Most poems build toward a revelation. Here the verdict arrives first. Before we read a line of the scene, the title, «he was lying», tells us how to hear it, so the four lines that follow work like evidence in a case already decided. The past tense matters too. Someone is looking back, with knowledge she may or may not have had at the moment it happened.
The scene is small and intimate. A man looks into her eyes, which is already a gesture that contradicts what he is about to say. Then comes the confession dressed up as a refusal: "I don't want to fall in love with you." He does not say "I don't love you" or "I feel nothing." He talks about wanting, and that is a revealing choice. People announce that they don't want something when it is within reach. A denial of feeling would close the door, while a denial of desire leaves it open.
The second line sharpens this. "I don't want to love you" drops the phrase "fall in," and the change is quietly significant. To fall in love is to be a victim of gravity, something that happens to you and is nobody's fault. The second version is bare and direct, with no soft landing. The repetition of "I don't want to" sounds less like information for her than like a man talking himself into something. Both lines also end on "you," so the poem has no rhyme in the usual sense and makes one out of repetition instead. The person he is trying to resist is the word he keeps landing on.
There is a sound pattern worth noticing as well. The long "i" runs through "eyes," then "I," "I," "I," and finally "smiled," like a thread joining the look to the reaction. The poem is short enough that these echoes are audible, and they bind the speaker's response to the very gaze that undercuts his words.
A small oddity in the text deserves a mention. As printed, the first line reads "He liked into my eyes." This is most likely a slip for "looked," and I'd treat it as one. But the slip, accidental or not, lands on the poem's subject. "Liked" is exactly the feeling he is disowning, and it sits in the line where he is looking at her, before he opens his mouth.
Then comes the last line, and it is the poem's real turn: "And I smiled." It is the shortest line, and it starts with "And," as though the smile were simply the next thing that happened, without comment or explanation. The speaker gives him three lines of speech and keeps only three words for herself. The imbalance says something. He talks a great deal and she says nothing, yet her silence feels like the more controlled and honest response.
What the smile means is left open, and the poem is better for it. It could be the smile of someone who hears the lie and finds it tender. It could be the smile of someone hopeful, who takes his protest as a promise. Or it could be the smile people use to hide a flinch. Read next to the title, any of these is possible, and the poem doesn't choose. It is also telling that there is no full stop anywhere, not after his words and not after her smile. The colon after "said" prepares us for something, but nothing is ever sealed. The moment is left hanging, as unresolved as the feeling.
What makes the poem worth reading is how much it fits into so little space. It captures the gap between what is said and what is meant, and it shows that a lie can be a way of protecting oneself as well as a way of deceiving someone else. Anyone who has heard a half-denial of this kind will recognize the situation at once. The poem doesn't explain it. It trusts the reader to see that "I don't want to love you" is a strange thing to say to someone you are not already close to loving, and it lets the smile do the rest.