Nine short lines, no punctuation and no rhyme, and still the poem manages to describe a whole relationship after it has gone wrong. Two people are no longer together, or at least no longer at peace, and their feelings have stopped keeping time with each other. Part of him will go on loving the speaker. Part of the speaker will work at the opposite task. The central idea is that love doesn't end on command, and that ending it is a project one has to labour at, with no guarantee of success.
The title, "Love unlove.", sets this up as a puzzle. Read as an instruction, it tells love to reverse itself, a bit like telling a spilled drink to climb back into the glass. Read as two nouns pressed together, it names a single condition in which loving and unloving happen at once. "Unlove" is also a slightly strange word. The prefix suggests the undoing of a knot or a lock, as in *untie* or *unlock*, so love is imagined as something made and fastened, which in principle could be taken apart. The poem then tests that idea and doesn't let it comfortably succeed.
The construction is quietly clever. The first stanza ends on "me" and the second ends on "him," so the pronouns cross over like a mirror image. In stanza one he is the subject and the speaker is the object ("Love me"). In stanza two the speaker becomes the subject and he becomes the object ("unlove / him"). Each person is shown acting on the other, and the white space between the stanzas is where they fail to meet. Both stanzas also rely on the phrase "a part of," which means neither person is whole. He is not simply loving and she is not simply leaving. Each is divided, which feels more honest than a neat story of one person who stays and one who goes.
The poem's lopsidedness shows in its verbs. His side gets "would always / Love me": the line is smooth and settled, and "always" has no effort in it. The speaker's side gets "would try / to unlove / him," and the line breaks pile up hesitations. "Try" admits that she may fail, and the break after it leaves the effort hanging for a moment before the action "to unlove" arrives on its own line. Short, broken lines like these read almost like someone stopping to breathe. The repeated "would" matters too. It is neither plain present nor plain future, and it has the feel of prediction or resignation, as if the speaker is describing something she already knows about both of them. The poem never says he has told her this. It reads as something she is sure of, which gives the lines a mix of comfort and weight.
The typography is worth noticing. Apart from the sentence openers "A" and "And," the only capitalised word is "Love," and it appears mid-sentence, where a lowercase word would be expected. That capital makes love feel like a proper noun, a force or an institution that outranks the people serving it. The speaker's attempt to "unlove" is lowercase and small by comparison. The missing punctuation adds to this. With no full stop after "him," the poem trails off without closing, which suits a task the speaker may still be struggling with. The title, by contrast, ends with a full stop and sounds like a verdict that the poem then questions.
The poem's significance lies in what it refuses to do. It doesn't call anyone a villain or announce a clean break. It offers no revenge and no triumphant moving on, only the awkward fact that one person's lingering love can sit beside another person's effort to let go, and that both can be real. Judging by the text alone, the speaker feels something complicated about being loved so durably. It might be gratitude, guilt or a trap, and the poem leaves that open. A reader who has been on either side of a breakup can fill in the reason. Nothing about the poet or the circumstances of writing is supplied here, and the poem doesn't need it. It works because it takes an experience that usually takes pages to describe and puts it in a few words, each placed with care.