Sonnet+43



-trying to describe the abstract feeling of love by measuring how much her love means to her -expresses all the different ways of loving someone and she tells us about her thoughts around her beloved -the tone of the poem is deep, in a loving way. -starts of with a rhetorical question, because there is no ‘reason’ for love -she will count the ways, which is a contradiction against her first line. In the rest of the poem she is explaining how much she loves -normal measurements for something that cannot be measured -she is trying to illustrate she loves every single piece of him - afterlife – “and, if God choose, I shall but love thee better after death” -repeats “I love thee” -she loves him and there is nothing else to do about it, nothing that will make her change her mind -no gender is implied, just keeps saying “Thee” -she trusts him--“My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight” -no matter what is going on in her life, whether something horrible happened or it’s just a normal day, she trusts him to stay by her side and that she will love every minute of it -the sun and candle-light--imagery; image of light being constant and abstract saying that her love will forever go on but with a sense of mystery -sun is also a very well known image for being strong, powerful, and good; he brightens her day -“I love thee to the level of every day’s most quiet need”, implying that she needs him, even when there is nothing special happening -“and, if God choose, I shall but love thee better after death.”, if God gave her a choice between her own life and his, she would choose for him to live and that when she is dead, she can finally love him to the depth that he deserves, without anything standing in her way -rhyme scheme: ABBA ABBA CDC DCD -"I love thee" appear in eight of the poem's fourteen lines -sound of the poem is repetitive -speaker wants to distinguish between loving "freely" and loving "purely" and loving in various other ways