Sugar is normally a reward, but in this poem it slowly turns into a warning. The speaker opens with a tidy little saying: candies and chocolate tarts can fill your stomach, but only "the grin of a certain girl" can satisfy your heart. It sounds like something off a birthday card. By the last line, though, the sweetness has curdled into guilt. The poem is now the story of a friendship that one person took for love, while the other insists she meant nothing by it.
The cleverest move concerns who is speaking. For four stanzas the girl is always "she": "she led you on," "She said you were like a brother," "Was she a little too sweet?" We assume a narrator watching from outside, perhaps a friend. Then the question comes back in stanza five with one word changed: "Was I a little too sweet?" The girl has been telling her own story as if it belonged to someone else, which is what people tend to do when they aren't sure how guilty they feel. The bracketed line "(There were no bad intentions)" gives her away earlier. It is a murmured defence, slipped in right after the accusation "Sickly sweet, she led you on," as if she can't let the charge stand for even a line.
The imagery is all baking and building. Honey is "layered to the sky" and sugar "piled miles high," sweetness stacked like a tower. The poem calls this "really quite a feat," a phrase that sounds like praise for a showy cake and quietly admits that this much kindness took effort. Then the same material becomes a barricade: "like a brother" is "the first of the walls." What looked like generosity turns into a boundary. The title's "a little" is its own piece of evidence. Set against honey up to the sky, it is a heavy understatement, and the gap between the two is where her self-deception lives. The "you" of the poem "wilted in the oven's heat," a mixed image of flower and pastry at once. It is slightly awkward, but it lands on something true: a living thing placed in a kitchen it was never meant for. A reader might even half-hear a fairy-tale house of sweets, though the poem never says so.
The form is quieter than the imagery. There are five quatrains, each rhyming its first and last lines and leaving the middle two free: tarts/heart (a near-rhyme), on/gone, calls/walls, sweet/feat, heat/sweet. The rhymes close each stanza like a lid on a jar, which suits a poem about being kept at a distance. The lines are short, loosely speech-like, so it reads as a confidence rather than a performance. Then the final line breaks the pattern altogether and stands alone: "I'm sorry I broke your heart." It rhymes with "apart" from a few lines earlier and echoes "heart" from the first stanza. The satisfied heart of the opening has become the broken one.
That last line is carefully worded. She apologises for the result, a broken heart, not for the leading on, and the parenthesis has already insisted she meant no harm. Whether this is honesty or a polite sidestep is left to the reader. This is where the poem earns its place. Stories of unrequited love usually belong to the person who is hurt. This one gives the floor to the person on the other side of the wall, who caused pain without planning to. It admits how hard "flirting and friendliness" can be to tell apart, and it declines to give us a villain. What it leaves us with is a harder idea: that meaning no harm and doing no harm are not the same thing.