How Do I Love Thee? (Sonnet 43)

Love lasts. It seems a simple premise yet one that takes issue with conventional wisdom. Love is love exactly because its impact is sudden, inexplicable, irrevocable, and ephemeral. That is what makes love the emotional miracle it is. If Sonnet 43 is a love poem, it challenges one of the defining assumptions about love. As a powerful expression of intense emotion, conventional wisdom assumes, love cannot maintain that energy. The reality of its impermanence is in fact what gives love its wallop. Its own brevity makes love that most special of emotions. After all, the verb of choice is to fall in love, not step lightly or carefully. Love is tectonic, and because of that, love inevitably fades, as all strong emotions must, from the weight of its own intensity.

Within that dynamic, the best lovers can hope is that love cools into commitment and the consolation of companionship. However, the argument in the poem is the opposite of love’s inevitable cooling: Because love charges and recharges the “depth and breadth and height” (Line 2) the soul can reach, and because it animates the soul even when the object of such intensity is “out of sight” (Line 3), love perseveres.