Eight short lines, one word for a title, and a whole life seems to change hands in the space between them. "Made" is the kind of poem that gets by on what it leaves out, and the gaps are where its meaning sits.
The first stanza stages a strange encounter inside the speaker. "Within me, one / that had formerly known me" suggests a former self, someone who knew the speaker before whatever happened next. The speaker can't name him ("I know not his name"), and the unnamed figure is more unsettling for it. The phrasing is slightly archaic: "know not" instead of "don't know." That gives the line a hushed, almost scriptural air. The last line of the stanza is a whispered aside in parentheses: "(I had the wit to deny him.)" The brackets make the denial sound furtive, as if the speaker is muttering it under his breath. The word "wit" is the sharpest choice. Denying the old self isn't presented as cowardice or betrayal, but as cleverness, a survival skill. The tone is dry and a little ashamed. Anyone who knows the story of Peter denying Christ may hear an echo, though the poem never says so. That is an inference, but the structure fits: someone who knew you is disowned before witnesses.
The second stanza moves from "I" to "we": "We made ourselves / by taking away art." This is the paradox at the poem's center. Making usually means adding, yet here the self is built by subtraction. Whatever "art" means here, whether creative work, artifice, or the inner life that makes someone distinctive, it is the price of belonging to the "we." One might also notice that "art" sits right after the archaic "know not," so for a split second it can look like the old verb form, as in "thou art." That is only a faint possibility, but it fits a poem about what lingers of an old self.
Then the title turns on itself. "We made ourselves" is active and proud, the language of the self-made. A line later comes "Made to confess," where the same word is passive and means forced. The poem never settles which kind of making happened. Was the speaker's change a choice, or was it pressure dressed up as choice? "Confess" carries both a religious and a legal weight, so it could be admitting guilt, or reciting what an authority wants said. The poem doesn't say who is doing the making, and that silence hints at a system or institution that stays offstage.
The final line is the most loaded: "I married the company." Marriage is a vow, a binding, and it usually means giving up other options. Placing it next to "company" gives the line a deadpan comedy, since "company" can mean a business, a theatrical troupe, or simply the people you keep around you. Which one the speaker means is left open, and the word's three senses make the surrender sound both corporate and intimate. The irony is that a theatrical company would be a place for art, yet this marriage happens only after art has been taken away.
There is no rhyme, and the lines are short, running from about four to eight syllables. The rhythm is plain and clipped, like testimony. The longest lines come at the ends of the stanzas, "(I had the wit to deny him.)" and "I married the company," and each one lands as a small punchline with a bitter aftertaste. The dash after "known me" is a pause where a name should be, and the stanza break is a pause where an explanation should be. The poem is built from absences, which is what it describes.
That fit between form and subject is what gives the poem its force. It says that becoming someone can mean cutting something away, and it does so in lines that are themselves cut down to the bone. It asks, without answering, whether the speaker lost his old self or sold it, and the reader is left to decide how much of that choice was ever free.