Eleven short lines are enough for meah to trace a whole love affair from pursuit to ruin, and to make the speaker sound guilty while doing it. The story is simple. The speaker wants someone, wins them, loses interest, and leaves. Then comes a harder admission: the speaker's own intensity destroyed the person who was loved. The central idea is that desire can be a kind of appetite, one that consumes its object and so cannot survive getting what it wants.
The poem opens on a question that works two ways: "How could I be content?" It could be a defence, as if restlessness were simply the speaker's nature and no one's fault. It could equally be a baffled self-reproach. The title, "Regret", tips the balance toward the second reading, though the poem never lets the speaker say so outright. Instead the word reappears in the middle, aimed at someone else: "Do you regret the time we spent?" The speaker asks the beloved about regret instead of owning it. That deflection may be the most revealing move in the poem.
The verbs and pronouns tell the story too. Nearly every action belongs to "I", and "you" is almost always the object: "I chased you, / I caught you", "Once I had you", "I burnt you up". The beloved is acted upon and never acts. The only time "you" becomes a grammatical subject is in the question about regret, and even there it hands the speaker no answer. Hunting vocabulary shapes the first half. "Chased" and "caught" are blunt, almost breathless, and the matching phrasing makes the pursuit feel as quick and automatic as it is one-sided. "Had" is a possessive word, and the next line, "I left", is the shortest and coldest in the poem. It lands exactly where satisfaction should be.
Then the imagery shifts from the hunt to fire. "You were soft, / tender" is in the past tense, so the beloved is already being described as lost. These are gentle words, but "tender" has a darker edge too, since it can describe meat that has been made ready to eat. Judging by the progression from chase to capture to burning, the poem may be quietly suggesting prey that is hunted and then consumed. Whether or not that was intended, the fire is clearly the speaker's own: "*My* fire grew." A fire needs fuel, and the softness of the beloved is what it feeds on. The flame grows by destroying the thing that sustains it. "Burnt you up" is a casual, colloquial phrase, and its plainness makes the cruelty sharper. Even "spent", in the earlier question about "the time we spent", carries a hint of the same idea, since a thing that is spent is used up.
The final line holds the poem's best piece of wordplay: "Until there was nothing left I loved." Earlier the speaker "left", meaning departed. Now "nothing left" means nothing remained. The same word moves from action to aftermath, as if leaving and losing were one event seen from two sides. The line is also ambiguous. It can mean that nothing remained of the beloved to love, or that the speaker's love ran out as the fire burned down. Both readings are bleak, and they may both be true, because the speaker destroyed what was loved and then ran out of reasons to stay.
The form supports all this. There is no rhyme and no regular metre, only short, clipped lines, many of them just a few syllables, which leave white space around every statement. The single-line stanzas fall in three key places: the opening question, the middle question, and the closing verdict. The couplets between them carry the action, so the poem feels like a story told in two-line bursts, held in place by three moments of reflection.
The poem matters because it refuses to flatter its speaker. It gives no excuse, no villain, and no neat apology. It asks a question, tells a brief and damning story, and stops on a loss that cannot be undone. In doing so it shows how a feeling that seems like love at its brightest can turn out to be something closer to consumption.