If I Told Him, A Completed Portrait of Picasso

Stein’s main concern in “If I Told Him” is art’s ability—or lack thereof—to capture a likeness. This concern is primarily focused on the visual arts and its attempts to depict individuals in portraits. But Stein extends her focus to larger questions about communication and the subjective nature of experience. Similar to how viewers can easily misunderstand an abstract painting, artists too are prone to perceptual errors. Stein highlights this potential for error by setting the poem in the present tense, thereby making the portrait exist only in each moment (See: Poem Analysis). If an object can only be experienced in each present moment, it is impossible to understand it objectively. Instead, it can only be understood through each subjective impression.

Throughout the poem, Stein struggles with this problem of subjectivity and her own impulse to create an exact resemblance. The clearest instance of this struggle is after Stein’s speaker provides various understandings of what an exact resemblance is. In Line 13, the speaker strips this understanding of representation down to its constituent words. Unable to give explanation or justification for the long history of attempting exact resemblances, the speaker ends the line simply stating “For this is so.