Most of us would be mildly embarrassed to be caught muttering alone in a room, yet George Burnett Devine's "Talking to Yourself" begins by insisting that we are muttering all the time. The conversation he describes just happens inside the head, where nobody can overhear it. The poem is a gentle, joking observation about the constant inner monologue we all carry, capped with a punchline that turns the whole thing into advice: talking to yourself is not a sign of oddness but a safe place to say what you like.
The speaker opens with a question, "Have you ever stopped to notice, / Have you ever stopped to think," and the repeated phrasing sets the tone of a friendly nudge rather than a lecture. Then comes the jovial insult, "you funny gink." The slangy word "gink" (a mildly teasing term for an odd fellow) tells us immediately that this speaker isn't a solemn philosopher. He is buttonholing the reader like a neighbor over a fence, and the reader is both audience and subject. The poem is addressed to "you," but by the end we realize that "you" is also the one doing the talking, which is exactly the trick the poem is playing.
The craft of the poem is simple and deliberately so. Each stanza has four lines in alternating rhyme, with the second and fourth lines rhyming: "think" with "gink," "shelf" with "yourself," "around" with "sound," "foes" with "goes." The meter has a bouncy, near-spoken quality, with lines of roughly four beats that sound like casual speech, not formal verse. This suits the subject. A poem about everyday chatter is written in everyday chatter's rhythm, with phrases like "By gosh" and "Ain't that the way it goes?" keeping the language loose and colloquial. The rhyme of "shelf" and "yourself" is especially neat, because the second stanza has to bend its sentence to land on the word that names the poem's whole subject.
What gives the poem its charm is its imagery of contradiction. The speaker piles up phrases of noise and then deflates them. You "chatter like the dickens," you "talk the clock around," you "make a lot of racket" — and then comes the punch: "But nobody hears a sound." The hyperbole is there to make the final silence funnier. Noise and silence occupy the same line of thought, and that paradox is the poem's core joke: the loudest conversation of your day is one that no one else can detect.
The fourth stanza widens the scope with a comic leap: "You converse with men and angels, / And laugh at friends and foes; / You talk with kings and doggies." The list slides from the grand to the humble in a single line, from kings to doggies, and the shift in register is deliberately silly. It suggests how the inner voice wanders, rehearsing arguments with enemies, daydreaming of important company, chatting to a pet. The phrase "men and angels" gives the mind's talk an almost cosmic range, while "doggies" brings it straight back to the hearth.
The fifth stanza is where the poem gets quietly tender. Your "private business" and plans for the future are known only to "that little person, YOU." The capitalized "YOU" is the poem's one raised voice, and the phrase "little person" is oddly affecting: it pictures the self as a small companion living inside, the only one in on every secret. The joke carries a faint note of loneliness, yet the poem treats that privacy as something comfortable.
Then the final stanza pivots from observation to argument. Talking to yourself has an "advantage," the speaker says: "You don't get into trouble, / When you're talking to yourself." It is a wry piece of wisdom, since many troubles in life begin with something said aloud. The inner conversation is a rehearsal room where blunders cost nothing.
The poem's modest significance lies in how it takes something people often feel faintly sheepish about and treats it with affection. It doesn't diagnose or moralize, and it never grows heavy. It simply makes the reader smile in recognition, and then hands over a small, useful thought: that our private chatter is not a flaw but a kind of safe harbor.