One line, thirteen syllables, and a whole small drama inside it. "I cherished your smile and kept it from fading away" is signed only with the name Maria and carries no title except three asterisks. I know nothing reliable about who Maria was or when the line was written, so the best way to respect it is to look hard at what is actually on the page.
Start with the situation it sketches. There are two people, held in two pronouns: "I" and "your." Between them sits a single object, a smile, and two verbs describe what the speaker did with it: "cherished" and "kept." Both verbs are in the past tense, and that quietly changes the mood. The line is not a declaration of present love but a report on something already done, and it never says whether the effort worked. The speaker kept the smile *from* fading, yet the grammar of looking back leaves a faint question hanging: is the smile still there, or only the memory of having guarded it?
The word choices carry most of the weight. "Cherished" is gentler than "loved" or "adored." It suggests tending something small and breakable, the way you might shield a candle flame with your hand. "Kept" gives the smile the quality of an object, something pressed in a book or stored in a drawer. But a smile is the least keepable thing there is. It exists only while it is happening, and it lives on a face, in time. The line sets a stubborn tenderness against that fact. To keep a smile, the speaker must turn a passing gesture into something lasting, and the only place that can happen is memory or, perhaps, the poem itself.
Then comes "fading away," the line's one real image. Fading is a visual word. It belongs to old photographs, evening light and ink left in the sun, so the smile is quietly pictured as something seen and slowly losing its colour. "Away" adds motion, a drift toward distance. Even the sound helps. The final phrase "fading away" has a soft, falling rhythm, with the stress dropping on "fad-" and rising once more on "-way," so the line seems to exhale as it ends. The earlier part, "I cherished your smile," is steadier, with its beats landing on "cher-," "your" and "smile." The line starts firm and ends in a slow dissolve, which is exactly the thing it claims to have resisted.
On form, there is little to analyse in the usual way. With one line there is no rhyme to find, no stanza pattern, no refrain. But the absence is itself interesting. A line that stands alone looks like a fragment, or a note, or a complete thought pared down to its bone. I cannot say which, and the asterisks do not settle it. Typographically they act like a pause or a threshold, a way of saying the text has no name and begins somewhere unseen. Whether or not that was intended, the effect is that the poem seems to have been rescued from silence, much like the smile.
There is also a second reading worth considering. "Kept it from fading away" could mean the speaker preserved the smile in memory, but it could equally mean the speaker kept the other person smiling, sustaining the joy in the face before them. The grammar allows both. One reading is about remembering, the other about caring, and the line's brevity lets them sit together without choosing.
What makes the line significant is how much it does with so little. It names a feeling without ever using the word love, it admits its subject is fragile, and it turns the act of writing into a small act of preservation. The poem is nearly as brief as the smile it protects, and in that echo, the form and the meaning quietly agree.