"Complements" is built around a small daily ritual. Someone says kind things, and the speaker refuses to believe them. Only the final line reveals that the kindness ended, and that the person who raised the speaker up is the one who "crushed me down." The poem is about how confidence can be handed over by another person, and how easily it can be taken back.
The structure is a call and response. "Everyday you'd tell me" and "I'd reply" use a habitual past tense, so we sense a routine repeated again and again rather than a single scene. Each compliment meets a rebuttal. Eyes "like no one else's" become "just brown." A face "pure and bright" becomes "dull." The punctuation is loose, with no commas around "you'd say" or "I'd reply," so the two voices run into each other. Compliment and denial sit in the same breath, like an argument the speaker keeps losing and winning at once. There is no regular metre and the lines vary a good deal in length, which gives the poem the feel of someone talking rather than composing.
The sound patterns matter. The word "beautiful" returns four times, first as the other person's gift, then as the thing the speaker says they are not ("my face wasn't beautiful"), then as the other person's verdict on the body. It wears down with repetition, and it is missing from the last line altogether. The poem also has one patch of rhyme, in the middle: "say" and "day." The speaker's happiest lines are the ones where the sound clicks together. Then comes "What a cheesy thing to say but your words meant felt like a sugary topping to my day," where "say" and "day" chime inside a single long line. That line overflows. "Meant felt" reads as though two phrasings collided, and the sentence sprawls as if the speaker can't contain the pleasure. After this the rhyme disappears, as though the sweetness has gone.
The imagery here is about taste. "Cheesy" and "sugary topping" make the compliments something to be eaten and enjoyed. A topping sits on the surface, though. It is sweet, but it is not what the cake is made of. The poem hints that the words never reached the speaker's own opinion of themselves, which stays blunt and unchanged: "dull," "I don't like my body."
The turning point is "I don't like my body but you made me feel like a goddess." Earlier, "but" belonged to the speaker's defences ("but they're just brown"). Here it points the other way, and the praise gets the last word. "Goddess" lifts the speaker as high as the poem goes, and it sets up the vertical movement of the ending. Smiles "light up," the speaker is raised to godhood, and then the speaker is "crushed me down." The poem rises and then drops in a few lines.
The last line is the most revealing grammatically. "You made me confident in myself until you crushed me down." Every verb of consequence belongs to "you": *made*, *crushed*. Even the speaker's confidence is something done to them rather than something they own. The word "until" does the damage. It tells us the confidence was real while it lasted but was never the speaker's to keep. The poem gives no cause and no scene of how it ended, and that silence lets the line land flatly. Judging by the text, the hurt is too large for explanation.
The title spells "Complements" where we would expect "compliments." Whether that is deliberate or a slip, a complement is something that completes another thing. It fits a speaker who felt finished by another person's words and unfinished without them. That is an inference from the text, not something the poem states.
The poem is worth reading because it is plain and honest. It does not decorate its feelings or blame anyone loudly. It shows how compliments can feel like care and still leave a person's self-worth in someone else's hands. The uneven lines and the clumsy "meant felt" make it feel less like a polished piece and more like a confession, and that suits its subject. The question it leaves is who should be the first person to say "you are beautiful," and whether the speaker will one day be able to say it themselves.