The title, "Love of enemies," recalls the familiar instruction to love your enemies. The poem then gives that instruction a twist that is hard to shake off. Its speaker doesn't love the enemy as a living person. He loves what the enemy leaves behind, or what his death makes possible. Read this way, the central idea is that hatred and love may not be opposites. An enemy gives a life its sharpest outline, and the poem suggests we can become attached to the very person who hurts us.
The first line is deliberately slippery. "I value an enemy head / higher than his life." The word "head" could suggest a trophy, a severed head prized more than the man who wore it. The poem doesn't say so outright, but the word "value" has a market ring, as if the head were something to be weighed and priced. "Head" can also mean mind, and then the speaker prizes the enemy's thinking, his cleverness, his opposition, over his continued breathing. The word "higher" adds a spatial joke: a head sits above the body, and here it also ranks above the life. Both readings can hold at once, and neither makes the speaker comfortable company.
The second couplet makes the logic harsher. "if he dies I love him for it." The grammar leaves "it" open. Does the speaker love him for dying, or for the quality that made him worth valuing in the first place? Either way, love arrives only after death, which makes it safe. A dead enemy can no longer fight back, so he can be loved at no cost. The poem seems to have noticed this convenience and to be a little ashamed of it.
The last line is the strangest: "a no one who pierces like a thorn." Putting "a" in front of "no one" turns a pronoun into a noun, and it makes the dead man a *thing*, a nobody with a definite shape. The line also contradicts itself. A no one, by definition, shouldn't be able to hurt anyone, yet this one pierces. The thorn image explains how. A thorn is small, and it stays lodged in the flesh long after the moment of contact. The enemy has been erased as a person but not as a pain, and the speaker's "love" starts to look like the ache of something that won't come out. Without punctuation, the final line also attaches itself loosely to everything before it. The "no one" could be the enemy, the speaker's feeling, or the speaker himself, who may be reduced by the loss of his opponent.
The form supports this uneasiness. The poem is two couplets in lowercase, with no punctuation at all, so the voice sounds flat and matter-of-fact, as though stating something obvious. There is no rhyme, but there is sound-play. "head" and "higher" share an initial *h*. The long *i* runs through "I," "higher," "life," and "dies," which ties the speaker's own "I" to both life and death. The rhythm is nearly even, with lines of about eight syllables ("I value an enemy head," "if he dies I love him for it"), and the shorter second line ("higher than his life") breaks that pattern. That line is only five syllables, and it ends on the word "life," so the line itself seems to fall short. The white space between the couplets works like a held breath before "if he dies."
The poem is significant for how much it does in so few words. It doesn't denounce violence or praise forgiveness. It admits something unflattering: that our emotional lives can be organized around opponents, and that love and hostility can grow from the same root. The sentimental reading of "love your enemies" imagines a gentle, generous feeling. Here the love is possessive and a little cruel, and it is barbed with the memory of a wound. That is more disturbing than a plain moral, and it is why the poem lingers. After only four lines, a reader is left asking whether they have ever valued someone more once they were gone, and whether that counts as love.