Sleeplessness comes first, and it sets the terms for everything after it. "I lie awake" is plain, almost flat, and the poem never really leaves that plainness. What follows is a nightly bargaining. The speaker hopes, prays, and pictures someone turning round with "those loving eyes", then admits in a short, blunt line, "But you never do." The poem is about longing with nowhere to go, and about how bewildering it is to be shaped by a person who doesn't seem to notice. Its central idea arrives in the last image: what the speaker has confessed is only "the tip" of something much larger that is still changing.
The line lengths do a lot of the work. The poem is free verse, with no fixed meter or rhyme scheme, but the lines carry the emotional pattern. Lines of hope stretch out: "Look at me with those loving eyes," "You would hold me tight in your arms again." Lines of disappointment are clipped: "But you never do." "It never comes true." The daydream gets room to swell, and reality cuts it off in a few syllables. Reading aloud, you can feel the speaker's breath rise and then drop.
Real rhyme is rare, but there are echoes. "Do" and "true" sit two lines apart, so the disappointment lands with the small click of a door closing. The long *i* sound also runs through the poem: "I," "lie," "eyes," "why," "nights," "tight," and finally "iceberg." The speaker's own "I" seems to keep coming back, which suits someone going round and round the same thoughts in the dark. The sound of "why" appears in the title and twice in the body, and it is never answered.
The word choices are telling. "Hoping, praying" borrows the language of religion, as if wanting to be looked at were a kind of plea to a higher power. The *-ing* endings have no clear start or finish, which makes the waiting feel endless. Then "Thinking maybe, just maybe" shrinks the hope: the repeated "maybe" is followed by the small, almost embarrassed "just." The word "again" is easy to miss, but it suggests the arms have held the speaker before. If so, the pain comes less from never having been close than from remembering it, though the poem doesn't say.
The poem's most interesting word may be "affect." The title uses it, and the body repeats it: "It affects me / Or why you affect me / The way you do." It is a oddly clinical word for something so emotional, and the repetition suggests the speaker has no better name for the feeling. That fits the pattern of "I don't know why," said twice. Yet the speaker's ignorance is only partial. They can't explain the cause, but they know the truth of the feeling, and the phrase "But the truth is" sits on its own line like a held breath before the reveal.
Then comes the iceberg. The idiom "tip of the iceberg" normally means that most of the problem is hidden below the surface, and that alone would make the ending a warning. The poet adds "ever melting," and that changes the picture. A melting iceberg can suggest defenses thawing, so that feelings once kept frozen now seep out. It can also suggest something dissolving, perhaps the speaker's composure or sense of self. The poem doesn't choose between these readings, and the ambiguity is the point. The break after "only the tip" holds back the word "iceberg" until the next line, so the image appears the way a hidden thing breaks the surface.
What makes the poem worth reading is that it refuses a tidy ending. The title asks a question, the speaker admits to having no answer, and the final image is one of motion rather than resolution. The language is simple enough for any reader to recognise, and the poem trusts that simplicity. Anyone who has lain awake rehearsing a moment that never comes will know the feeling of "maybe, just maybe." The poem's honesty is in letting that feeling stay unresolved, with the ice still melting.