Six times the speaker says "to see," and six times the sentence stops before it says why. Each line is an infinitive with no main verb, a purpose with no action attached. Beneath the title, "Self examination," sits an unasked question: why look at yourself so closely? The poem answers in fragments. What the speaker finds is smallness, something mechanical, and finally a greedy wish to own the one thing nobody can own. Honest self-scrutiny, the poem suggests, does not end in comfort. It ends in wanting.
The construction is spare. There is no rhyme, no punctuation and no capital letters, so the lines sound like thoughts being added one at a time. The stanzas alternate between one line and two: "to see what little I am" stands alone, then "to see an absent satisfaction / close to the dirt" takes two, and the pattern repeats to the end. The repeated "to see" works like a drumbeat. Because the opening is so predictable, the small changes in what follows stand out. The line breaks do real work too. "what things / make a man himself" cuts off after "things," so the word hangs there blankly, as if a person were just an assembly of objects. In the last stanza, "like a bad king" is held back until the final line delivers "to possess death," and the poem ends on its heaviest word.
The imagery moves downward and inward. "Little" shrinks the speaker, "close to the dirt" puts him at ground level, and "inside a machine" takes him under a casing. The phrase "absent satisfaction" is a neat paradox, because satisfaction can only be seen here as something missing. "Close to the dirt" also hints at humility and, judging by the imagery, at burial, though the poem never says so. The machine is the most puzzling image. It might be literal, or it might stand in for the body, since the very next stanza asks what makes "a man himself." The poem leaves this open. Then comes the surprising line "to see how fine the machines are." "Fine" can mean excellent, delicate or precisely made. The plural "machines" suggests the speaker has moved from one mechanism to admiring a whole class of them. Compared with such finely made things, "what little I am" sounds even smaller.
The pronouns shift quietly along the way. The poem begins with "I," moves to the general "a man," and ends with "me." That last word turns the speaker into an object of inspection, something looked at rather than someone looking. Then "wanting" does two jobs. It means desiring, and it also means lacking, as in the idiom "found wanting." The speaker is both greedy and deficient, and the poem will not separate the two.
The simile of the "bad king" fits this well. A king wants to possess things, and a bad one never stops. The speaker's appetite reaches past land and treasure to death itself. "Possess" is ambiguous. It could mean to own death, to master it, or even to be possessed by it. Perhaps the machines hold a clue. A machine can be opened up and understood, and the speaker may crave the same control over his own ending. That is an inference, though, and the poem offers no explanation.
What makes the poem worth reading is how little it consoles. A self-examination might be expected to end with wisdom, repentance or at least a clear self-portrait. Instead the speaker discovers a hunger that would be absurd if it were not so human. Without a closing full stop, the wanting stays open. The poem also fits a whole attitude into six short lines, moving from modesty to admiration to something nearer to tyranny. After reading it, a reader might try writing their own list of "to see," and find it more uncomfortable than expected.