I Am Offering this Poem

Before we dive in here, we should point out two things. Thing 1: It's never a good idea to confuse a poem's speaker with the poet him- or herself. What if the poet is writing in the voice of a made-up character? Hmm? You can wander pretty far off track if you just assume that it's the poet speaking when you see an "I" or "me" in a poem. Thing 2: With that being said, we don't really have any clues to go on as to the real identify of our speaker here. Who is the "I" and who is the "you" in the refrain "I love you?" We can only guess.

So, Shmoopers, that's just what we're going to do. We're going to give our best guess that this speaker is a boy, and his beloved is a girl. If you'd like to believe otherwise, we say go for it. In fact, this poem probably has a very good reason for not specifying who these lovers are: it wants everyone—no matter who or how they love—to relate. Love is the focus here, gang, not gender. We've all loved, so we all should be able to relate. We're just going to go with "he" and "she" for now, but that's only in order to talk about what kind of person our speaker might be.

So, let's see here… Ah, yes—our speaker is love-struck, big time. He adores his beloved. He wants to give her all he has (granted, all he has to give is poetry). The point is, the speaker positions himself as a lover in this poem. He repeats the words "I love you" four times in what is a pretty short poem. That's a lot of repetition (he just has to make sure that his beloved knows that he loves her).

But if this speaker is a lover, he is a confident one. He not only adores his beloved, he adores his own poetry. His poetry is like a "treasure," it's like a "warm coat" and "socks" that protect from the cold. It takes some serious confidence to go on about how wonderful your own writing is. But then, if we were as good at putting together stanzas as this speaker is, we'd probably be singing our own praises, too.