"Problematizical" is a word that seems to clear its throat before speaking. It stacks the dry, modern verb "problematize" onto an old-fashioned "-ical" ending, and the result sounds both scholarly and slightly absurd. That mix of seriousness and mischief runs through the whole poem. Its subject is the trouble of choosing, of deciding what one is or what one will say yes to, and it makes that trouble feel playful and strange rather than heavy.
The first couplet frames the dilemma as a question with no question mark: "which to be / a ropemaker or a sun." "Which to be" has an old, inverted grammar that recalls Hamlet's "to be or not to be," though here the stakes are comic and the options are not opposites at all. A ropemaker is a figure of patient human labour, someone who twists loose fibres into something that binds and holds. A sun gives light without effort, from an impossible distance. One option is made by hands and the other is simply given. The sentence slides between them so casually that the choice feels both ridiculous and oddly real, as if the speaker wanted to be the one who ties things together and the one who lights them up.
The second couplet repeats the "or" structure but changes the scale: "the old East India Company / or the rains." The first line is the longest in the poem, nine syllables rolling toward the lilting "Company," as if the institution were sprawling across the page. Then "or the rains" cuts it off in three. Rhythm does the work of an argument here, because a vast commercial enterprise is answered by something older and bigger that it cannot control. Judging by the imagery, there may be a link with the first couplet. Ropes and ships belong together in the imagination, and rain suggests the weather that trading voyages depended on. The poem never says so, which is part of its charm. It lets the images sit side by side and leaves the reader to find the thread between them. In both couplets one choice is a human construction and the other a natural force, and the speaker seems pulled toward both.
The final couplet turns from the choices to the speaker: "no end of accounts / to tire my yes." Here "accounts" does double duty. In the context of a trading company it means ledgers, columns of figures, debts and profits. It also means stories, versions, explanations, the endless ways people narrate the world. Either way, the supply is limitless. The most startling phrase is "tire my yes," where a small affirmative word becomes a noun that can be worn out. Saying yes to anything, whether a role, a history, or a way of seeing, is presented as a muscle that fatigues when the world offers too many competing stories. The poem stops without a full stop, so the tiredness is left hanging rather than resolved.
Formally, the poem is spare. It has three couplets, no rhyme, no capital letters, and no punctuation. Rhyme would have suggested a neat answer, and its absence keeps the question open. The lines are short and the diction plain, apart from the odd title and the grand proper name in the middle. That proper name stands out because everything else is so small and bare. "Sun," "rains," and "yes" are all single syllables, which gives the poem a hushed, almost spoken quality, while "ropemaker" and "Company" supply the longer sounds.
What makes the poem worth reading is how much it holds in so few words. It touches on work, empire, weather, and storytelling without lecturing on any of them, and it admits uncertainty without becoming gloomy. The title promises a problem, but the poem treats the problem with a light, wry touch. It suggests that identity is not a single decision but a pile of possibilities, some human-made and some elemental, and that the real difficulty is not choosing among them but keeping enough energy to go on saying yes.