Cogma — Poem analysis

Dave BontaCheerful

I work with pleasure. Near an end of work, I burn to give satisfaction to the company. Take me. Make me.

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Seven short lines, and almost every one can be read two ways. On the surface, the speaker is a model employee: cheerful ("I work with pleasure"), devoted, eager to please "the company." Underneath, the vocabulary of the workplace keeps slipping into the vocabulary of longing, and the result is unsettling. The central idea seems to be that devotion to work can become a kind of surrender, in which a person wants to be used up and remade by the institution they serve.

The word choices show this. "Pleasure" is a mild, polite word for enjoying a job, but it is also a word of the body. "Near an end of work" sounds like a worker approaching the end of a shift or a project, yet "end" can also mean climax or purpose, and the line leans toward both. Then comes "I burn to give / satisfaction." Burning is what desire does, but it is also what a person does when they burn out. The speaker's energy is being consumed even as it is offered. "Give satisfaction" is stock language from customer service, and it carries a bodily meaning too. The poem never says which meaning is correct. It lets the two registers sit on top of each other until the corporate phrase starts to sound faintly indecent and the intimate phrase starts to sound like a mission statement.

"The company" is the other double word. It might be a firm, but it might also be companionship, being in someone's presence. The poem gives no name, face or pronoun, so the object of all this eagerness is blank and vast. The speaker has no "you" to address, only an institution, and that absence may be what makes the devotion so strange.

The form is spare and carefully shaped. The lines are brief, and by my count the syllables run 5, 5, 4, 4, 5, 2, 2. The poem tapers like a funnel, and each line has less room than the one before. There is no rhyme or regular meter for most of the poem, which gives the opening a flat, conversational, almost spoken-aloud quality, like someone reciting a job interview answer. Then the last two lines snap into the poem's only true rhyme: "Take me. / Make me." The rhyme works like a click. After lines of loosely connected speech, the sound locks into place, and the effect is of a chant or a prayer. The full stops add to this, because each phrase is a complete, blunt command with nothing softening it.

Those last lines also change the speaker's position. Until then the speaker is the active one, working, burning, giving. In the final two lines the speaker becomes the object of two imperatives, asking to be taken and made. "Make" is the crucial word. A person can be made in the sense of being formed or educated, but things are also made on an assembly line. The speaker asks to be turned into a product. Taking and making are what an employer does with a worker's hours, and in a different register they are what a lover or a god might be asked to do. The request is the same in each case, to be handed over completely.

The title adds one more layer, though it should be read as an inference. "Cogma" is not an ordinary English word, but it resembles "cog" and also the ending of words like "dogma" and "enigma." If that echo is intended, the title suggests a belief system (a dogma) in which the believer is a cog, a small part in a larger machine. That would fit the poem well, since the speaker's happiness and the speaker's replaceability are the same thing.

What makes the poem worth reading is how little it says and how much it leaves open. It does not accuse anyone or complain, and the speaker never shows distress. The unease comes from the cheerfulness itself. A reader can finish the poem and still not know whether the speaker is fulfilled or hollowed out, and that uncertainty is probably the point. In under thirty words, it asks how much of ourselves we hand over when we say we "work with pleasure," and whether we ever notice the moment when enthusiasm turns into asking to be taken.

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