"I Am Offering this Poem" is an ode, written in free verse. Great, but what the heck does any of that mean? Well, an ode is a poem that's written to, or about, a specific person (or thing). It's a poem of praise. We don't write an ode about how horrible our gymnastics teacher is (or at least, that's not usually what we do in an ode). We write an ode in admiration of how nimble our gymnastics teacher is, or an ode of love to Shmoop for helping us ace all of our English essays.
"I Am Offering this Poem" can be considered an ode on two levels. It's a poem written for a beloved whom the speaker admires and it's a poem that, well, praises itself. The speaker is full of love and admiration not only for his beloved, but for his own poem—or at least poetry in general. This speaker is quite a confident guy, clearly. He ain't exactly shy about telling us how cool his poem, and really any poem, is.
So how is this put together? The poem is written in free verse, which means that the meter is irregular. In other words, there really is no rhythmic pattern being followed here. Let's take lines 8-12 as an example:
I have nothing else to give you,
so it is a pot full of yellow corn
to warm your belly in winter,
it is a scarf for your head, to wear
over your hair, to tie up around your face,
As we can see, these lines don't rhyme. What's more, the lines are of varying lengths. The first line has eight syllables, the second line has ten syllables, the third line has eight syllables again, the fourth line has nine syllables, and the fifth line has eleven syllables.
The only thing we can rely on, form-wise, in this poem is the refrain. At the end of every stanza, there it is, a comforting reminder: "I love you." Isn't that sweet? Well, duh, but it's more than that. In terms of this poem's form, that refrain stands out against a backdrop of unpredictable, chaotic free verse. In the same way, the speaker wants his beloved to know that his love is steadfast, even when the world turns wild, the going gets rough, and the pot of corn runs low (mmm, corn…).