Four lines, and the speaker is already crowded. The poem opens by announcing the self with a colon, as if "Me" were a headline or a name on an office door, and then calls it "my extreme business." The phrase is odd in a useful way. "Business" gives selfhood the flat vocabulary of work, something to be minded and kept up. "Extreme" pulls the other way, toward the outermost edge, the last resort, the thing done too intensely. Together they suggest that looking into yourself is both an everyday chore and a risky one, and perhaps a slightly absurd one, since the speaker is the only customer. The title, "Self-Reflection," sets up the double meaning of a mirror's image and a mind's thinking, and the poem keeps both going.
Then the mirror shows someone else. "I see my father, that wit, / the war with chance." The grammar is loose enough to let several readings in. Are "that wit" and "the war with chance" two descriptions of the father, or are they further things the speaker sees? The comma-separated pile-up lets them blur, so the father becomes wit, and wit becomes a war against chance. It is a striking way to define a person, by a stance toward luck rather than by appearance or deeds. Wit here seems to mean quickness of mind, the knack of turning accident into order, or at least into a joke. The word "war" is enormous beside the casual "that wit," and the mismatch seems to be the point: the cleverness is a fight, and the opponent is something that cannot be argued with. The poem never says whether the father won, or whether he is living or dead. The present-tense "I see" simply puts him in the glass, which is where inherited faces tend to turn up.
Nothing here rhymes, and the lines have no regular meter, but the sound is carefully managed. Line lengths shrink from the first to the third, which has only four syllables, so that "the war with chance" lands like a closing door. A small cluster of w-sounds runs through the middle and end: "wit," "war," "with," and finally "we." That last word also quietly rhymes with the poem's first word, "Me," so the piece begins and ends on the same vowel while changing one consonant, and a single person becomes a pair. The final line is almost entirely monosyllables, "My lord Me, we turn," and each word takes nearly equal weight, which gives it the slow tread of a ceremony.
That line is where the poem's humor and its unease meet. "My lord Me" is a mock-formal address, the speaker acting as courtier to his own ego. The capital M, repeated from line one, turns a pronoun into a title. But the lord has just been shown to be an heir. Whatever kingdom "Me" rules was handed down by a father, and the sovereign is as much a product of that war with chance as the man in the mirror. Then comes "we," and the self divides. It could mean the speaker and his lordly double, or the speaker and the father he sees in himself. The poem declines to choose.
"Turn" is the most open word of all. It can mean turning toward the mirror or away from it, turning into one's father, or the turning of a wheel. Given the earlier "chance," I would read a gambler's or fortune's wheel in it, though that is an inference from the imagery rather than anything the poem states. It also describes what the poem itself does, since the last line is a small volta, a turn from observation to a shared movement.
The poem is significant for how much self-knowledge it packs into so little space. It undercuts self-importance without abandoning the self as a subject, and it suggests that identity is partly inherited and partly an ongoing struggle with contingency. Its brevity also matches its theme: a few quick words set against a large, unruly subject, which is what the father's "wit" was doing too.