I Shall Not Try To Fool Myself - Analysis

Refusing self-deception, yet choosing a mask

The poem’s central drama is a man who insists he will stop lying to himself, yet can’t stop naming himself with the very labels that seem like lies. It opens with a vow—I shall not try to fool myself—and immediately admits the real occupant of his inner life: Care’s roosted in my misty heart. That roosted matters: worry isn’t a passing mood but a bird settled in for the night. Against that stubborn sadness, the speaker asks why he has become a charlatan and a hooligan. The questions sound like an indictment, but also like an attempt to explain his public reputation before anyone else can.

The poem argues with its own accusations

What follows is a strangely legal defense: I’m not a crook, he says, and offers specific crimes he hasn’t committed—he doesn’t steal wood or shoot unhappy prisoners. By picking such blunt, almost official wrongs, the speaker separates himself from state violence and petty theft; whatever his guilt is, it’s not that kind. Instead he calls himself a street Arab, a figure of homelessness and outsider life, then softens it at once: someone Who smiles at everyone he meets. The contradiction tightens: he’s branded a hooligan, but the poem keeps showing a man whose main impulse is friendliness.

Moscow’s backstreets: swagger as a kind of loneliness

He leans into the city persona—Naughty Moscow boulevardier!—as if performing the role others expect. Even the dogs participate in his legend: Every back-street mongrel / Round Tvyersky Street knows well / The sound of my light step. The detail of the light step gives him a dancer’s or thief’s quickness, but the witnesses are strays, not respectable citizens. This is a poem where the speaker’s audience is the city’s overlooked life. His “hooligan” identity starts to look less like pure rebellion and more like the social position he’s been assigned: visible, talked about, but not truly held by anyone.

Animals as the speaker’s honest community

The most persuasive self-portrait arrives through animals. A drayhorse shakes its head when he passes—not in fear, but recognition—and he claims, I’m a friend / To animals. He even makes an extravagant promise for his art: every line / I write cures the bestial soul. That sentence is both tender and slightly grandiose, and that’s the point: the speaker is torn between humility (he feeds horses) and the need to believe his words matter. In this world, animals become the beings he can be truthful with; they don’t ask him to be respectable, and they don’t force him to pretend he’s fine.

Elegance repurposed: top-hat, tie, oats

He keeps taking symbols of urban style and redirecting them away from romance, status, and conquest. My top-hat’s not for women, he insists, because his heart can’t live in stupid lust. Instead of seduction, the hat is useful for service: it’s handier for ladling oats to hungry mares. Likewise, he’s ready to remove his finest tie not to impress someone, but To hang about a horse’s neck. The tension here is sharp: he carries the costume of a boulevard figure, yet his deepest wish is to turn that costume into a tool of care. His tenderness is almost defiant—an alternative masculinity built around feeding and adorning the vulnerable.

The turn: pain clears, and the stigma becomes self-chosen

Near the end, the poem pivots: Already now I cease to ache. The horror in the misty heart clears, as if the inner weather changes. But instead of dropping the ugly labels, he repeats them as conclusions: This is why I’m a charlatan. / This is why I’m a hooligan. The logic is provocative: his “fraudulence” is not that he fakes kindness, but that he lives in a world where kindness looks like a pose; his “hooliganism” is not violence, but refusal to join the human realm that offers him no true friend. The poem ends by turning accusation into identity, not because he believes the insult, but because it’s the only language society has given him for his difference.

A sharper question the poem leaves behind

If his care is real—oats for hungry mares, a tie for a horse—why must he keep calling himself a charlatan? The poem suggests a bleak answer: when tenderness has no accepted place among men, it starts to feel like performance, even to the one performing it.