A man grows fatter, and he is delighted. That is the premise of William Dickey's "Proteins, Carbohydrates, and Others," and the poem's unsettling pleasure comes from how far it lets that delight go. What begins as a comic portrait of a glutton, with his gravy stains and his academic gown, gradually reveals something colder: a speaker for whom accumulation is the only value, and other people are just more material to absorb. "Increment, gain, increase" is both his appetite and his philosophy.
The poem's central trick is to treat weight as a moral and intellectual quality. The speaker's belly grows "fatter than Buddhas or / The heaviest emperor," so his bulk is set against both spiritual serenity and worldly power, and he claims to beat them at their own games. Even his speech is fattened, since "ponderous and absurd / Analogies from Greece" swell his talk. Learning, rhetoric and flesh all become the same substance. Fat is the poem's master metaphor for any kind of getting, whether of food, status, learning or other people's lives.
The imagery turns darker as the portrait fills in. The gravy stains are "like jewels in my crown," a joke that also admits he has made his mess into his regalia. Then come the "six reptilian hearts" and the "simple murderer's hands / On which the live fat stands." The comedy tips into menace here, and the speaker's voice, "slowly, my voice like glue," is not only slow but sticky and clinging. By the ninth stanza the confession is out: he would have "your substance to my grave" and add your weight "to my edifice of hate / That is the only good." The grotesque body becomes a predator, and the reader, addressed directly as "you," is the prey.
The form deepens this effect. The poem runs in tidy couplets of short, mostly tetrameter lines, and the rhymes are almost aggressively neat: "peace" and "increase," "grease" and "apace," "paunch" and "lunch." Such regularity sounds like nursery verse or light comic doggerel, which is exactly why the content disturbs. Many of the stanzas are self-contained, as though each were another helping, and the whole poem reads as a steady, unhurried intake. Some rhymes are slyly funny, like the pairing of "Ghibelline or Guelph" with "intact" and "perfect," where the speaker compares his self-satisfaction to the stubborn partisans of medieval Italian factions. The learned reference is itself one of those "analogies" he has been gorging on, so the poem mocks the very habit it displays.
One of its sharpest moments is the stanza about the Khan "weighed / In diamonds, then betrayed." The speaker counts himself among those who are valued by weight, and he seems untroubled that the story ends in betrayal. The poem raises, without pressing it, the possibility that the hoarder's glory is a setup for a fall. His wish for an epitaph confirms the vanity: not copper, brick or wood, but "fat, substantial stone," carved with the words "He is as he would be, / Weighty." The self-description is the entire monument, and nothing in it speaks of love, kindness or anything he gave.
The closing stanza returns to the opening triplet of words and asks, "What have we got but these?" It is the poem's most dangerous moment because the question sounds almost reasonable. Dickey lets the speaker's logic spread outward from the grotesque individual to a whole way of thinking, in which having, growing and holding are the only measures. The final line, "My belly tells me so," offers the body as proof, a bluntly physical argument that cannot be reasoned with.
What makes the poem memorable is that it never steps outside the speaker to condemn him. There is no rebuking voice, only his own cheerful self-portrait, and the horror assembles itself in the gaps between his boasts. It is satire carried out through ventriloquism, and its target reaches well beyond one fat scholar to anyone who has mistaken accumulation for worth.