Perfectionism Poem Analysis

The Poem, Perfectionism is by an unknown poet. It has no paragraphs and is written in one stanza. The poem is spoken in first person, but it does not state who the speaker is. The poems main subject and matter is about a person who is a perfectionist and needs everything to be perfect. This then causes the speakers life to be dominated by the perfectionism he needs. The Poet is saying that the speaker needs everything to be perfect. The whole poem until the last phrase describes a tyrant who puts the speaker in terror. It describes everything the tyrant does to him/her, torturing him/her and then about to execute him/her. The last line states, And as the blade falls, I see the face is my own. This is evidence for my point that perfectionism if dominating his life. The line itself says that he/she is doing something to himself/herself and it is compared to him/her executing himself/herself. Although the poem could have stated he has done something bad to himself and not specify what the something is, the title of the poem states perfectionism causes the speakers problem in this poem. The message in the text is that the speaker needs perfectionism; this is compared to a tyrant who threatens with the use of metaphors. As stated before in the first paragraph of this poems analysis, all verses of this poem is about a tyrant who tortures the speaker with an exception of the last verse. In these first 15 lines, the message was simply there was a tyrant who threatens and tortures the speaker. The last line, And as the Blade falls, I see the face is my own reveals that all previous lines were a comparison using metaphors and is used in this last line. To give a description of this poem, the poem used 3 imagery devices (visual imagery, auditory and tactile imagery). The poem is all visual imagery as it describes the event happening. The auditory used is not direct messages of describing the sound. Instead, it creates sound from visual imagery as a person would not imagine everything as silent which makes them imagine the

sound in the background. Tactile imagery is used several times. Like auditory, a person could imagine the feeling of the speaker as the events of the poem are happening. However, there are some direct uses of tactile imagery; examples of these are My arms tied back tight and He forced my knees to the wooden floor. These 2 lines could make us imagine to feeling of having arms tied back and having knees forced down to the wooden floor. These uses of imagery were used to describe the torture, in the first 15 lines of the poem. In conclusion, this was a metaphorical poem used to compare being a perfectionist to being threatened by a tyrant. This poem was described with the use of visual imagery, auditory and tactile imagery. The speaker in this poem is unknown as it could have been anyone speaking in the first person. After the analysis, the mood of the poem would be confirmed as light tones, but dark.