Sun on the face, head in the clouds: the poem opens on a speaker who is almost weightless. The first lines run long and loose and are full of light ("My eyes would sparkle and glint and play"). Then a short line cuts the happiness in half: "And then / You changed me." What follows is an account of a relationship that turns violent and controlling. The central idea is that this kind of harm does not stop at the body. It rewrites a person's sense of who she is, until she describes herself in her abuser's terms.
The imagery follows that change. Sunlight gives way to "rank darkness" and a "dark garden", and the simile of a snake swallowing its prey introduces a motif of consumption that keeps returning: "hungry love", then "feed". The snake and the garden together faintly recall Eden, though the poem never says so, and the echo may be accidental. The speaker's address to Pain is one of the oddest moments. She talks to it like a child caught playing with matches: "This is not your home. / Run along, run away! Put down that fire!" It is an almost motherly scolding, a last attempt to keep her soul safe with good manners. The next question is more frightening. Love may not have left at all, but may be "already" sitting beside her, and may be the pain itself.
Then comes a small ladder of hope: "Sometimes… Something… Somewhat… Someday." Four lines begin with "Some-", and each shrinks the wish a little more, from a habit of thought to a vague object, then "somewhat impossible", then "just maybe". The kite is a child's toy that points back to the clouds of the opening. But a kite is also held on a string, which may be worth noticing in a poem about being held. Then, in a line of its own, "Crack." The violence arrives in exactly the place where the escape fantasy was, and the poem does not explain it.
Afterwards the speaker's voice changes. "That'll teach me to look at another man" sounds like a lesson learned from someone else's punishment. "Why am I so selfish? I am lustful and full of greed" turns the blame back on herself. The word "greed" also starts the poem's sharpest piece of craft. Until now rhyme has been scattered and slight ("play" and "prey", "lie" and "die"). Suddenly the lines lock into one sound: weed, steed, feed, need, seed. Each line repeats the pattern "He is the… and I am his…", so the sentences have nowhere to go but where the rhyme sends them. The chant sounds close to a nursery rhyme, which is part of what makes it chilling.
The comparisons themselves escalate. The oak and the weed are about size. The king and the steed bring in rule and being ridden. In "He is the cattle and I am his feed" she is not even the animal but what the animal eats, which brings back the swallowing of the snake. Addict and need make him the one who craves, and her the thing craved. The last pairing, god and seed, moves into worship and origins. The list starts in nature and politics and ends in religion, as if every available framework has been drafted to explain why she is smaller.
After all that ornament, the ending is plain: "I was once a woman. / Now, a shadow." There are no metaphors left to hide behind. A shadow depends on light and belongs to something else, and it quietly answers the sun-warmed face of the first line. The refrain returns as "You changed me…", with an ellipsis instead of a full stop. The sentence that started the damage has not finished.
The poem matters because of how well its form matches its subject. The irregular rhythm, the abrupt one-word line, and the rhyme that tightens into a trap let a reader feel a voice being taken over, not just hear that it happened. It is rough in places, but the roughness suits a speaker who is losing her footing.