Seven short lines, and the speaker has already confessed to everything. With time on his hands, he goes looking for love, spots an attractive woman, arranges himself as a thoughtful reader, and flatters her with something untrue. The central idea is that seduction can be a performance, and that the word "love" is sometimes a polite costume for something more opportunistic. The poem never says so outright. It lets the speaker incriminate himself in the plainest words available.
The title does a lot of the work. "On the make" is an idiom for someone hunting for a conquest, or for personal advantage, so we know the speaker's motives before he opens his mouth. It also hides a second meaning. A "make" is something fashioned, and poets have long been called makers. That pun is only an inference, but it hints that the poem is about artifice in general, not just flirting. The opening stanza, "a while to wait / so I find love," is slyly ambiguous. "So" suggests cause and effect: because there is time to fill, love turns up, like a magazine picked from a waiting-room table. Love is something *found*, a way to pass the minutes, and that casualness is the first sign that the feeling is not what it claims to be.
The middle stanza describes a rehearsed routine. The verbs come in sequence, "see," "play," and later "telling," like steps in a procedure. The line break after "play" matters, because the word hangs there for a moment as simple play before the next line turns it into pretending: "play / at being thoughtful." Thoughtfulness is supposed to be a quality someone has, but here it is something the speaker acts out. The book completes the act. He is "ready with a book," and "ready" makes it sound like a tool kept at hand. We are never told which book, and that omission is the point. For this purpose the content doesn't matter, only the picture of a person who reads. The woman, meanwhile, is a "fine woman," an appraising phrase that judges by appearance, since she has been seen but not yet known.
The last stanza is the most striking. "The beautifulest mouth" is not standard English, and the clumsy superlative sounds like the overblown compliment itself, sweet and a little too eager. It also reduces her to a single feature. The mouth is the part of her that will speak, yet it is the speaker's own mouth that is busy lying. Then comes "a pretty lie," where "pretty" works twice, since the lie is decorated and it is also aimed at someone pretty. The poem ends on the word "lie" and never tells us what the lie was. The falsehood stays offstage, which makes it more general and more unsettling.
The formal choices suit this cool, offhand confession. There is no rhyme, no capital letters, and no punctuation, so the thought slips past like an aside. The stanzas run two lines, three lines, two lines, a small, unbalanced shape that fits so brief a scheme. Sound still binds the poem together. A long "i" runs through it in "while," "I," "find," "fine," and finally "lie." "Find" and "fine" are almost the same sound, as if finding and judging fineness were one act. By the end, the speaker's own "I" has rhymed with "lie," and the poem's grammar underlines this, since "telling" has no stated subject and floats free, as though the lying were a habit more than a decision.
What makes the poem worth reading is its refusal to flatter its own speaker. It does not excuse him, and it does not preach either. The tone, judging by the deadpan phrasing, is closer to wry self-awareness than to anger or guilt, and whether we should smile or wince is left to us. There is also a further possibility, offered as a reading and not a fact. A poem is itself a carefully arranged piece of language, so a poem confessing to "a pretty lie" invites us to wonder how far prettiness and honesty can go together. In very few words, the poem exposes a small vanity and quietly implicates the art of making words attractive.