Twelve words are enough to tip a medieval ideal onto its side. The title promises courtly love, the old poetic tradition of devotion to an admired, idealised lady who stays just out of reach. What the poem delivers is a bottle, and perhaps the tail end of an evening: "A fine lip the bottle had— / my lady / and her good night." How you join those three pieces decides what the poem is about, and it seems content to let you join them in more than one way.
In one reading, the bottle is the lady. A lip is the part you kiss, so "my lady" becomes a drinker's toast, and "her good night" becomes the nightcap, the last pour before bed. The speaker courts a bottle in the language of knightly service. In another reading, the lady is a real woman who has drunk from the bottle, or whom the speaker imagines doing so. His only kiss is then an indirect one, the rim where her mouth has been, and her "good night" is a farewell that leaves him with the glass. The second reading is closer to the spirit of courtly love, which feeds on distance and unfulfilled wanting. The past tense of "had" supports it: the fine lip belongs to a moment already over, so the speaker is looking back from the other side of the evening.
The syntax is where the poem's old-fashioned voice comes from. Modern speech would say "the bottle had a fine lip." Putting "A fine lip" first sounds like a ballad or a translated medieval verse, and it means the compliment arrives before we know what is being complimented. That is how a lover talks, praise first and object second, and then the object turns out to be glass. The drop is small and funny. The dash after "had" works like a held breath, or a sip taken before the next line. "Fine" is a connoisseur's word, the word of fine wine and fine distinctions, and it carries admiration without any sneer.
There is no rhyme and no regular meter, but the sound is carefully managed. The first line runs to seven syllables, with weight falling on "fine lip" and the first syllable of "bottle." The second line shrinks to three, "my LAdy," and the short line works like a bow, or a pause with the glass raised. The third line, four syllables long, ends on two heavy beats, "good night," like a door closing. The nearest thing to rhyme is the long *i* sound in "fine," "my" and "night." It threads the lines together and brackets the poem, since it starts in the first line and finishes on the last word. The "and" that opens line three also sounds like an afterthought, as if the farewell were being added reluctantly.
Beneath the joke, the poem is tender. Sneering would have been easy: grand words like "my lady" attached to a humble object, and the courtly tradition laughed at. But "fine" sounds sincere, and the speaker never seems to be performing for an audience. The weight falls on the last phrase. "Good night" is written as two words, so the night is "good" in its own right, and the farewell reads almost as a blessing. If the lady is a person, she has said it and gone. If she is a bottle, the speaker is alone with her, which may be sadder still. The poem never says which, and that is part of its skill.
Its significance lies in how much it carries in so little space. It depends on the gap between title and text. Without "Courtly love," we would see only a bottle, and with it we see a whole tradition of idealised longing shrunk to a modern scale. The title is a small act of collaboration, because the reader has to supply the knight. The result suggests that the old gestures of devotion, the praise, the bow and the sad farewell, survive in everyday life, even when what we bow to is only a rim of glass.