Five lines, one sentence, and a small trial about fairness. The poem opens like a defence speech: "If love has been unfair, / Then I have too." The speaker doesn't blame love, and doesn't claim to be its victim either. Love's unfairness is matched by the speaker's own, so blame is shared. That is the idea behind the bracketed phrase «Two to Tango», the idiom that it takes two people to make a situation what it is. Even the sound of the line quietly agrees. "Too" is a homophone of "two", so the number from the subtitle slips into the confession.
The second half shows what the speaker's unfairness actually was. It isn't cruelty to another person. It is a kind of self-neglect: "To search for it in foreign hearts / And leave mine desolate." The speaker went looking for love elsewhere and abandoned the one place it might have been kept. The poem is built on a contrast between "foreign hearts", which are distant, unfamiliar and full of promise, and "mine", which is reduced to one small pronoun and a bleak adjective. "Desolate" suggests an emptied landscape, a place that has been left rather than a place that has failed. The speaker did the leaving.
The title adds another layer, though this part is inference. A harbor is shelter, the place a ship returns to, and to "harbor" something is to hold and protect it. Set beside "foreign hearts" (which read like distant ports) and a "desolate" home heart, the title implies the speaker has been sailing from shore to shore and neglecting the harbor at home. The title never says so, and the poem's one loaded word, "desolate", leaves us to supply the abandoned dock.
The final line is where the poem turns. "As though it was incapable without another's touch" is a mock-logical explanation for the speaker's behaviour: the heart was treated as if it couldn't function alone. The phrase "as though" matters here. It shows the speaker no longer fully believes this and sees it as an assumption, possibly a false one. The plain "was" instead of the more formal "were" also makes the assumption sound like something the speaker truly lived by, a belief acted on rather than a hypothetical. And "touch" brings the subtitle back in, since the tango is a dance of close contact. The title claims that dancing takes two, while the ending quietly asks whether the heart really needs a partner to be whole.
The form carries this argument without any rhyme. No line ends in a matching sound, so nothing clicks shut and the poem has no comfortable resolution. Instead the lines expand. The first has five syllables and the second only four, both clipped, like a quick retort. The third stretches to eight, the fourth dips to six, and then the last line unspools to fourteen. The rhythm is loosely iambic in places ("If LOVE has BEEN unFAIR" has a steady beat), but it never settles into a pattern. The effect is of someone who begins with a neat conditional, "if… then…", and finds the confession growing longer than they planned. The tidy logic of the opening gives way to a final line that sprawls, almost out of breath, with "incapable without another's touch" hanging at the end.
The poem is significant because it takes a very familiar complaint, that love has been unfair, and turns it inward without self-pity. A less careful poem might have blamed a lover or mourned a loss. This one admits that the speaker's own habit of looking outward for completion was a failure of care. The poem is also modest in scale. It offers no grand image of heartbreak and no promise of recovery, just a precise account of how someone can be unfair to themselves. Its closing doubt leaves the reader with a question rather than a moral: if a heart can be left desolate by the search for another, perhaps it was never as incapable as the speaker once assumed.