Most poems that compare love to fire are about the blaze. "Smoke" is about what comes after: the grey, drifting state of someone who has lost the flame but not quite the heat. Its speaker looks back on a love that has ended, and the central idea is double. The loss is real and has left the speaker half-extinguished, yet the same love is remembered as a gift ("I realise I was blessed"). The poem never settles into simple bitterness.
The opening stanza builds its whole logic out of breath. "I took in a breath of fresh air" is an ordinary, life-giving act, and air is also what a fire needs. Then comes "you came and blew it out." The other person uses breath too, but as an exhale aimed at the flame. One element nourishes and destroys, depending on who is breathing. The stanza also says "light" rather than "warmth," so what is lost is brightness, a sense of being lit up, as much as comfort.
The repeated line "All I have is smoke" is the poem's centre. Smoke proves a fire existed but gives no light, which makes it a good image for grief. The couplet "Hot enough to be re-lit, / But not hot enought to start" is oddly paradoxical, since something that can be relit surely can start. That awkwardness fits the speaker's limbo, where the possibility of a new flame exists but nothing can act on it. The second refrain moves the smoke from the heart to the chest, "Bellowing" instead of "Swirling." The move from emotion to body suggests struggling to breathe, which loops back to that first clean breath. The word "bellowing" may also bring to mind bellows, the tool for coaxing embers back to flame, though that is an association rather than something the poem states.
The poem is also honest about dependence. The speaker's fire is not self-sustaining: "when you chose to love me, / The fire inside me stayed," and at the end, "your love is what kept me ablaze." There is a small tension here. The first stanza has the fire already bright before it is blown out, while the last credits the lover with keeping it alight. The poem doesn't reconcile these, and it doesn't need to, because it follows feeling rather than argument. The same person is both the fuel and the one who snuffs it out. The verbs also harden as the poem goes on, from "blew it out" to "blew my love away" to "stomped out my fire." The movement from breath to boot is a shift from gentle to brutal, as though the memory grows angrier as the speaker looks at it.
The form is plain and song-like. The short lines and the rhyme on every second line (bright/light, heart/start, afraid/stayed, chest/blessed, days/ablaze) give a ballad-like rhythm. The tidy rhymes sit against messy emotion, and the stanzas end on commas rather than full stops, so the sentences never quite close. The final stanza breaks the pattern with a last line, "Because your love is what kept me ablaze," that runs noticeably longer than anything before it. The line overflows its frame, as a fire might. A couple of apparent typos ("enought," "cired") roughen the surface, but the structure is clear.
The ending matters most. The refrain of smoke does not return in the last stanza, and the poem finishes on "ablaze." The only thing that makes the smoke move in stanza four is memory: "as I remember our love." So the closing image suggests that remembering briefly relights the fire. The shift to the present tense in "your love *is* what kept me ablaze" implies that, emotionally, the speaker is still measuring everything against that love.
The poem is worth reading for how much it builds from one metaphor. Flame, breath, smoke, heat, being "re-lit" and "ablaze" are stages of one story, carried mainly by verbs. The idea of love as fire is familiar, but the poem's strongest choice is to dwell on smoke, the in-between state that most heartbreak actually occupies. For students, it is a clear example of how a sustained image can express feeling without explaining it.