Eight words, two short lines, no full stop. Yet "I've never loved / and hated you this much" manages to say something most people recognise and few can put so bluntly. A speaker turns to a "you" and admits that two feelings usually thought of as opposites are running at full strength together. The central idea is that love and hate are not at opposite ends of a scale. They draw on the same energy, so the more intensely one burns, the more intensely the other does. The speaker doesn't choose between them or explain the contradiction. They simply report it.
The line break does most of the work. Read on its own, "I've never loved" is a bleak statement: a life without love, a confession of emptiness. Then the second line arrives and overturns that reading. The sentence was never about absence but about excess, and the pivot feels like emotional whiplash. The grammar adds to the effect. "Loved" and "hated" share one object, "you", and one measure, "this much", yet "loved" doesn't receive its object until the next line. Love is left hanging for a beat, and hate, which comes second, is the one that closes the poem. Nothing in the syntax separates the two feelings. They sit in one clause, bound by a single "and".
The sound is just as economical. Nearly every word is a single syllable, and only "never" and "hated" stretch beyond that. The poem is plain, almost curt, the way people talk when emotion has stripped away their decoration. The first line runs four syllables and the second six, so the poem lengthens as it goes and comes to rest on the two heavy beats of "this much". There is no rhyme, but "loved" and "much" share the same short vowel, so a faint echo crosses the line break and links love to the measure of its intensity. "Loved" and "hated" also end in the same "-ed" sound, a parallel that makes them look like two weights on the same balance.
What the poem leaves out is striking. It has no images: no room, no weather, no object, no detail about the "you". Judging by the text alone, we can't say who this person is or what happened between them and the speaker. That bareness works in the poem's favour. With no scenery to look at, the reader's attention goes to the two verbs and the quantity attached to them. "Never" gives a lifetime in one word, and the contraction "I've" runs that lifetime up to the present moment. Then "this much" gestures at an amount it can't name, like someone spreading their arms wide because words have run out. It is a measurement that refuses to be a measurement, and the reader has to supply the size.
Even the title is part of this. Three asterisks, in place of a name, suggest a pause or a fragment, as though we have walked into the middle of an argument or a thought that began before the page did. The lack of closing punctuation backs this up. The sentence stops, but the feeling doesn't resolve.
Nothing reliable is known here about the writer, who appears only under the name amone, or about when or why the lines were written, so the poem has to stand on what is on the page. It does. Poets have returned to mixed love and hatred for a very long time. The Latin poet Catullus has a famous couplet that begins "odi et amo", "I hate and I love", and nothing suggests a link between the two poems. Still, the comparison shows how old this feeling is. What makes these eight words worth reading is how little they do to dress it up. They don't explain, justify or resolve, and that makes them convincing. Real ambivalence rarely arrives with reasons attached. It tends to arrive the way it does here, all at once and stopping mid-breath, as a single overwhelming "this much".