Speaker

The speaker of the poem “How Do I Love Thee?” by Elizabeth Barrett Browning is not clearly stated in the poem. The poem does not offer any information about the speaker or the person they are addressing. However, it is widely accepted that the speaker is the poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning herself and the person she addresses is her husband, Robert Browning, to whom she dedicated the collection this sonnet belongs to. 

The poem is told from the first-person perspective of the speaker and addresses the lover directly with the personal pronoun “thee”. The poem is the speaker’s monologue about the depths of her love and the ways in which she experiences that love. 

From what she shares about her life, the speaker shows she had a difficult past by...