Three lines, no capital letters, no punctuation, and no title, only a row of asterisks where one might go. Anselm Hollo's poem arrives like a remark overheard mid-conversation, and what it overhears is one of the oldest puzzles about being a person: where, exactly, is "you"?
The first line sounds like a calm correction: "the soul is not a little man." It targets a picture most of us half-carry around, a tiny passenger sitting inside the skull or chest. Line two lists the usual addresses, "the heart or head," the two obvious candidates for where feeling and thinking live, and gives the little man a job. He is "operating." That verb is quietly funny. It makes the soul a technician at a control panel, a pilot in a cockpit, perhaps even a surgeon, and it makes the body a machine that needs someone to run it. The poem rejects the picture while describing it in such practical detail that you can almost see the levers, which may be why the picture is so hard to shift.
Then the third line turns. "all right but who is that little guy" begins with a grudging concession, as if the speaker has lost an argument and is conceding the point. Then comes "but," and the figure refuses to leave. Look at what happens to the vocabulary. The "man" of line one sounds like a textbook, while the "guy" of line three is someone you'd mention across a kitchen table. The adjective "little" is repeated, but it shifts from dismissive to almost affectionate. The word "that" points, as though the little guy were still standing there, unmoved by the debate.
Underneath sits a simple, nagging logic. If a small man inside you runs the controls, who runs him? Another, smaller man? The poem never spells out this endless regress. It lets one colloquial question imply it. Saying the soul is not a little man gets rid of the cartoon but not the feeling behind it, the sense that someone is in there. There is a further twist, too. The voice asking "who is that" belongs to the same self that the question is about, so the little guy may be the one asking.
The sound of the poem supports this. Line one is a clean, steady beat of eight syllables: "the SOUL is NOT a LIT-tle MAN." It has the confidence of a chant or a nursery rhyme, which suits the childlike image it dismisses. Lines two and three stretch to nine syllables each and loosen into speech rhythm, as though the argument were slipping out of the speaker's control. There is no end rhyme ("man," "head," "guy"), but small echoes hold the lines together. "Heart" and "head" share their opening sound, pairing the two rival homes of the soul. The long *i* of "right" returns in "guy," so the last word closes on an open vowel that hangs in the air. The missing question mark does the same job. Nothing in the punctuation shuts the question down, so it stays open on the page.
The poem is significant because it does the work of an argument in the voice of a shrug. It takes a problem philosophers have long worried over and gives it to us as a joke that doesn't stay a joke. We laugh at the "little guy," then notice that we can't quite say what has replaced him. The poem doesn't offer an answer, and it's wise not to. It only shows a mind catching itself still believing in what it has just denied. The short lines and plain words make that moment easy to recognise.
For a student reader, the poem shows how much a few ordinary words can carry. Changing "man" to "guy," or choosing "operating" over a more solemn verb, shifts the tone from lecture to confession. The poem ends where thinking about the soul usually ends, with a question we can ask but not settle, and the little figure in the head still waiting to be named.