The exclamation in the first line is the poem's first puzzle. "How I inform myself!" could be a boast, a groan, or a stage whisper of mock astonishment. The title, "Self-starter," nudges toward the boast. It is a phrase from job advertisements, praising someone who needs no prompting, and it also names a part of an engine. Over the next four lines the poem quietly lets the air out of that pride. Its central idea is that a mind which deliberately sets out to know, and treats knowledge as a target to be reached, has misunderstood what a mind is.
Start with "inform." It means to give form to, and it also means to tell, as an informer tells. The speaker is both teller and told, a one-person school where the teacher can only repeat what the pupil already holds. That circularity is the joke, and the rest of the poem makes it concrete.
The hinge is "A mind to know / is no mind." Two things happen here. "A mind to know" can mean a mind meant for knowing, but it also catches the old idiom of having a mind to do something, of intending it. A mind with a purpose of knowing is, the poem says, no mind at all. The line break adds a sound effect, since "know" ends one line and "no" opens the next. The two words are identical to the ear, so the negation seems to arrive before we've finished reading the claim. The dash after the second "mind" holds the sentence open for a beat before the images arrive.
Those images are not quite the same kind of thing. "Sand to the Indies" has the shape of the proverbial coals to Newcastle, which means carrying something to a place that already has plenty. The Indies suggest distance, richness and trade, and sand is about the cheapest, commonest cargo imaginable. The mind that informs itself is shipping what it already owns. "The morning star to a fish" makes a different point. Here the trouble is not surplus but mismatch. The star is bright and high, and the fish lives below the surface, so the gift is something it cannot take in. One image says self-instruction is redundant, the other that it may be impossible to receive. The poem doesn't choose between them. It also gives both a watery setting, with the shore on one side and the fish on the other, which lets them sit together without explanation.
The construction is spare. Counting syllables, the lines run six, four, three, five, seven. They shrink down to the short, blunt "is no mind—," the point where the claim lands, and then widen into the pictures. There is no rhyme and no regular meter. The effect is of a proverb being put together in front of us. Notice too how the small word "to" changes jobs. In "a mind to know" it is part of a verb, in "sand to the Indies" and "star to a fish" it means delivery. The grammar slides from wanting to know into handing something over, which echoes the poem's worry about an act of knowing that goes nowhere. The last two lines contain no verbs at all. The poem ends on things, not on advice or a conclusion, and its final word, "fish," is a plain one-syllable landing.
That restraint is what makes the poem worth reading. In five short lines it takes the language of self-improvement and shows how thin it can be. It never says what a mind should do instead. Judging by the imagery, the alternative might be a mind that is open and receptive and doesn't push itself toward a goal, but the poem only hints at this. There is also some gentle self-mockery. The speaker is the only one who sounds pleased with himself, and the poem is happy to puncture him. A reader can finish it feeling either scolded or freed, and the poem seems content with both reactions.