Comment on the intensity of passion expressed in "How Do I Love Thee". (NU 2010) Or, " Comment on Elizabelh Barrett Browning's use of Imagery in sonnet "How Do I Love Thee".

Ans. Elizabeth Barrett Browning's sonnet "How Do I Love Thee?" is remarkable for its singere expression of love.There she
frankly declares her love for her husband with considerable degree,of passionate intensity. In a desperate attempt to count her love, the poet uses a number of imáges. The images are very often
conventional, yet they have been an effective tool to express the strong feelings of the poct for her husband.
Elizabeth Barrett Browning is made so humble by love that she attempts to describe its nature. The poem begins with a seif- question- "How do I love thee?" It is clear that she is attempting to
"count" or assess her love. The second person address is directed to towards her husband. Although she poses this dramatic question, she already knows the answer, as she confesses:
I love thee to tlhe depth and breath and height
My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight
For the ends of Being and ideal Grace.
She loves him from the core of her heart. In fact, her attempt to measure her love proves futile because her love knows no bound. Her experience of love reaches such a height that she feels an eestatic joy. Her feeling reaches its utmost boundary, "to the ends of Being and
ideal Grace." Her declaration of love is pregnant with intense passion and unlimited joy. Her love is, however, not of abstract kind. Rather, she expresses
it in terms of everyday experience. She loves him and craves for him as one desires for the daily necessities. She loves him to the level of everyday's "most guiet need". In fact, her life would not. go on normally withouf being in love with him. Her love is eandid and it is an essential ingredient of her life. She is so bold and self-confident that she compares her condition with that of a man wlio struggles to establish his own right with a single-minded devotion. As she utters:
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.

Her devotion to her husband is akin to her religious experience. She loves him with her "childhood faith". Again, her love amounts to the love of Christian saints towards God. She feels love at instingtual
level and her whole being is dipped into it. As if, her very existence depends on this love. Moreover, it is not a matter of today and tomorrow: her love will last forever, not only in this world but also in
the world after. She is convinced that it is possible for her to meet and live with her husband if God wills so.