That image of the soul "feeling out of sight / For the ends of being and ideal Grace" is a potent one in its very hesitation. The merging of erotic and mystical experience might suggest Dante as a poetic model. It's also a poem about the god-like fulfilment of loving. It addresses a beloved almost as if he were God. In rhythm and feeling, the poem, which began conversationally, progresses into an act of worship. These are not left unreachably in the past, as for Wordsworth, but joyously recovered. It's followed by a further push back through time, perhaps to "intimations of immortality" embodied in the "lost saints". The "passion put to use / In my old griefs" encapsulates the story of her earlier life, but holds it in check. From the grandest of spatial metaphors, the focus turns to the detail of "everyday's most quiet need": then it soars to the moral and political high ground with the insistent anaphora of lines seven and eight. The poem's unity is born of carefully arranged variety. The answers the poet gives are profoundly serious, of course: Barrett Browning is bringing her whole intelligence to bear on answering the question. 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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