To Myself

This poem starts out seeming like a call to the author's own self, trying to find who he really is as he is writing it. It begs the question that maybe we never know who we really are, or contrarily, we may know exactly who we are, but in some sort of doubt we question and prod who we actually are in order to find ourselves to be some sort of impostor, when the case is quite untrue. The poem ends by saying that, maybe within all this searching, we knew all along who we are but we just refuse to believe it. I think W.S. Merwin  is keying in on the common issue that we are insecure with our own intuitions and we cannot decipher between our realities and our psychological doubts. The poem talks about how a person feels closer, then further from know themselves, and this is just the roller coaster of doubts that people have about their own conception of reality and their true self and that people lose and gain faith in their knowing about themselves.