How Do I Love Thee? (Sonnet 43)

It is a given that the poet and the lover are soul mates. The poet confesses in Lines 2 and 3 that the love felt for the significant other is measured only by the reach of the soul itself. The idea of soul mates has become a catch-all phrase to suggest that the meeting between the two was destined and that their union was inevitable. Within this secular reading, the soul is a symbol that suggests an element of love that defies time. In the sonnet, however, the poet uses the symbol of the soul not as a symbol at all but as a real element of the human psyche, a gift from a real God who monitors the reach, depth, and breadth of a soul that is itself on loan from that same God. The poem invokes the concept of the Christian soul without the contemporary secularization of it into an abstract.

Here the soul elevates the love rather than expresses the love. Because the soul is the property of an all-seeing God, its involvement in the affairs of the heart makes that love cosmic in its implications. That the energy of the poet’s feelings can be quantified as grace (Line 4) further underscores the elevated import of the soul.