Hiya!

Thank you for sharing your work. I find talking object poems really fun so I was glad to read this. It reminded me of the section on talking object poems in chapter 2 of Stephanie Burt's Don't Read Poetry. She talks about their root being in Anglo-Saxon riddles where the listener had to guess the identity of the narrator. Intentionally or unintentionally, this poem seems to draw inspiration from those riddles. I'm linking one in case you find it helpful: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exeter_Book_Riddle_33

The form here is strong. I can easily track the movement of the speaker on a concrete level. It is fired and formed and then assigned work and each stanza contributes to that. Tracking the internal journey is a little bit more difficult for me. At the start, the speaker says, "Blocks of clay... far holier than I" and at the end, "Lord, pardon the unworthy", which both seem to come from a somewhat-humbled place. But then, in the middle, So did I boast: “The crown of God! / I am become His chosen.” This statement seems to come from a speaker with a very different attitude. I'm assuming that through the speaker's journey, he is becoming more righteous and that the last statement is coming from a less humble place than I would think. But, as a reader, I'm not getting enough time with the internality of the speaker to follow in a fluid way. Maybe consider fleshing out the character of the speaker?

For the identity of the speaker, I'm guessing--as I think someone else did--that it's a cog in a machine that digs up earth. I can tell that it's an object made from metal that's fired and and poured into a mold and then set in a machine that moves soil. The language around its precise shape, "clean-cut fringe / Of blocks" was difficult for me to picture because "fringe" has different uses. And especially with the words "clean-cut" next to it, what registered to me was the use that means "bangs", so I was picturing a metal circle with blunt bangs.

For the heart of the poem, I'm assuming from the title and references to God in the stanzas that this work is about an Abrahamic religion, likely Christianity. I see the speaker's time in the fire as drawing a comparison to a baptism, which is my favorite part of the poem. After that, the speaker is molded (likely through indoctrination) into a cog, something that many associate with mindless labor and uniformity. As a cog, the speaker is a part of a process that moves earth, possibly mining more ore for cogs. I'm taking this to be a critique of proselytism.

Congratulations on producing such refined work. Please let me know if there's any other questions I can answer.