Twelve words, and a whole bargain is laid out. The speaker imagines cutting out their own eyes and claims the result would be "perfect sight." On the surface that is nonsense: remove the organ and you remove the seeing. The couplet only works if we hear "sight" as something larger than eyesight, meaning clarity, judgment, the ability to see past surfaces. The idea is very old. Greek myth gives us Tiresias, the blind prophet who knows what others cannot, and Oedipus, who blinds himself once he finally understands the truth about his own life. This poem takes that tradition and shrinks it to two lowercase lines.
The title adds a complication. Putting «choice» in guillemets holds the word at arm's length, as if it were someone else's word, or one the speaker doesn't quite trust. Is it really a choice when the only route to a flawless view runs through destroying the means of looking? The quotation marks suggest a bargain that looks free but isn't. They also stand out in a poem that has otherwise dropped capitals and nearly all punctuation.
The grammar is just as careful. "If... would" makes everything hypothetical. The speaker never says they will do it, only that they imagine what follows. The comma at the end of the first line works like the pause between the cut and its result: the cost comes first, the reward second. The rhythm reinforces this. "If i carved out my eyes" has six syllables and a cluster of heavy beats, so "carved," "out" and "eyes" land almost like blows. The second line, "i would see with perfect sight," is longer but smoother, close to a steady iambic glide. It sounds calm and certain, and that calm after the violence is what unsettles us. Nobody in this poem seems to be screaming.
The word "carved" deserves attention. The speaker could have said "tore" or "gouged," but carving belongs to sculptors and woodworkers. It implies control, precision, even artistry, and "carved out" suggests hollowing a space as much as inflicting a wound. The act is made to sound deliberate and almost beautiful, which is part of what makes the poem disturbing.
Then there is the sound of the first-person pronoun. "I" and "eye" are pronounced identically, and the poem keeps them close: "i," "eyes," "i," "sight," all sharing that long vowel. To carve out "my eyes" begins to sound like carving out "my I." The suggestion is that truthful seeing might require giving up the self, the particular, biased point of view from which every person looks. Perfect sight would belong to nobody.
The vocabulary is almost entirely one-syllable words: "if," "carved," "out," "would," "see," "with." The only exception is "perfect," which is also the most suspect word. Perfection is an absolute that no real sight achieves, and in this plain-spoken line it stands out like a boast. The phrase "see with perfect sight" is slightly odd as well. The preposition "with" expects an instrument and gets only an abstraction. We are told how the speaker would see but not through what, which leaves sight with no eyes.
Nothing ends the poem. There is no full stop after "sight," so the thought hangs open, as if the vision it describes had no edge. That openness is where the poem's real question sits. Should we believe the speaker? The "if" leaves room to suspect a rationalization, the kind of reasoning that makes a loss sound like a gain. Or the lines may be a sharp truth: that we see more honestly once we stop relying on appearances. The poem declines to say which.
That refusal is the main reason a couplet this small is worth reading closely. It condenses an ancient paradox, that clarity can demand sacrifice, into a modern, quiet, lowercase voice, and it trusts the reader to finish the thought. Whether we hear wisdom or a dangerous fantasy depends on how much we think "perfect" can be believed.