If thou must love me, let it be for naught except for love’s sake only.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning wrote this line in the midst of her courtship with fellow poet Robert Browning. Their relationship began as a literary correspondence in 1845 and quickly deepened into an intense, private romance conducted under the shadow of her ill health and her father’s strict opposition to marriage. The poem belongs to the sequence later published as Sonnets from the Portuguese (1850), a set of love sonnets that Barrett Browning initially kept personal and that dramatize her anxieties about being loved for contingent reasons—pity, admiration, beauty, or circumstance—rather than for her essential self. The line articulates a plea for love that can endure change.

The speaker asks that love be grounded in nothing external—neither the beloved’s virtues, nor the lover’s compassion, nor any transient quality that time might alter. “For naught except for love’s sake only” insists on love as its own justification: a commitment not dependent on beauty, mood, health, or social advantage. The urgency of the request implies fear that reasons can become conditions, and conditions can fail. In the sonnet’s logic, love that is motivated by anything other than love itself is vulnerable to reversal; love chosen freely and without ulterior cause is the only kind that can remain constant through suffering and change.

If thou must love me, let it be for naught
Except for love’s sake only. Do not say
“I love her for her smile—her look—her way
Of speaking gently,—for a trick of thought
That falls in well with mine, and certes brought
A sense of pleasant ease on such a day”—
For these things in themselves, Beloved, may
Be changed, or change for thee,—and love, so wrought,
May be unwrought so. Neither love me for
Thine own dear pity’s wiping my cheeks dry,—
A creature might forget to weep, who bore
Thy comfort long, and lose thy love thereby!
But love me for love’s sake, that evermore
Thou may’st love on, through love’s eternity.