Six short lines, and a whole relationship is visible in them. "Strategy" is built like a tiny scene from a play: a question, an answer, and then a confession that changes how we understand everything that came before. Its subject is the quiet greed of being loved, the way hearing "I love you" once is never quite enough.
The poem opens with a question that is not really a question. "What did you say, my darling, / When you spoke to me, just then?" The speaker sounds distracted, even a little careless, as if a half-heard remark had drifted past while she was thinking of something else. The tenderness of "my darling" is already there, but it is tucked inside the pretence of not having listened. The reply arrives in quotation marks, and it is wonderfully extravagant: "today I love you more / Than yesterday or the day before." This is the language of lovers' arithmetic, in which feeling only ever goes up. Notice the small piling-up of time, "yesterday" and then "the day before," which suggests a steady, daily growth rather than one grand declaration.
Then comes the turn, and it is the whole point. In the final couplet the speaker admits: "I know—I heard you the first time— / Just wanted to hear it again!" The title suddenly clicks into place. What looked like absent-mindedness was a plan, a small piece of tactical play, and "Strategy" is the poem's joke on itself. The dash after "I know" works like a wink: she cuts across the reassurance she has just received to confess the trick. The exclamation mark, the only one in the poem, lets her pleasure spill over. She is not embarrassed to have been caught wanting more; she is delighted.
The form supports this lightness. The poem is arranged in three two-line units, and the rhyme is placed with care. "More" and "before" chime in the middle of the poem, giving the beloved's answer a satisfying, musical ring, as though the words themselves are being savoured. The first and last lines echo each other more loosely: "then" and "again" share a sound and, more importantly, a meaning, since "again" is exactly what the speaker is after. The rhythm is conversational rather than strict. Lines sit close to ordinary speech, with a gentle beat that lets the voices sound natural, almost overheard. That ease is part of the trick: a poem about a trick should not look like it is trying.
What gives the poem its charm is its double structure of speech. There are really two layers of dialogue: the one we hear, and the one we only understand at the end. The beloved answers sincerely, thinking he is clearing up a misunderstanding. The speaker, meanwhile, has been steering the conversation toward exactly the words she wanted. The reader is placed in a position of knowing slightly more than the man in the poem until the last moment, which makes us complicit in her affectionate scheming.
There is also something quietly true in the idea. Love, the poem suggests, is not only a feeling but a thing that has to be spoken to be fully felt. The speaker already knows she is loved; she does not need information. What she wants is the sound of it, the repeated experience of hearing it said. "Just wanted to hear it again" is one of the most honest lines about intimacy one could write: reassurance does not wear out, and we do not tire of what we most need.
That is what makes so small a poem worth reading closely. It is playful, but it takes the need for affection seriously, without shame or apology. It turns an everyday habit, asking someone to say it once more, into a miniature comedy of manners with a warm centre. In six lines it shows that tenderness can be clever, and that cleverness can be an act of love.