A title that promises a conversation, followed by a poem in which nobody speaks a word of dialogue, is already playing a trick. «Lovers' conversation» sets up the expectation of talk, and what arrives is a mouth, a rose, and a lock. The poem's central idea is that between lovers the mouth does two jobs at once. It is the organ of speech and the organ of the kiss, and here the two collapse into one act. The conversation is not about anything. It is simply the closeness of two mouths.
The first line, "her mouth pretty as night," has no verb. It reads like a glimpse rather than a sentence, as if the speaker were too absorbed to bother with grammar. The simile is odd in a way that rewards a second look. We say "pretty as a picture," and "pretty" is a small, almost girlish word, yet here it is set against night, which is vast, dark and private. Night is not normally pretty, so the comparison makes the mouth both delicate and immense. It also suggests a scene: darkness, closed eyes, a world reduced to touch and taste.
The second line adds a second image, "the rose I lock my mouth to," and the rose plays against the night. In the dark a rose loses its colour and survives as softness, scent and shape, which is how a mouth would be known to someone kissing it. "Lock" is the most interesting verb in the poem. It can mean "lock lips," but it also brings in keys, clasps and fastenings, so the kiss becomes something held shut, a private enclosure for two. The line also ends on "to," a preposition left hanging. The reader has to cross the stanza break to find out what the mouth is locked to, and that small gap acts like the pause before a kiss lands.
The last line, "saying her fill," is the poem's quiet surprise. English has well-worn phrases like "drink your fill," "eat your fill" and "have your say," and this phrase seems to blend them. To say your fill is to talk until you are satisfied, but the shape of the idiom also suggests drinking, so speech and thirst become the same thing. The grammar is deliberately loose. Because "saying" has no stated subject, we can read it as her speaking freely, as the speaker taking in what she says, or as both at once. If a mouth is locked to a mouth, words can only pass as breath and taste. The conversation has not been abandoned. It has moved somewhere more physical, and "her" gets the last word, both in what is said and in who is said to be satisfied.
The poem is built with very little. It has no rhyme, no punctuation and no capital letters, and the lowercase start makes it feel overheard rather than composed. The lines run six, seven and four syllables, seventeen in total, close to the length of a haiku without following that form's 5-7-5 pattern. The tapering to a four-syllable last line lets the poem end in a murmur, like a breath released. Sound does some of the work that rhyme would otherwise do. The long "i" in "night," "I" and "my" links the beauty of her mouth to the speaker's own presence, while the short "i" in "pretty" and "fill" bookends the poem with a softer chime. The repeated word "mouth" works like the two mouths meeting.
The pronouns carry the poem's most subtle design. The sequence runs "her," then "I" and "my," then "her" again. The speaker sits in the middle of the poem, enclosed by her at both ends, which is exactly the position of someone being held in a kiss. It is a small piece of structure, but it makes the form act out the embrace.
What makes the poem worth reading is how much it asks of so few words. It never describes a kiss directly, and it never says "love." It relies on the strangeness of "pretty as night," the double meaning of "lock," and the stretched idiom of the last line. In doing so it shows that a very short poem can hold an entire scene, with its darkness, its closeness and its wordless talk, and it leaves the reader to finish the conversation.