How do you find real love?

Can anybody plz help me find some figuartive langauge and Poetic Elements in the poem "How do i love Thee"

• I need a line by line paraphrase of how do i love thee by elizabeth barrett browning heres the poem How do I love thee ? Let me count the ways. I love thee to the depth and breadth and height My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight For the ends of Being and ideal Grace. I love thee to the level of everyday's Most quiet need, by sun and candle-light. I love thee freely, as men strive for Right; I love thee purely, as they turn from Praise. I love thee with the passion put to use In my old griefs, and with my childhood's faith. 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.

• Answer:

  Lovers tend to want to explain their passion, so Elizabeth Barrett (she was, I think, unmarried but in love with Browning when she wrote this) uses figurative language to explain the dimensions of her love, its freedom, purity, depth of passion, its accumulation of her entire life's loves and griefs since childhood, and the speculation that it will only increase after death. She may be a little carried away but it is such sincere and moving language that it seems acceptable as truth of feeling. The first figure explains that her love matches the dimensions of her soul searching when she is contemplating Being and Grace, two of the highest of human thoughts. Then she makes the modest comparison to quiet everyday needs, things very close to the essentials of life, then to freedom that must accompany the pursuit of Right, then to the purity of men shunning Praise(!), then to the passion with which youthful griefs and faiths are marked, and finally to all her life and the means of its expression - tears, smiles, breath. It is a 14-line sonnet with the poetic elements of a sonnet and with a definite backward look toward Shakespeare's sonnets. Check out "Shall I compare thee to a summer's day ... " for one. Different rhyme scheme but look at the language and the meter of the lines expressing the passionate feelings of love.