s. Barrett Browning had been an invalid for years and lived under the restrictive control of her father; the relationship and eventual elopement (1846) marked a dramatic personal turning point. The sonnets were composed as intensely private love poems and later published (1850) under the guise of “translations” to preserve intimacy and modesty. Sonnet 43 is the best-known of the sequence, presenting love as immeasurable in spiritual and moral dimensions rather than merely physical or social terms.

The speaker attempts to “count” love’s ways, but the language immediately expands beyond arithmetic into spatial and metaphysical measurement: “depth and breadth and height / My soul can reach.” Love is framed as an act of the soul stretching toward ultimate realities—“the ends of Being and ideal Grace”—suggesting that true love participates in the infinite and the divine. The phrase “when feeling out of sight” implies that love persists beyond immediate emotion or circumstance, reaching past what can be sensed. The sonnet’s power lies in translating private devotion into a universal scale, where love becomes both a spiritual aspiration and a comprehensive mode of existence.