Will You Teach - Analysis

Advice for the wretch comes from the unqualified

The poem’s central move is to mock the idea that anyone can be taught to live straighter than a needle—and then to insist, oddly tenderly, that if you’re going to look for guidance anyway, you should look to people who seem least able to give it. The speaker frames the learner as a wretch, a word that carries shame and self-disgust, and pairs it with an absurdly strict standard of straightness. That impossible measure makes the request for instruction feel not only moral but punitive: the poem is suspicious of self-improvement that aims at needle-like purity.

Instead of presenting a teacher with authority, the poem points outward—ask, ask, ask—as if the only honest method is relentless questioning. The repetition is less a technique than a state of mind: a person desperate for rules, yet driven toward figures who won’t provide neat answers.

The first oracle: a brittle little person in rain

The first person we’re told to consult is her, described as a brittle little / person fiddling / in / the / rain. Brittle suggests fragility, even breakage; little reduces social power; fiddling implies distraction or nervousness rather than competence. Yet this is who the speaker urges us to approach again and again. The rain matters: it’s a weather of discomfort and exposure, and she’s not heroically enduring it—she’s merely there, preoccupied, getting wet.

In other words, the poem treats vulnerability as a kind of knowledge. The person who can’t keep herself dry, who seems breakable, may understand how to live without the fantasy of straightness. The tension is immediate: the poem begins with a demand for rigid rectitude and then offers a teacher who embodies unprotected, ordinary mess.

A jolt of intimacy: the thimble image

Right after urging us to ask her, the poem drops a startling question: did you kiss / a girl with nipples / like pink thimbles. The detail is comic and precise; thimbles belong to sewing kits, to domestic touch and protection, and turning them into nipples mixes innocence with erotic specificity. The color pink keeps it bodily, but also softens it into something almost toy-like.

This is where the poem’s moral problem sharpens. If you want to live straighter than a needle, why bring in a memory (or fantasy) of kissing, nipples, and playful comparison? The poem suggests that a life worth living won’t be separable from the embarrassing, tender, sensual facts of being human. The erotic image interrupts any sermon; it insists that the body will not stay outside the lesson.

The second oracle: a simple crazy thing singing in snow

The poem then repeats its instruction with a new pronoun—ask / him—and a new scene: a / simple / crazy / thing / singing / in the snow. If the first figure is brittle in rain, this one is exuberant in cold. Singing makes him sound heedless or brave; snow intensifies solitude and difficulty. But the phrasing crazy / thing refuses to grant him full dignity or rational authority.

So the poem sets up two kinds of outsider wisdom: the fragile person who fiddles while it rains, and the irrational creature who sings while it snows. Both are, in a conventional sense, the wrong teachers—yet both are offered as the best sources for instruction. That contradiction is the poem’s bet: the straightest path is the one that abandons the obsession with straightness.

What the poem’s asking might really be

If you keep asking again, you may be refusing the comfort of final answers. The poem’s questions—about living straighter, about kissing—sound like tests, but they also sound like confession. The speaker seems to suspect that the only honest teaching is contact: talk to the breakable person in the rain, listen to the singer in the snow, admit the body, admit desire, admit the crookedness you started by trying to erase.

And there’s a harder possibility the poem won’t resolve: what if the urge to be straighter than a needle is itself the real sickness, and the wretch is wretched mainly because he wants to be cured of ordinary life?