The speaker of "My Love" begins by blaming the weather and ends by asking for something that has nothing to do with it. The opening question, "Are the summers getting colder?", is a small act of self-deception, and the speaker drops it almost at once. The real explanation is that "we are getting older," and the chill is not in the air but on the beloved's face, which has "that winter's look." The central idea is that age takes away strength and beauty but not desire, or the nerve to admit it.
Winter is the controlling image, and the poem handles it quietly. The word appears twice in the first stanza, first as "winter's chill" in "this place," then as the "winter's look upon your face." Watching it travel from the landscape to a person is how the metaphor works: a season becomes a stage of life without the poem ever announcing it. The syntax is a little tangled here. The speaker offers one explanation, then hesitates with "Or is it that...", and the sentence never quite settles. That untidiness makes the stanza sound like someone thinking aloud, not reciting.
The second stanza answers the cold with memory. "Once we had our love to keep us warm" treats love as a kind of heating, something practical as well as romantic. The setting then opens out: "In the open air, under a starry sky." It is one of the longest lines in the poem, and it sprawls the way open space does. The most telling detail comes in the shortest line, "When you thought we would die." The word "thought" suggests the speaker never shared that fear, so the thunderstorm is remembered fondly, even with a little teasing. Danger has become part of the pleasure, which makes the present quiet feel emptier by comparison.
The third stanza turns to wishful grammar. "If we still had our strength and vigour" is a conditional, and the slightly formal word "vigour" gives the wish a wry dignity. Then the tone loosens: "How we would make the bells chime" is playful and clearly suggestive, though it may also echo wedding bells, which would tie the couple's past to their beginning. The next line, "Then you had a lovely figure," is disarmingly blunt. It is a compliment and an admission of change at once, the kind of thing only a long-married person could say without offence. The final question, "Do you think we could, just one more time?", mirrors the first line's question. The poem moves from asking the world about the weather to asking the beloved about the future, and "just one more time" is modest and hopeful, with a quiet awareness of how few chances remain.
The form supports this. Each stanza has five lines rhymed ABAB, followed by the refrain "My love," which is left unrhymed. The rhymes are simple, almost song-like, but several carry weight. "Place" and "face" bind the cold surroundings to the person. "Sky" and "die" set beauty beside mortality. "Vigour" and "figure" pair the two things that have slipped away. The rhythm is loose, roughly four beats to a line but never rigid, so the poem sounds closer to speech than to formal verse. The refrain also grows: "My love," then "My love, My love," then "My love, My love, My love." It builds like a repeated touch on the arm, or a plea gaining courage.
Love poems are usually about youth, so it is unusual to find one where the lovers are old and still want each other, and where the poem allows this to be funny as well as moving. Humour keeps it from self-pity, and the plain, direct language keeps it from sentimentality. There is no grand claim about love defeating time, only a gentle, cheeky request. The poem's quiet insight is that growing old does not change what people want. It only makes them braver, or more reckless, about asking.