Almost every line of Sarah's "i saw him" is about eyes: the speaker's, his, and the ones that never meet. The poem is a short confession of unrequited love. The speaker watches a boy talk about music, falls for him, and says nothing. Its central idea is the gap between seeing and being seen. She notices everything about him, down to the colour the light turns his eyes, while she stays invisible to him. The ending suggests she has chosen part of that invisibility herself.
The first half is built from light. It "danced through his eyes," the sun "caught" them and was "tinting them gold," and his "red locks blazed." The verbs are lively, and they belong to the light, not to the speaker. The sun does what she cannot: it catches him, touches him and colours him. The images also show how she loves him. She doesn't describe his character or say what he said about music. She gives us a picture, gold and red and fire, as if he were lit from outside like a figure in a painting. That makes the portrait tender but also idealised. She sees him through a glow, and perhaps that glow is partly her own feeling.
Then the tone changes. "i knew it was love" is flat and sure of itself, with no image to decorate it. Right after it comes the turn, "but he never saw me." The title promised "i saw him," and now the verb is turned against her. Seeing was the whole of her love, and it was entirely one-way.
The most interesting moment is the line break in "he never saw the stolen glances / i threw him away." Read quickly, "i threw him away" is a harsh sentence: she rejects him, or gets rid of her feelings. Read with the break, the glances were "thrown" at him and he missed them. The missing punctuation lets both readings stand together. "Stolen" suggests she felt almost guilty for looking, like a thief. "Threw" suggests the looks were reckless, tossed out and never caught. The poem doesn't settle between them, and that uncertainty is what the speaker feels.
The last lines pull away from the bright imagery into something more reserved. He lives "in a world of his own making," which fits the boy who talked about music as if nothing else mattered. The speaker says she "didn't dare to disturb" it. That phrase shows her fear, but also a kind of respect or even politeness. She thinks of herself as an interruption, not as someone he might want. The final phrase, "after all he's given," is left open. The poem never says what he has given. It could be music, or simply the joy of watching him. Because the poem doesn't say, the ending can read as gratitude or as quiet hurt, and the speaker may not know which herself.
In form, the poem is spare. It has no rhyme scheme and no regular metre, only short lines that sound like a thought spoken aloud. The main sound pattern is repetition. "Eyes" appears twice in the first four lines, so the poem keeps returning to the one image it can't stop looking at. The poem is entirely lowercase, even the pronoun "i," and the only full stops come at "me" and at the very end. Whether or not this was meant as a statement, the effect suits a speaker who makes herself small and avoids drawing attention. It also stops the poem from sounding dramatic. Nobody here sobs or accuses anyone. The feeling is held in.
The poem matters because it takes a very common teenage experience and shows it accurately. Unrequited love here is not a grand tragedy but a series of small, private acts of noticing that go unanswered. Its restraint is what makes it sting: she steps back before anyone has refused her, and the poem leaves us wondering whether she was kind, afraid, or both.