Nine short lines are enough here to set a whole drama in motion: someone asks another person not to leave, and the reason is something much bigger than either of them. I'll stay with the words on the page, since they carry everything the poem offers.
The first stanza is made of three commands, though none of them sounds commanding. "Go with me / stay with me / keep me from the ice." Grammatically these are imperatives, but the language is so bare and the lines so short that they read as pleading. The first two lines are almost identical, and their repeated "with me" works like a heartbeat or a whispered chant, the way a frightened person says the same thing twice because once didn't feel like enough. The long "e" sound hums through the stanza: "me," "me," "keep," "me." It is a soft, close sound, and it keeps the speaker's attention on himself and on the one he is speaking to.
The third line changes the mood. Up to this point the request could belong to any love poem. Then comes "keep me from the ice," and the sentence turns. The speaker is not asking to be kept warm, which would be the expected romantic phrase, but to be kept *from* something. That makes the beloved a guardian rather than just a companion. The choice of "ice" rather than "cold" matters too. Cold is a condition, while ice is a surface you might walk onto and a thing you might fall through. Judging by the river in the next stanza, we can guess that ice is both a literal danger and a figure for numbness, for the stillness that comes before death.
The second stanza supplies the threat, but it doesn't explain it: "night and the river / gun for our hearts." There is no "because" linking the two halves, and the poem trusts us to feel the connection. The phrase "gun for" is the most startling choice in the poem. It is an idiom meaning to hunt someone down, to go after them with hostile intent, and it drags a violent, almost Western-movie image into a quiet lyric. Night and river are ordinarily natural, even beautiful things, and here they become pursuers. Their verb is also plural, "gun" rather than "guns," so the two forces act together like a posse closing in. The hard "g" of "gun" echoes the "go" that opens the poem, which hints that what the speaker wants to keep (going together) is exactly what is under attack.
The pronouns tell a small story as well. The first stanza is all "me," a solitary voice asking for help. In the last line the word becomes "our." The speaker's fear is not only for himself, because both hearts are targets. This turns the poem from a request into a shared predicament, and the love it describes is less about romance than about two people standing together against forces that don't care about them.
Form reinforces this. There is no rhyme, no punctuation, and no capital letters, so nothing is sealed off or finished. Almost every word is a single syllable, which gives the poem the bluntness of speech overheard in the dark. The second stanza stretches the lines slightly, "night and the river" taking a breath where "stay with me" did not, as if the danger takes up more room than the prayer against it. Then the poem simply stops on "hearts," with no resolution and no reassurance that the plea will be answered.
The title, "Little love song," is therefore a quiet piece of irony. "Little" suggests a lullaby or a charm, something small to hold in the hand, and the poem does work like a charm, with its repeated phrasing and its simple spoken rhythm. But what it is warding off is large and nearly mythic. That gap between the small voice and the enormous threat is the source of its power.
The poem is significant because it shows how much a few plain words can hold. It defines love as company against danger: not a grand declaration, but the wish that someone will keep walking beside you when the night and the river are closing in.