Three times in twelve lines a woman smiles, and each smile makes the reader a little more uneasy. On the surface, "Squire" shows a gardener, a fire and an unmade bed. Put those together and a darker story appears. The soil is "freshly turned" and "decorated with flowers", the kind of tidy mound that could be a flowerbed or a grave. Her labour lasted "hours". By the last stanza a bed holds a single figure with a "face flecked with gore", and the "so-called lover" is "gone forevermore". The poem never says "murder". It lets us work that out, and its central idea sits in the gap between what happens and how calmly it is told: violence handled with the neatness of housework, and a woman who finally feels "peaceful at last".
The order of events is a puzzle. Burial, fire and bloodied bed are presented in that sequence, though logic suggests the bed scene came first. The reader has to rearrange the clues, and the poem may want us to feel like an investigator arriving late. Even "lays only one" is ambiguous. It could mean the bed now holds one body, or that only one person is left in a bed made for two. Both readings suit the poem's grim joke about a double bed that has become a single one.
The form is plain and controlled. There are three quatrains, and the second and fourth lines of each rhyme: "flowers" with "hours", "unlit" with "wit", "gore" with "forevermore". The rhymes work like punchlines, since each stanza closes on a word that lands with a click. "Forevermore" is almost ballad language, and it gives the final line a fairy-tale finality. The rhythm is loose but steady, with lines of roughly eight syllables, and the poem is written in lowercase with hardly any full stops. That gives it a flat, unhurried voice, as if nothing here deserves a raised tone.
The most important device is the repeated "she smiles", which opens the third line of every stanza. It works as a refrain, and the smile changes each time. First it is the pride of someone "admiring her work". Then it is casual, even playful, as she is "striking and dropping" a match. Finally it is relief. The verbs around it get lighter as the deeds get heavier, so the contrast grows with every stanza.
The imagery plays delicacy against dirt and blood. "Lace adorned gloves, stained with dirt" is a small portrait of gentility soiled. The lace suggests a refined, ladylike gardener, and the dirt suggests what she has really been doing. The unlit matches wait on the table like an ordinary household item until she uses one. The line "the fire burns as bright as her wit" is the poem's boldest turn. Comparing a flame to intelligence makes the fire an extension of her cleverness, and the speaker seems almost to applaud it. The reader is invited to admire her, then slightly alarmed to find that we do.
The words around the poem add to this. The subtitle, «hearts and spades | day 19 | freewrite», suggests a daily writing exercise, and "hearts and spades" may be a prompt. Whatever its origin, it fits the poem well. Hearts stand for love, and spades are both a card suit and the tool for digging a grave. The title is also a little strange. A squire is traditionally a knight's attendant, a figure of service. Here the word may hint at a reversal, with a servant who takes control. That is an inference from the title, since the poem never explains it.
The word "so-called" in "so-called lover" is the only moment the poem openly takes sides. Everything else is description, but that phrase dismisses the dead partner and hints at betrayal or harm that we are never shown. The poem does not say whether her calm is justified. Its interest lies in leaving that question open while the rhyme and refrain make her actions feel almost orderly. The effect is unsettling because of how neat it is, and a few short stanzas manage to be both dark comedy and quiet horror.