Every one of the thirty-five lines in "I wanted" begins with the same two words, and the poem's whole meaning sits in the second one. "Wanted" is past tense. It tells us that everything listed, from the letters and meals to the mountains, either never happened or no longer can. The poem never says why. It gives us a long catalogue of wishes and leaves us to feel the gap where the fulfilment should be.
The catalogue is carefully ordered. The first lines are small and domestic: to write, to jot down, to draw a face, to cook "a meal", to "buy you gifts". These are things a person could do in an afternoon, which makes their absence sting. Then the scale jumps. The speaker wants to "circumnavigate the earth", "count the stars", "trace a river's source", "climb the Everest" and "dance on a dune", and every one of these ends in "with you". The ambition grows, but the companion stays fixed. The adventures matter less than who would share them.
The second stanza shifts from doing to feeling and then to the impossible. Early on we get "sing for you" and "slumber in your arms", then the more intimate "touch your soul". After that the speaker wants "to make the sun rise in the evening" and "the moon rise in the morning". No one can do this, and that is the point. Love is imagined here as something strong enough to rearrange the sky, and the speaker admits the wish is beyond reach. The widening circle that follows, with the "vegetation", "the animals", "the people", sounds like a proclamation. Judging by this urge to tell everyone, the love may never have been made public, though the poem leaves that open.
Time runs through the second stanza as well. "I wanted us to age and grow" looks forward across a lifetime, and the next lines tighten the idea. First "I wanted you to see my future", then "I wanted you to be my future". Changing one verb turns a hope that someone will witness a life into a hope that they will be that life. Then comes "my forever with you", the largest word the poem allows itself.
The ending is the most striking part. After thirty-three lines of "I wanted to…", the poem drops the infinitive verb and says "I wanted you, / I wanted us." The wishes shrink to a person and then to a pair. The comma and the full stop are among the few pieces of punctuation in the stanza, so the lines land like two quiet breaths after a long run. The pronouns move from "our love" in the first line to "you" and finally "us". That small shift hints that "us" was the one thing the speaker never fully had. It's a reading drawn from the text, not a certainty.
The form is free verse, with no rhyme and no regular metre. Most lines are short and roughly the same length, so the rhythm comes from repetition, not sound patterns. The poem has a quiet irony here, because the speaker says "I wanted to rhyme your ideal woman" in a poem that doesn't rhyme at all. The stanza break after "dance on a dune with you" gives a pause between the earthly wishes and the cosmic ones. The first line, "I wanted to write of our love", also hangs over the whole poem. In a sense the poem is that writing, a late and partial version of the letter, the story on paper and the "profess and confess" the speaker says they wanted.
The poem is significant for its restraint. It names no quarrel, parting or death, and its language is plain, with little figurative decoration beyond the sun and moon. Because it explains nothing, readers can place their own unfinished love inside it. For students, it shows how much a single repeated phrase can do. Its meaning builds up as the lines accumulate, until one small verb in the past tense carries the grief.