Everything in "It is I" circles something the speaker never quite names. The first line gives only a pronoun: "Its in the rivers, oh how it haunts Me." The title supplies the answer. The "It" is the speaker. What follows from that is a poem about a girl who cannot bear her own reflection and so keeps away from every surface that might show it to her.
The water is the poem's main image, and it is treated like a persecutor. It is in "the rivers," "the lakes and all the seas," and it is "always taunting me." The accusation grows through the second stanza, where she avoids even "glass, ponds / And the little dams." That list shrinks from oceans to puddle-sized trouble, and "glass" slips in as though a window or mirror were as dangerous as a sea. Her fear has no scale. Anything that can hold an image counts. Yet the water never speaks. It only lies there and reflects, so the taunting must come from the speaker's own eyes. She gives the water the voice she cannot stop hearing in her own head. When she says "they know what I am," the water is only repeating her own verdict.
The poem's pictures of place carry its emotional weight. She remembers being "a once happy girl within the waves" and finds herself "now on the sand." "Within" suggests immersion, movement and belonging, while "on" suggests a surface and a stranded stillness. The hill adds distance, so she can watch the water, even hate it, but never enter it. The poem does not say what changed, and that silence helps it. Nothing explains the lost happiness, so the loss feels both unexplained and permanent.
The fourth stanza is where the poem turns toward its argument. She says she would "gaze upon the truth, / The misery of what I am," as if a reflection were a fact rather than a judgment. Her refusal is blunt: "I will not like what I see, / Nor will I pretend." Then she reaches for a proverb, "beauty is skin deep," and the poem lands on the flat, modern "I'm far from a ten." The tired saying is supposed to comfort, but she uses it as evidence against herself. Rating herself on a scale of ten is a small, casual phrase that shows how far outside standards have settled into her thinking. The line is also the most jarring in the poem, and it should be. It sounds like someone talking, not someone composing.
The form matches this stripped-down voice. The poem is free verse in five stanzas, four of four lines and the fourth stretching to five, as if that stanza cannot contain what she needs to say. Rhyme is mostly absent, though near-echoes appear: "seas" and "me," "pretend" and "ten." These land like half-heard sounds, close to harmony but never reaching it. The strongest sound pattern is repetition. "Sand" closes three of the five stanzas ("from the sand," "Now on the sand," "Upon the sand"), and "what I am" returns in the third and fourth. The poem keeps arriving at the same shore and the same self-definition. The final stanza makes this loop physical, with lines that shrink and settle: "Sitting by myself / On a hill, / Upon the sand." The short middle line leaves her alone in the white space, and "where I always am" tells us this is routine, not a single bad day.
What makes the poem worth reading is how plainly it shows a painful trick of the mind. The speaker hates what she thinks the world shows her, so she withdraws from the world. Yet she still sits where she can watch the water, so she is not free of it. The old myth of Narcissus has a young man trapped by love for his reflection in a pool. Here the pool is just as inescapable, but the feeling is reversed: self-loathing in place of self-love. The poem does not offer a cure or even a hint of one, and it is honest about that. It ends with her still on the sand, still looking, still sure of what she will see.