The title names the feeling, but the six lines that follow never state it. The speaker even claims the opposite: he is "I who never loved." What the poem gives us instead is a woman arriving on a morning road, a heart compared to a shoe, and a man baffled by a handbag. Its central idea is that being struck by someone rarely feels like poetry. It feels like confusion, and the mind grabs at the nearest small, concrete object.
The construction is more deliberate than the casual lowercase and missing punctuation suggest. Strip out the line breaks and you get a single sentence: the morning road where she alights, and I who never loved, my heart a heavy shoe, cannot understand a purse which is little yet mighty. The main verb, "cannot understand," doesn't arrive until the last couplet. The poem moves in three steps, first the place, then the speaker, then the puzzle, and the reader waits through two stanzas to learn what the speaker cannot do. With no commas to steady it, the thought runs on like something half-muttered. The line break after "never loved" even lets a second reading flicker through: a man who never loved "my heart," as though he were a stranger to his own feelings.
"Alights" is the first word that rewards a second look. It can mean to step down from a vehicle, and the poem's setting suggests an ordinary arrival, though we can't tell from what. It also means to land softly, as a bird does. Hidden inside it is "light," and the next stanza answers at once with "heavy." The heart is not the fluttering, leaping organ of a thousand love songs. It is a shoe, something clumsy that sits at the bottom of the body and treads on the ground. The comparison is funny and deflating. A man with no experience of love has no stock of romantic images, so he reaches for something dull and close to hand.
The purse then takes the place of the woman herself. The speaker doesn't describe her face or her voice, only what she carries. That looks like shyness, a glance sliding off the person to rest on an object. A purse is also a small closed container whose contents are invisible, which makes it a neat stand-in for everything he doesn't know about her. "Little yet mighty" sounds like a ready-made phrase, closer to a slogan than a private discovery. Perhaps that is the point: he is so unsettled that he borrows someone else's words for a power he can't explain.
The sound of the poem enacts this contrast. "My heart a heavy shoe" is nearly all stressed syllables, and it plods. "Little yet mighty" tumbles lightly off the tongue, and the poem ends on the quick, bright word that answers the slow, dull one. There is no end rhyme, but the same long "i" sound turns up in "I," "alights," "my" and "mighty," quietly tying the speaker to the woman and to the power he attributes to her purse. The m of "morning" and "my" comes back in "mighty," so the poem opens and closes on the same sound.
The poem is significant because it declines the grand language that love poems usually use. There are no eyes like stars here, only a shoe and a handbag. That makes it more convincing. The surprise of feeling something new is shown through what the speaker fails to do, which is understand, and through the odd, humble objects his attention fixes on. The tone is wry and self-mocking without begging for sympathy. In a handful of words it also leaves gaps for the reader to fill: who she is, whether he speaks to her, what happens next. "Little yet mighty" describes the purse, but it describes the poem just as well.