What’s Up With the Title?

The title of this poem does a whole bunch of things at once. First up, it tells us that this is a poem about poetry (the words "this Poem" are in the title, after all). It announces that this poem is meta-poetry. That's when a work of poetry talks about itself, or about writing in general. And we do get an ongoing discussion of poetry's role in the speaker's and his beloved's lives.

And on another level, the title—"I Am Offering this Poem"—equates poetry with a gift. Poetry isn't something that's sold or bought, it's something that is offered, or given freely. The word "offering" also conjures up religious offerings—those gifts that we mere mortals give to the gods if we want to something really good to happen to us.

Finally, the title also puts emphasis on the relationship between the speaker and someone else, which includes us readers. That's because the speaker ("I") is offering his poem to "you." "You" is both the speaker's beloved and us readers. Don't you feel loved when you read this? Well, you should.