"Hardest thing to do": the poem opens with a superlative and spends every remaining line defending it. Its subject is one-sided love, and its central claim is that the real difficulty lies less in the feeling than in what the feeling costs: pride, voice, and finally the speaker's sense of self. Nobody is named and no story is told. There is only "someone", and that vagueness is useful, because it lets a reader slot in a partner, a friend, or anyone who takes more than they give.
The construction is a list that refuses to end. After the first line, almost every line begins with "To": to be there, to still see, to sacrifice, to cry, to choose, to give, to live, to neglect. These infinitives never settle into a main clause, so the poem feels like one sentence stretched again and again, each item added to the weight of the last. The stanzas are uneven (six lines, then four, three, four, four) and there is no regular metre, which suits the plain, confessional tone. The double full stops after "worst" and "up" leave the thought trailing, as if the speaker is too tired to finish it. Small word choices carry the strain. "Still" in "to still see the best" admits a habit of stubborn hope, and "tend" in "all they tend to show" makes the other person's behaviour a pattern rather than a bad day.
The imagery is blunt and bodily. "To cry without making a noise" is the quietest line and one of the strongest, since the grief is muffled so as not to disturb the person who causes it. "To live with a restricted throat" pushes that further. The throat is where breath and speech live, so the image suggests someone swallowing every complaint until it feels like choking, and the next line names what has been swallowed: "your truth". Elsewhere the vocabulary turns almost religious. To "give heaven to the devil" is deliberate exaggeration, but it shows how lopsided the speaker feels the exchange to be. "Loves obsession more than love" is the hardest phrase to pin down. I read it as the other person preferring intensity and being pursued to real tenderness, though it could also point to their own fixations. The fourth stanza ends by turning the relationship into a see-saw, where "putting yourself down is the only way to push them up".
The last stanza changes the poem's angle. Until now the voice has been impersonal, a catalogue of "to"s, and only in the final two lines does "I" appear. What it says is surprising: "I'm not bound by my heart or their mind / I'm just doing what the fate has assigned." This is the poem's only rhyme (mind/assigned), and it clicks shut like a proverb. Yet it sits uneasily beside everything before it. The earlier lines stress choice ("to choose", "to give", "to sacrifice"), and now the speaker appeals to fate. Is that consolation, a way of finding dignity in suffering? Or is it self-justification, a way of avoiding the question of whether to leave? The hedge in "Perhaps a grave mistake anyone can make" suggests the speaker half-suspects the second answer. "Grave" also sounds oddly final beside the earlier "heaven" and "devil". The poem does not settle the matter, and that open question is its most interesting feature.
The poem is worth reading less for any single striking phrase than for its honesty about a familiar trap. It does not glamorise sacrifice, since it calls the love a possible "mistake" even while insisting on it. Its plain words mean a reader needs no help recognising a line like "when all they tend to show is the worst". And it leaves a good question for discussion: at what point does devotion stop being generosity and become self-erasure, and can anyone honestly hand that over to fate?