Perhaps it was a playful question, perhaps a serious one: how do you love me, how much do you love me, why do you love me are the kinds of question lovers ask, with varying degrees of emotion, all the way from carefree compliment-fishing to agonised desire for reassurance.
He has asked the question, and she is repeating it: "How do I love thee?" It's a clever ploy, setting in train the answers that will form the poem. More likely, she wants us to feel the presence of the other person, the addressee.
It could be that this is simply the poet's private conversation with herself. We open in medias res – in the middle of a conversation, in fact. Tightly structured, but simple enough to be memorable (few sonnets by any poet are so quickly memorised, the first few lines, at least), gradually spreading itself across space and time, Sonnet 43 nevertheless has a brilliantly unassuming beginning. "I love thee" the poem repeats, and the mood of that quiet, confident statement is reflected technically. This poem also touches on the early sorrows, but only to pass lightly over them. Not surprisingly, Elizabeth's joy in her late-found happiness is mixed with reminders of early hardships, and the notional rejection the form seems to demand produces some heavily mournful Victorian postures in many of the sonnets. It is less tortuously self-analytical than many others in the sequence. The anthologists aren't always right in their tendency to single out certain poems at the expense of others by the same author, but the endless popularity of Sonnet 43 is understandable.
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