Four short stanzas carry a boy from the top of the world to the bottom of a disillusion. The poem opens on a runner who "learnt to run without stopping" and ends with the discovery that "Love had scars," hidden under a makeup kit. In between is a story about falling for an image rather than a person. Confidence turns into infatuation, infatuation into a fantasy of the future, and the fantasy into rage when reality won't match it. The central idea is that appearance gets mistaken for love, and the person making the mistake is partly to blame, because he has done the painting before he knows what lies underneath.
The first stanza is built from pure momentum. The boy spreads his arms, aims "for the mountains," and even "the wind bowed at his strength." Nature is made to submit, and the world is something to be "embraced... with a grin." Each of the first three lines is a complete, confident statement ending in a full stop. The fourth begins with "As" and is a fragment, left dangling. It is a small hint that this certainty is unfinished.
The turn comes with "But then." The arms that were thrown wide in triumph are now "shaking," and the imagery shifts from mountain air to water: a "mysterious fountain," a breath "lost to the sea." The word "lost" appears twice in the stanza, and for a boy who never stopped, losing his breath is a real collapse. "Fountain" also nearly rhymes with "mountains," in the same position in the second line of the previous stanza. It is the poem's only real sound echo, and it links ambition with the thing that swallows it. A boy gazing at "the image before him" beside water recalls the myth of Narcissus, though here the image seems to belong to someone else, a "wonderful creature."
That creature does not stay wonderful. The word "image" returns in the next stanza ("He moved closer to behold the image"), and the more the boy looks, the more the language darkens. The "creature" becomes a "beast," and the place he enters becomes a "nest" where he is "trapped." The line "He saw more than his weary eyes could eat" is the strangest and most revealing. Eyes don't eat, but desire does, and the verb turns looking into hunger and greed. "Weary" reaches back to the exhausted runner, so we feel the loss of his energy as well as his judgment.
The final stanza sets two kinds of painting side by side. The boy "painted so quickly a perfect future," and Love turns out to be "dressed perfectly with the help of a makeup kit." His imagination and her cosmetics are both surface work, and both are called perfect. The poem doesn't simply blame the beloved for deceiving him. His fantasy was finished before he could have known anything real. Time matters here too. The future is painted "so quickly," but he grows impatient "slowly," as though the runner who couldn't stop is now forced to wait and can't bear it. The longest and most deliberate line is saved for the reveal, and "Love" gets a capital letter, as if the whole idea of it, not just one person, were standing there with its scars.
The form supports this. There is no regular rhyme scheme or fixed metre, only loose lines of around ten syllables that sound like someone telling a story aloud. The tenses wobble, too. The first stanza is firmly past, but "his arms are shaking" and "he is trapped" slip into the present. Whether or not this was planned, it makes the moments of falling feel immediate, as if the boy is caught in a "now" he can't escape. The setting narrows as well, from mountains to sea to nest to dress, so the open world of the opening shrinks to a space no bigger than a person.
The poem is significant because it takes a familiar story of youthful idealism meeting disappointment and tells it through one sustained contrast, between a body that moves freely and a boy who ends up caught. Its final line makes us reread "image," "creature" and "perfect" with new suspicion. It also doesn't lecture, since the disappointment comes from a gap between what is shown and what is true, and the boy helped to create that gap.