Seven short lines, no capital letters, no punctuation, and yet they seem to hold a whole small history: a sudden wanting, a burst of laughter, and a bleak realisation that the wanting leads nowhere. The central idea is that desire can arrive faster than meaning. The two people in the poem are caught by a feeling they cannot direct, and the poem asks, without answering, what such a feeling is worth. The title helps. "Careless" can mean carefree, as in lovers who laugh and don't worry, but it can also mean neglectful, as in lovers who don't take care. The poem lets both meanings hang in the air.
Look at how the tone shifts. "our want was so sudden / we laughed at it" begins in a spirit of playfulness. The laugh could be delight, nerves, or embarrassment, and the poem doesn't say which. But notice that the lovers treat their want as an "it", something outside themselves that they can look at. By the third line they are judging it: "how poorly formed it was." That phrase sounds like a teacher marking a draft or an inspector examining something badly built. Desire is imagined as an unfinished object, without proper shape, and the lovers have stepped back from it far enough to criticise.
Then the poem swerves into metaphor. "a ship turned out of relation / to what satisfied" is a strange sentence, and its strangeness is the point. We expect a ship to be heading for a harbour, but no harbour is named. "Turned out of relation" is cold, abstract language, closer to geometry or paperwork than to romance, and it describes a vessel that is simply pointed the wrong way. The tense is worth noticing too. "What satisfied" is in the past, as if satisfaction existed once, or was always something already defined and out of reach. The line break adds to this effect, because "to what satisfied" sits alone on a very short line, cut off from the ship above it, so the form itself shows the separation it describes.
The last two lines bring a simile, the poem's only use of "like": "like an appointment / at the grave of a clerk." It is both funny and chilling. An appointment suggests planning, punctuality and good intentions, while a grave guarantees that no one will answer the door. A clerk is a minor official, a person of forms and records, and I read a quiet echo of "poorly formed" here, as though the grave belongs to someone whose job was to get forms right. That is an inference, but the sense of dead routine and futile ceremony is clear from the image alone. The ship has no harbour, and the lovers' meeting has no one to meet.
One more thing happens as the poem proceeds. The people disappear. "our" and "we" appear in the first two lines, and after that there are only things: a ship, an appointment, a grave, a clerk. The human warmth of the opening drains away until the final image holds only a dead stranger. Nothing is said about the lovers parting, which is part of why the effect is so unsettling.
The form supports all this. There is no rhyme and no regular metre, just lines of roughly four to seven syllables that move like quiet speech. Soft s sounds run through the poem, in "sudden", "poorly", "ship", "relation", "satisfied", giving it a hushed, breathy quality. The final line ends on two heavy, closed sounds, "grave" and "clerk", and because there is no full stop the poem just halts, like a conversation that no one knows how to finish. The absence of punctuation also lets the laughter of the opening slide into the graveyard of the ending without a pause, which suggests how quickly a mood can turn.
What makes the poem significant is how much it refuses to explain. It doesn't tell us what happened to the lovers, whether they regret their carelessness, or whether the want was ever fulfilled. It offers two precise, odd images and trusts the reader to feel the gap between wanting and satisfaction. In seven lines it manages to be playful, bitter and mysterious at once, and it leaves the reader to decide whether the carelessness was a kind of freedom or a kind of loss.