The title of "Idealist" does the work of a subject, and the poem leans on it. Every line hangs from the opening "who," so the whole text is one long description with no main verb and no full stop. We are told what this person sees, what he does with bad news, and what he owns, but never what he does in the world. That grammatical gap seems to be part of the point. An idealist, the poem implies, is defined by how he looks at things rather than by what he changes.
The first line, "who sees the world without rags," is cleverly slippery. "Without" can mean the world has no rags, so poverty and tatters are gone. It can also mean the idealist looks at the world and fails to register them. The poem never settles this. Line two, "without imperfection," repeats the preposition, and the repetition makes the vision sound like a habit of mind, an editing out. Notice too the vocabulary. "Rags" is short, rough and physical, a word you can almost feel between your fingers. "Imperfection" is a long, abstract, Latinate word, the longest in the poem. The concrete thing and the abstract idea are both erased in the same breath, as though the idealist could not tell a beggar's clothes from a philosophical flaw.
The third line is the longest, and it is where the tone turns. "Taking a kind farewell to sad news" is almost courteous. The idealist does not slam the door on bad news; he waves it off politely, the way you might see off a guest you never really wanted. "Kind" is the unsettling word. It makes avoidance sound like gentleness, and it invites us to ask whether this kindness is aimed at the world's suffering or at the idealist's own comfort. The slow, stretched rhythm of the line, with its run of soft syllables, even feels like a drawn-out goodbye.
Then the poem switches to money. "Rags" gives way to "rich," and the last line completes the metaphor: "with what he saves in sorrow." Here the poem opens up. "Saves" can mean hoarding, as in a savings account. It can also mean rescuing or sparing. And "in sorrow" might say where the saving happens or what is being saved. Judging by the imagery, one reading is that the idealist's wealth is made of sorrow itself, a sadness he has stored up and never spent. Another is more ironic: by turning away from sad news, he saves himself the cost of feeling it. The word "already" makes this more pointed. He is rich before anything has been earned or fixed, rich in advance of a perfect world that has not arrived. The poem never says whether to envy him or pity him, and that balance is its strength.
Formally, the poem keeps everything bare. There is no rhyme, no punctuation and no capital letters, and the lines are short and uneven rather than following a regular beat. That openness suits a sentence that never closes. Instead of rhyme, the poem relies on sound echoes, especially the soft hiss of "sees," "sad," "saves" and "sorrow." The first and last lines are linked this way, with sight at the start and sorrow at the end, as if the one grows quietly into the other. The pronoun "he" appears only in the final line, after four lines of someone who has been oddly impersonal. Only at the end does the idealist become a man, and the first thing we learn about him is that he is saving sorrow.
What makes the poem worth reading is how much it holds in five lines. It sketches a character, raises a moral question and plays with the language of poverty and wealth, all without explaining itself. The reader is left to decide whether idealism is a gift, a shield, or a way of looking away. The poem does not pass judgement. It lets the idealist's own vocabulary of rags, riches and savings expose the strange bargain he has made, and it trusts us to count the cost.