Six short lines are enough to hold thirty years of a relationship. A man fusses with his guitar, his wife rolls her eyes, and one small word, "once," pulls us back to a time when that same fussing was the start of everything. The central idea is simple and quietly moving. The habits that first enchant us can, with time, become the ones that exasperate us, and the exasperation is itself proof that the bond has lasted.
The poem is built on a mirror between its first and fifth lines. "He tunes his old guitar" is answered by "He tuned his new guitar." The subject, verb, object and final word all repeat, and only three things move: the tense, the verb ending, and "old" becoming "new." Those tiny shifts carry the whole story. The text never says it is the same instrument, but the echo invites us to imagine a guitar that has aged alongside its owner. Notice too what the present-tense man actually does. We never see him play. In the past, tuning led to a song; now tuning seems to be all there is, a preparation that never arrives at music. The poem is gently comic about that.
The word "compulsively" does a lot of work. At four syllables it is the longest word in the poem, and it sits at the end of line two, so the sentence stalls on it just as the tuning stalls. Then "and she" arrives, hanging at the line break, and her reaction waits in the next line. The enjambment gives us a beat of anticipation, like a pause before a familiar joke. "Rolls those green eyes" is similarly affectionate. The pointing word "those" sounds like a narrator who knows these eyes well, and the fact that their colour is still worth mentioning after three decades suggests she is still being looked at with interest.
The poem's neatest trick is the echo between "Rolls" in line three and "rolling" in line four. The first describes a flash of irritation, the second describes time, "three rolling decades." The shared verb makes the eye-roll a miniature of the years themselves, each small gesture another turn of the same wheel. Between them sits "but once," the hinge of the poem. It can mean "except on one occasion" and also carries a faint "once upon a time," the language of stories. The poem pivots there from present to past.
Its form is spare but not careless. Counting syllables, every line has exactly six, which gives the poem a brisk, even pulse, almost like a strummed phrase. There is no conventional rhyme scheme, but sound still ties it together. "Guitar" ends both the first and fifth lines, so the repeated word does the work of a rhyme. The final word, "heart," then half-echoes it: in many accents the two share the same long vowel and "r" sound. "Past" and "heart" also close on the same hard "t." The instrument and the feeling are bound together by sound before we are told they were bound together by love.
That last line is the most charged. "And his song snared her heart" packs in the poem's only strong emotion, and it saves "heart" for the very end. "Snared" is a trapper's word, and the repeated "s" sounds in "song snared" have a quick, catching snap. It makes falling in love sound like being caught, which is funny, a little dangerous, and entirely believable. Judging by the eye-roll in the opening lines, she is still caught. People who have really escaped do not bother to roll their eyes at the person beside them. That reading is an inference, but the poem's structure supports it. We end in the past, then loop back to the present and see the eye-roll differently.
The poem is significant because it manages so much in so little space. It avoids both sentimentality and cynicism, and it is warm without gushing. It also shows a technique students can use in their own writing: repeat a line with small changes and let the differences tell the story. The poem has no title, only asterisks, which makes it feel like a moment glimpsed through a doorway. It is small, but it understands that long love often sounds less like a grand song than like someone tuning a guitar while someone else sighs.