Three kisses, counted off like steps on a staircase, carry the whole argument of this sonnet. Elizabeth Barrett Browning sends them upward, from hand to forehead to lips, until the speaker can say something that seems newly possible for her: "My love, my own." The poem is about how love changes a person's sense of herself, and how a physical gesture can grow into something close to a sacrament. Within the sequence called *Sonnets from the Portuguese*, it is usually read as a love poem to the poet's future husband, Robert Browning.
The opening is almost shy. "He but only kissed / The fingers" is a deliberately small claim, yet the effect is huge. The hand is "this hand wherewith I write," which quietly reminds us that it is also the hand making the poem. Since the kiss, it has grown "more clean and white," and it is "slow to world-greetings," reluctant to bother with ordinary politeness. It is "quick with its 'Oh, list,' / When the angels speak." A hand that listens is a strange and lovely image, as if the whole body had turned into an ear. In four lines the speaker has moved from a human gesture to angels.
Next comes a paradox. She says a ring of amethyst, which she could not wear on that hand, would be less "plain to my sight" than the first kiss. A kiss leaves no mark, yet she sees it more clearly than a jewel. The purple stone also plants a colour that returns at the end of the poem.
The second kiss "passed in height / The first," and the line break does just that: the sentence spills over the end of the line as the kiss rises. Then the verse stumbles, "sought the forehead, and half missed, / Half falling on the hair." The imperfection makes the moment feel real, and the speaker prizes it. "O beyond meed!" she exclaims, meaning that it is beyond any reward she could have earned. The exclamation arrives just as the sonnet turns from its eight-line first section to its six-line second. The religious language then thickens. The forehead kiss is "the chrism of love," the holy oil of anointing, which comes before "love's own crown" and its "sanctifying sweetness." Anointing and then crowning: the kisses become a ceremony.
The ceremony finishes with the third kiss, "folded down / In perfect, purple state." The verb suggests a robe settling into place, or perhaps a letter being sealed. "Purple" echoes the amethyst and suggests royalty, and "state" means both pomp and condition. "Perfect" answers the earlier "half missed." Where the second kiss faltered, the third arrives complete, and the climb is over.
The sound of the poem supports this staircase. It is a Petrarchan sonnet, with the first eight lines rhyming *abba abba*. One sound dominates the opening: "kissed," "list," "amethyst," "missed." The clipped, hissing ending is a little like the sound of a kiss. The last six lines alternate *cdcdcd* (meed, crown, precede, down, indeed, own), though "own" only half-rhymes with "crown" and "down." The metre is iambic pentameter, but the first line begins with two heavy beats, "First time," and is made almost entirely of plain one-syllable words. The emotion is huge, but the language stays simple.
The final line also reverses the grammar of the first. At the start, "he kissed me," and she is the one acted upon. At the end, "I have been proud and said," and she is the one who speaks. Pride, usually a fault, is presented here as a gift the kisses have given her. She has been kissed into having a voice, and the closing words are in quotation marks because they are hers.
That is much of what makes the poem significant. Love sonnets in the Petrarchan tradition are typically spoken by a man admiring a woman from a distance. Here the woman is the speaker. She describes in sensory detail what it is like to be loved, and she treats it with the seriousness usually reserved for religion and royalty. The poem manages to be intimate and grand at once, and it gets there with three kisses.