How difficult is this poem? Let me count the ways

Sonnets from the Portuguese 43: How do I love thee? Let me count the ways
By Elizabeth Barrett Browning

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.
I love thee to the level of every day’s
Most quiet need, by sun and candle-light.
I love thee freely, as men strive for right;
I love thee purely, as they turn from praise.
I love thee with the passion put to use
In my old griefs, and with my childhood’s faith.
I love thee with a love I seemed to lose
With my lost saints. I love thee with the breath,
Smiles, tears, of all my life; and, if God choose,
I shall but love thee better after death.

Despite its title, Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s 43rd Sonnet from the Portuguese, “How do I love thee? Let me count the ways,” is not an attempt to quantize her feelings for her equally poetic husband, Robert Browning, as she leaves her claim of doing so purposefully unfulfilled, but rather a qualitative comparison of her love for him and her own capacity to love, the former begging to exceed the latter.

The fact that she loves her husband very much is beyond apparent, the second and third lines encapsulating her love that is felt “to the depth and breadth and height [that her] soul can reach,” leaving, metaphorically, no room for anything else. Within the 14 lines of the poem, she writes “I love thee” 8 times, excluding the title, which includes another. She nails home that her love for him is unwavering and pure and full of passion, and that there is no possibility of being able to love him more, all within the first few lines. How and why, then, does she have so much else to say?

I have, I believe, the reasonable assumption that sonnets are written with every word being well structured and filled with intent and purpose. Of popular forms of poetry, only the sonnet has such defined structure to it; each sonnet consisting of 14 lines — 3 quatrains and a couplet — each line consisting of typically 10 syllables phrased in iambic pentameter — as Browning does here. Such structure is not limiting in the sense of creative freedom, but purely in word count. If every word were 2 syllables long, a poet would only have 70 words to work with, which, for context, this paragraph is already way beyond.

When every word counts, it is difficult to imagine the depth behind each line and word of this poem. Some words can be safely ignored, namely “I love thee,” as its repetition is worthy of note but not overanalysis, but most cannot, each conjunction and adjective and preposition providing more than a little context for each line. Take, for example, the twelfth line, “I love thee with the breath, smiles, tears, of all my life.”

Each word serves a unique purpose. She separates possession of her breath, smiles, and tears, by only laying claim to her own life, showing how, in effect, those breaths, smiles, and tears are of consequence of having her life. This is emphasized by her distinctive “the” as opposed to “my,” which she applies later to describe her possession of her life. Beyond that, looking at each of the three, “breath” appears the most neutral, “smiles” has a positive connotation, and “tears” a negative one. As for why she mentioned all three could be indicating how irregardless of her own state and livelihood, she believes that her love for him remains constant.

Immediately after, she writes that “if God choose, I shall but love thee better after death,” ending the sonnet in perhaps an effort to demonstrate how her love is one that transcends death, but also declaring that her love is subject to change via God’s will. She also loses a word from the more common phrase “I shall naught but,” which is a creative, and still recognizable, way in which she conserves the number of syllables she has available to use.

The issue with such limitations in structure is that a lot more is left ambiguous. “I shall but love thee better after death” makes little to no sense; why would she say that she can love him with her breath, smiles and tears, which encompasses the fallible reality of human life, if she has the capacity to love him more after death? By mentioning God, the easiest assumption is that life in heaven is liberating; without earthly troubles, love can be a sole focus, but yet, she claims loves him with those imperfections as much as she loves him with much else.

An interesting consequence of this difficulty is that, as metaphors and other figurative language are derived from, she relies a lot on comparisons, and along with said difficulty, each comparison is equally inexplicable. Each “I love thee” introduces another comparison, where she demonstrates love in a slightly different way. Other than the ones I already mentioned, she loves him “to the level of every day’s most quiet need… freely… purely… with the passion put to use in my old griefs and with my childhood’s faith… with a love I seemed to lose with my lost saints.”

That’s a lot of ways to describe something, and does not entirely mitigate the issue of how much is “a lot.” Several lines compare her love for him to sensations of daily life — which provides more context than merely other concepts — such as “to the level of every day’s most quiet need,” which frankly leaves more questions asked than answered. What is every day’s most quiet need? How can a day even have needs? They are lines that are written beautifully and elegantly, but feel as if just a little more is necessary for them to be understood, voids of which the reader themselves have to fill in.

The difficulty of fully understanding such a poem is the inherent structural ambiguity of the sonnet form, and logical arguments that rely solely on assumptions to perform, a combination of which leaves me to wonder just how much I might be missing from the love I give, and whether or not it’s even worth it to count the ways from which love exists, or maybe that’s just too confusing. However, for all it’s worth, Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s answer is 8.