The title, "I loved," is a sentence that stops before it says what was loved. The poem spends its twelve short lines finishing it, and the delay is the point. Only in the last three lines do we find out why the moment hurts. The speaker has been watching someone "stand there alone," and then "she" is "walking / Down the aisle." Judging by this, the speaker is at a wedding, and "you" is waiting at the front. The speaker imagines taking the bride's place: "it would be me." The central idea is that feelings left unsaid don't disappear. They turn into a wish to go back and say them.
The grammar of the title already carries this regret. "Loved" is in the past tense, so the feeling is filed away before the poem begins. The voice is also plain and spoken, not literary. "Makes me wish I would have told you" is how people talk when they are upset, and the poem never polishes it. There is no rhyme and no steady meter. The lines are uneven, and some are very short, so the poem reads like a confession that has not been rehearsed.
The punctuation is revealing. A full stop lands after "told you," in the middle of what should be one sentence. What follows, "About everything I've ever / Thought About you," is a fragment, and the capital A on the second "About" looks like a stumble. The thought seems to start over, as if the speaker keeps losing the thread. The line break after "ever" leaves the word hanging, and "ever" suggests a huge amount of unsaid feeling. The poem is better read as a mind catching up with itself than as a tidy statement.
The list of what the speaker loved shows this best. It begins with a pattern: "How I loved your dimple. / How I loved your eyes." Then the pattern falls apart. "Your laugh," loses the "How I loved," and "Smile" loses even the "Your." The speaker seems to be running out of breath, or finding the list too long to finish properly. The details are small and physical, a dimple and a laugh, not grand declarations. That makes them believable, because they are the things someone notices only when they have been watching closely for a long time.
One word in that list is easy to pass over: "carefree." The speaker says the person "seemed so carefree," and "seemed" matters. It marks an outside view, someone reading a face from a distance. The carefree look contrasts with the weight the speaker carries, and the poem hints, without saying it, that the person has no idea. "Alone" works in a similar way. At the start it sounds sad, but in a wedding setting it is only temporary, because the person will soon be joined. The speaker may be the one who is truly alone.
Then comes "Maybe." Everything before it is regret, and everything after it is a daydream. "Maybe then she wouldn't be walking" admits that telling the truth might not have changed anything, which is more honest than a flat claim that it would. The short line "Down the aisle" is itself brief, but it slows the sentence down, as if the walk were being watched step by step. The poem ends on "And it would be me" with no full stop, which is a sharp contrast to the stray full stop earlier. The sentence stays open because the wish cannot be settled. The pronouns also form a triangle: "you," then "she," and last of all "me." The speaker puts themselves in the final position and ends the poem there.
The poem is not technically elaborate, and it doesn't pretend to be. Its significance lies in how closely its form matches its subject. The broken sentences, the shrinking list and the unfinished ending all enact a feeling that came too late to be spoken. There is an irony too. The speaker never told the person, but the poem is the telling, aimed at the page because it can no longer be aimed at them. The poem gives no names and no setting beyond the wedding, so a reader is free to step into it. Anyone who has kept quiet at the wrong moment will recognise the speaker.