Six parts of a person, twelve prepositions, one plea. The poem is built from remarkably few pieces, and nearly all its meaning comes from how they are rearranged. A "he" is mapped through his eyes, smile, soul, heart, hands and ears, and between each sweep of the map the speaker asks for the same thing: "save that memory / despite the past." The name attached to the poem tells us nothing about who wrote it or when, and the poem never says who "he" is, so everything here comes from the words on the page. The closeness of those body parts suggests someone once near to the speaker, but that is an inference, not a fact.
The poem falls into two ten-line halves that follow the same order: eyes, smile, soul, heart, hands, ears, then the doubled refrain. Only the prepositions change, and the changes are the real drama. "Without his eyes" becomes "in his eyes," so absence turns into presence. "Into his soul" becomes "away from his soul," so an approach turns into a retreat. "In his hands," which sounds like holding or trust, becomes "against his hands," which sounds like resistance. "Over his ears" becomes "into his ears," as if something once covered or muffled is now pressed straight into hearing. The relationship never settles into a clean arc from closeness to distance. It swings between them, and the grammar of position is the only way the poem can show that.
That grammar has an odd feature. Apart from "save," there are no verbs. Each line is a prepositional phrase left hanging, so the reader has to decide what it attaches to. It might describe where the person stands in relation to the speaker, or it might describe where the memory should be kept: "save that memory… away from his soul, outside of his heart." "Save" itself is double-edged. It is a command to rescue, but in older usage it also means "except," so the line can also be read as "everything is in motion, save that memory." The poem never picks between these readings, and that uncertainty keeps it from feeling like a simple love poem or a simple complaint.
The sound is as stripped back as the syntax. Most lines run three or four syllables, and the repeated "preposition + his + noun" pattern gives a steady, chant-like pulse. There is no end rhyme, but the repetition does the work rhyme would do. "Eyes" and "his eyes" bookend the halves, and the refrain returns four times. Smaller echoes hold it together: the long *i* of "eyes," "smile" and "despite," and the breathy *h* in "his heart" and "his hands." There is no punctuation, so no line is ever formally closed. In that run of short, plain words, "memory" is the only three-syllable word. It lasts a beat longer than anything around it, which suits the one thing the speaker wants to keep.
The imagery is made of the senses and the self. Eyes, hands and ears are how a person sees, touches and hears someone else, which is how memories get made. Smile, soul and heart are what people show and what they hide. The order runs outer, inner, outer: face, then depths, then the limbs and organs of contact. The poem moves around the person as if circling a house and trying each door. Yet the memory is never described. We are not told what happened, only that it must survive "despite the past." That phrase is a small paradox, because a memory is made of the past, yet the speaker asks for it to be kept in spite of it. It suggests that the past holds something that threatens the memory, perhaps pain, perhaps simple distance, though the poem does not say which.
The ending matters too. The final words are "despite the past," so the poem stops on the very thing it is resisting. After all the shifting positions, the refrain returns unchanged, almost stubbornly.
The poem is significant for how much it does with so little. It uses no story, no scene and no named feeling, only the small words that say where one thing stands in relation to another. By keeping the memory blank, it lets readers fill it with their own, and it shows that a person can be close or far, inside or outside, while the wish to hold on stays exactly the same.