Imagery

“I, I, I” is filled with imagery of contrasting size. The boy speaker and his mother live in a “Small” town; when he gets to the barbershop, the boy sits in a “big” chair; the walls in front of him and behind him hold “huge” mirrors; his head is “small”; the image of his head in the mirror is repeated “In ever diminishing images”; the barber is “fat” and, therefore, bigger than he is; after his haircut, he “Climbed down” from the chair. The overall effect is to emphasize the boy’s smallness in a big world. Infinity is bigness drawn out to the ultimate extent, and the image of the small boy peering into the unfathomable distance is a graphic representation of the theme of the poem: the small self...