The title promises a cliché, "love in the air", but the slash in «Love/in the air» splits it in two, as if the poem wants to check what the air actually carries. By the final line we know: perfume and sea breeze, yes, but also a stink. The central idea is that romance does not happen in a clean, separate world. It happens in the middle of weather, crowds and decay, and it is made of all of it. Nothing is known here about the writer beyond the initials RKM, so everything below rests on the words themselves.
The opening couplet piles up contradictions. "Summer" and "spring" share one line, "grey horizon" sits beside "blue skies", and the waves are "clueless", a wonderfully offhand personification that makes the sea sound like a dazed teenager in love. The only place named is "Bombay", and the "fling" it ends on is light, brief and a little careless. Judging by the imagery of waves, shells and coral, the setting is a seafront, though the poem never describes it fully. It gives us flashes instead, the way a person in love notices things.
The second couplet is the warmest and the most physical. "Winds slapping violent, unsettled" turns into "I embrace, cheek to cheek", and the repeated word "cheek" links the two: the wind slaps a cheek, and then a cheek is pressed against a cheek. The violence of the weather becomes the excuse for closeness. Then come "old lovers, young at heart", a stock phrase the poem lets stand without irony, followed by "tenderly kisses, guarded meek". The grammar bends here. "Kisses" could be a noun or a verb, and "guarded meek" is an odd pairing, so the lovers seem careful and shy even in affection. Their love is gentle, not showy.
Then the third couplet turns. "Stink floating, wounded shells, overlapped prints, bleach coral" is a list of damage: smell, broken shells, footprints trampled over one another, bleached coral. "Bleach" may be a verb or a noun, and that ambiguity makes the damage feel ongoing. "Overlapped prints" suggests a shore that many people have crossed, so the lovers are not alone and the beach is worn out. Then the title's idiom returns as a joke with a bitter edge: "romance in the air, sniff". That one word, "sniff", makes the air literal. We are being asked to smell the romance, and what we smell is "seething" and rot. The line ends on "hung symphony choral". The word "hung" suggests music that is suspended and unresolved, and "choral" suggests a crowd of voices, sea and people together, singing something not quite in tune.
The form supports this. The poem is three rhyming couplets (spring/fling, cheek/meek, coral/choral), a tidy, song-like pattern. But the last rhyme is only approximate, since "coral" and "choral" are close in sound but not identical, which fits a harmony that does not fully resolve. There is no steady metre. Instead, commas chop each line into short, two-beat fragments: "grey horizon, blue skies, clueless waves". The effect is of glances and impressions arriving too fast for full sentences. Sound does some work too. "Cascading gliding" runs smoothly, "slapping" snaps, and the closing "sniff, seething, symphony" hisses like surf, so the last line sounds like the sea as well as describing it.
This small poem is worth reading for what it refuses to do. A postcard version of Bombay romance would stop at the kisses and the blue skies. This one lets the smell in. It does not turn cynical, because the embrace and the "tenderly" are still there at the end, but it insists that tenderness survives alongside mess. For students, it also shows how much a short text can hold when it relies on compression, ambiguous grammar and one well-placed pun. The air in the title is both romantic and polluted, and the poem asks whether love can be honest about that.