The title gives the ending away before the first line begins. «You are gone» is also almost exactly what the poem's last words say, so a reader arrives at a sentence they were handed at the door. That changes how the opening feels. "Your smile makes me smile" looks like plain happiness on a first glance, but with the title hanging over it, it sounds more like someone replaying a recording.
The central idea is that missing a person is not only something that happens after they leave. The speaker says "I missed you before I met you" and then "now I miss you because you are gone." One verb carries the whole timeline: longing before the relationship, longing after it, and the relationship itself squeezed into six short lines in between. The poem never says why the person is gone. Death, a breakup and distance all fit, and nothing in the text decides between them. That openness keeps the grief general, so readers can bring their own loss to it.
The construction rewards a slow look. The first four lines are two tidy couplets, and "would" and "could" make a clean rhyme. The lines are short, and the repeated "I knew" gives them the rhythm of a conviction, almost a charm. The speaker doesn't say "I hoped" but "I knew it would," so the smile's effect and the eloquence of the eyes are presented as things certain in advance. That prepares for the later claim of missing someone before meeting them. Foreknowledge runs through the poem like a thread. "Your eyes say so much" also never reports what they say, which keeps the intimacy private, as if the message were too close to repeat.
The poem then moves from face to body. We start with a smile, then eyes, then "Your hugs are the sweetest place." The metaphor mixes two senses: "sweetest" is taste, and "place" is space, so an embrace becomes something you can savor and somewhere you can live. A place is also something you can be shut out of, which is what "gone" will come to mean. The next line, "even before we first embraced," bends time again by calling the hug sweet before it happened. Its rhyme is a near miss. "Embraced" closes on a harder final sound than "place," and the slight mismatch can feel like a crack opening in the music, though that is a matter of interpretation rather than fact.
Then the form gives way. The last line is more than twice as long as anything before it, with no rhyme and no comma to let the speaker breathe. It sounds less like a verse line than like a sentence blurted out. Its symmetry is exact: "missed" and "miss," "before" and "because." The swap from "before" to "because" is the pivot of the poem. The first kind of missing is open-ended anticipation, and the second finally has a cause. "Because" is the only word in the poem that explains anything, and what it explains is pain. The line ends on "gone," a flat one-syllable word with nothing soft placed after it.
Tense matters too. Until the end, the speaker uses the present: "makes," "say," "are." The person is described as if still here. Judging by the shift in the final line, grief may be keeping the loved one alive in the grammar a little longer than in reality.
The poem's significance lies in this refusal to separate romance from loss. Its language is plain, with no elaborate imagery apart from the one good metaphor of the hug as a place. Yet it uses time cleverly: love looks forward in the first lines, looks back in the last, and is felt as certain at both ends. The speaker's "I knew" suggests the person was always going to matter, and the ending suggests that mattering this much has a price. It is a small poem, but it shows how few words are needed to make a reader feel both the sweetness of a person and the size of their absence.