As I Walkd By Mysel - Analysis

A song of self-talk that turns into a shield

The poem’s central move is simple but sharp: it stages a conversation in which the speaker teaches himself emotional self-reliance because he believes no one else will. The first voice offers a bleak verdict—there's nobody cares for thee—and the second voice answers by hardening into a principle: I'll look to mysel. What begins as advice becomes armor. The repeated meeting with mysel suggests a mind circling its own loneliness until it can convert that loneliness into a kind of independence.

Two selves: the wounded observer and the stubborn survivor

The poem splits the speaker into two roles: one that names the hurt, and one that manages it. In the first stanza, the speaker describes walking alone—As I walk'd by myself—then immediately fills the solitude with an internal echo: I said to mysel, and myself said again. That doubling feels less like playful ventriloquism than like a need for company. The advice he gives himself is oddly torn: Look weel to thyself, or not to thyself. The phrase or not carries a shrugging despair, as if even self-care might be pointless when the world offers no response. Yet the command Look weel still implies there is something worth preserving, even if only by one’s own hand.

The turn: from being uncared for to choosing not to care

The second stanza pivots from complaint to declaration. The speaker doesn’t deny the first stanza’s loneliness; he accepts it and builds a posture out of it: Whatever be my degree. That line widens the claim beyond a single bad day, suggesting that status, class, or success won’t change the basic fact of being on one’s own. The repeated I'll statements—I'll look, I'll think—sound like self-commandments, a private code of conduct. The final line, And I care for nobodie, lands with deliberate bluntness: it is both a consequence of neglect and an attempt to seize control of the situation by choosing what was previously inflicted.

A tough contradiction hiding inside the pride

There’s a tension between the poem’s brave surface and the ache that makes it necessary. If the speaker truly didn’t care for anyone, he wouldn’t need to argue himself into that stance through repetition and self-address. The very act of saying nobody cares reveals a desire to be cared for; the act of insisting on my sel exposes how thin that independence feels. In the end, the poem reads like a small, hard proverb forged from disappointment: self-reliance is offered not as a virtue to admire, but as a strategy for surviving the fear that affection is not coming.