Before the poem says anything about love or loss, it makes a quiet promise: the letter will be read. By the final line, the speaker is no longer sure what the letter has done. The poem follows someone writing to a person they once shared time with, hoping to make that person remember. Slowly it becomes clear that the letter may also be a goodbye. Its central idea is that handing over a piece of yourself can be the most intimate thing you do and also the way you close a door.
The first stanza sets this up through sound. Its four lines end on "letter," "remember," "together" and "each other," so every line closes on the same soft, unstressed "-er." The effect is a low hum, a kind of tenderness, as if the words are leaning on one another. The last line is the most interesting: "the days we spent away with each other." Being "away" and being "with each other" shouldn't fit in one phrase, yet here they do. The speaker suggests that even the periods of distance belonged to the relationship, which already hints that the story is not simple.
The second stanza pushes on that unease with a near-pun: "letter" against "latter." The words differ by a single vowel, much as the two kinds of days differ in the first stanza. "The latter" most naturally points back to the second of the two things mentioned, the days spent apart. The speaker may be asking the reader to remember the parting more than the closeness. The stanza also holds a contradiction. "I know you'll read it" sounds sure, but the next line begins "I wonder if it'll be the last letter." Certainty and doubt sit side by side. The identical rhyme of "it" with "it" feels almost like a stumble, as though the speaker is repeating themselves to stay steady.
In the third stanza the rhyme falls away. "Piece," "soul," "paper" and "you" refuse to chime, and the loss of music matches the loss of ease. This is also where the imagery turns physical and dangerous. The soul is "a piece," something cut off and handed over, and it is placed "in a paper" before being allowed to "burn into you." The verb matters. Burning can mean passion, a brand, a wound, or even the letter itself going up in flames. The poem doesn't say which, and that ambiguity keeps the gift from being purely loving. Something is being given, but it may leave a mark. The stanza is also the first to end with a full stop, which makes it feel like a door being shut.
In the last stanza, the speaker's wording shifts. The object that was a "letter" becomes a "message," a word repeated three times in a row ("this message from my heart / this message from my soul"). The paper has fallen away, leaving only the meaning. The tense has also moved. Earlier the speaker said "you'll read it," looking ahead. Now they ask whether "you got the message," as if the letter has already been sent and they are waiting. The phrase "got the message" also carries its everyday sense of understanding a hint, which adds a faint sting. Then comes the shortest, flattest line of the poem: "With this it all ends." It has no rhyme and no decoration, and nothing follows it.
Reading the poem as a whole, "soul" is the word that keeps returning, in the second, third and fourth stanzas. "Heart" appears only once. The diction is plain and conversational, closer to speech than to ornament, and the lines have no fixed metre. They tighten as the poem goes on, from the long, trailing fourth line of stanza one to the short, even lines at the close. This is a poem that sounds more like its subject the further it goes.
The poem's significance lies in this closeness between form and feeling. Its words are simple, and its images of soul, heart and fire are well worn, but the structure carries the real weight. The rhyme dissolves, the certainty turns to wondering, and the vocabulary shrinks until only one blunt statement remains. Judging by the text, the poem may even be the letter it describes, which would make the reader the person being addressed. Anyone who has put a difficult feeling into writing and then waited for a reply will recognise that mix of exposure, hope and finality.