A shopper stands at a butcher's counter, looks at a tray of brains, and ends up insulting herself. That is the whole event of Kay Sage's four-line poem, and yet it manages to be funny, unsettling and oddly philosophical all at once. The speaker is told the brains are "very fine" (shop talk, the language of quality cuts and fresh produce) and her reaction is not appetite but a shudder. The thought that follows is the joke and the sting in one: these animal brains are "probably better than mine."
The central idea is a kind of self-deprecation that turns into something stranger. On the surface, the speaker is simply belittling her own intelligence. But the poem quietly collapses a distinction we usually take for granted, the one between the thinking organ and the meat. In a butcher's shop, a brain is a product with a grade and a price. By holding her own mind up against it, the speaker suggests that her thoughts may be just as much a matter of tissue as the lamb or calf on the slab, and that quality can be judged in the same flat, commercial way. The shudder is not only disgust at the sight; it is the shock of seeing her own head reflected in a shop window of dead things.
The construction is deliberately modest. Four lines in the pattern of a ballad stanza give the poem the sound of a nursery rhyme or a bit of light verse, and the rhythm is brisk and conversational, a pulse of three or four beats per line that never strains. The rhyme falls on the even lines only: "fine" and "mine" chime, while "shop" and "them" are left unmatched. That "fine" and "mine" pairing does real work. It links the butcher's verdict to the speaker's self-judgment, so that the sales pitch and the insult sound like two halves of one thought. The easy music is part of the trick, because the tune is cheerful while the content is faintly macabre.
Word choice does much of the quiet damage. "Shudder" is the only strong verb in the poem, and it is physical, a bodily reaction to what is, after all, an intellectual comparison. "Fine" is a slippery word: said by the butcher it means fresh and good to eat, but it also carries the older sense of delicate, high quality, which is exactly what the speaker doubts about herself. Then there is "probably," which may be the cleverest word in the stanza. She does not state that the animal brains are superior; she hedges. That small word makes the speaker sound polite and apologetic, even while she is delivering a verdict against herself, and it adds to the comedy: she is too well-mannered to be fully certain of her own inferiority.
The title, "A Consideration," plays its own game. A "consideration" can be a thoughtful reflection, a matter to be weighed, or a courtesy, and the poem seems to touch all three. The speaker weighs the brains, quite literally in the butcher's sense and figuratively in the philosophical one, and the dry, formal title contrasts sharply with the blunt little scene it introduces.
What makes the poem worth reading is its economy. In sixteen or so words of real content, it fuses everyday detail with a genuinely uncomfortable thought: that the mind we are so proud of is physical, perishable and comparable. It also shows how humour can carry that thought. Had the poem been solemn, we might have resisted it; because it is wry and light, we laugh first and only afterwards notice that we have been asked to look at our own heads on the counter. The poem's smallness is its strength, a short, sharp joke with something sobering inside it.