Three short lines are enough here to turn a dinner into an injury. The speaker says they "dine on love," a phrase that sounds civilized, even tender, and then the poem drags that comfort somewhere much rougher: love is "like a well I bury / my teeth in." Nobody can eat a well. Whatever love gives this speaker, it cannot be taken gently or swallowed whole, and the poem is about the strain of trying anyway.
The first line sets up a clash of registers. "Dine" belongs to tablecloths and candlelight, a word for ritual and pleasure. The last line's "bury my teeth" is animal, the language of a bite that goes in deep and hangs on. The poem lets the polite verb stand next to the hungry one and refuses to say which is truer. Perhaps both are. Love nourishes the speaker, but the speaker's appetite is fierce, and the title, "Sacrifice," hangs over everything. A sacrifice is an offering, but it is also a meal at an altar, so the title fits the poem's own confusion about who is feeding and who is being fed. It may be the speaker who gives something up, in the effort of biting down on something that will not yield. It may be love itself, consumed and used up.
The central image is a puzzle, and the poem gives the reader no help solving it. A well is a source: water, depth, survival. Yet it is also a hole, a drop into darkness, and you can't chew a hole. The line break adds another layer. Stop at the end of line two and you read "a well I bury," as though the speaker were filling the well in. Wells are dug, not buried, and to bury one is to cut off the very thing that feeds you. The next line then swerves back to "my teeth in," and the sentence rights itself, but the first reading doesn't entirely disappear. The poem suggests that to feed on love this greedily might risk burying its source. That is an inference from the grammar, but the grammar invites it.
The sound of the poem supports this self-absorbed hunger. There is no rhyme, which suits something so unsettled, but there is a chain of long "i" sounds: "I," "dine," "like," "I," "my." The speaker's own pronoun keeps chiming through the poem, so that even a poem about love seems crowded with the self. The rhythm is also uneven in a telling way. The lines run roughly four, six, then three syllables, so the poem swells in the middle, where the image is being built, and then shrinks sharply. The last line, "my teeth in," is the shortest, and it ends on a small preposition with nothing after it. There is no object, no landing place. The sentence stops where the bite stops, with teeth buried and nothing resolved, and the lack of a final full stop-like noun leaves the reader hanging over the depth of the well.
The word choices are plain, almost all one syllable, which makes the strangeness of the picture hit harder. Nothing in the vocabulary is ornate. "Dine," "love," "well," "teeth" are everyday words, and the poem gets its force from forcing them into impossible company. Teeth are for tearing, a well is for drawing from, and love is supposedly neither, yet the poem makes them share one gesture.
What makes it worth reading is how much it asks of so little. Most poems about love offer it as warmth, light, or sweetness. This one offers it as something closer to labor, something you have to bite into, with all the risk to the teeth that implies. It also resists a neat moral. The poem never says whether the speaker is wise, desperate, or destructive, and it never says whether the feast is worth it. A reader finishes the last line still holding the question the speaker is holding: what does it cost to be fed by something you can only ever get your teeth into?