Anyone who has sat a multiple-choice test knows the sinking feeling of reaching the last option: "all of the above." You can't pick one answer and be done. You have to accept everything. Dacey's "Check All Of The Above" borrows that test-paper phrase for a love poem of sorts, or at least a poem about being loved. Its speaker hands over a list of difficulties and then announces, in the last line, that the listener must deal with every one of them.
The poem is built as a cycle of confession and request. The speaker admits to being a "day dreamer" with a head "in the clouds," then asks, "Won't you be my solid ground." The sky-and-earth pairing is neat. The idiom about a head in the clouds is pushed to its logical end: someone with their head up there will eventually "fall down," and the speaker wants someone to land on. The next confession, "I tend to block people out," leads to another request, and the image shifts from air to architecture. "Another wall" suggests this is a habit, something the speaker has built before. The plea is blunt: "Just break them all." The grammar wobbles here, since "wall" is singular and "them" is plural, but the slip suits the meaning. Once you start looking, there seem to be many walls.
The word that holds the poem together is "hard." The speaker is "hard to reach," finds it "hard to laugh," and ends by saying, "I'm hard to love." Hard means difficult, but it also means solid, like the wall and the ground. The speaker is both the thing that needs breaking through and the thing that needs to be leaned on. "I'm not easy to crack" extends this, since a wall, a nut or an egg can be cracked, and the line makes the speaker sound like something with a shell. The poem's contradiction sits in those words. The speaker wants to be reached, yet has made reaching difficult, and the poem never pretends to resolve that.
The form is plain and the sound is loose. The seventeen lines run in one block with no stanza breaks, and every line ends in a comma, even the last. That gives the poem a rushed, spilling-out quality, as if the speaker is afraid that stopping would mean losing nerve. There is some rhyme, but it is irregular: "wall" and "all," "awhile" and "smile," and the near-rhymes "clouds" and "ground," and "love" and "above." The two clearest rhymes come at moments of request, when the speaker asks to have the walls broken and a smile coaxed out. The slant rhyme on "love" and "above" arrives right at the poem's emotional centre. The spelling slips, such as "heads" without an apostrophe and "Becasue," add to the sense of an unpolished, unedited voice, though they don't weaken the feeling.
The most interesting moment is the pair of lines "Many have tried, / Many have failed." The repeated structure reads like a boast, with the speaker as a challenge nobody has passed, and also like a sad record of disappointments. The next line drops the pride entirely. "I'm hard to love" is flat and unadorned, and it is followed by "because," which turns what sounds like self-blame into a set of conditions. Love, the speaker says, is possible, but only if you "do all of the above."
That final phrase has a second meaning. "Above" can point back to the speaker's list of faults, which the other person must accept, and to the requests, which they must carry out: be solid ground, break the walls, make the speaker smile. It also echoes the clouds of the opening line, so the poem ends where it began, up in the sky. The poem doesn't say who "you" is, and that openness lets many readers step into the role.
What makes the poem worth reading is its honesty about a very human contradiction. The speaker sets up defences and asks someone to get past them anyway, and the test-paper title gives the whole thing a dry, self-aware humour. Under the jokes about quizzes, the poem asks whether being loved should be this much work, and whether the speaker really believes the answer is yes.