On its surface, “The Bagel” is a humorous 13-line poem about chasing a rolling bagel down the street. Ignatow’s language is simple and straightforward. However, his deliberate use of poetic technique and metaphor allow for more in-depth meaning. “The Bagel” is composed of only two sentences. The first sentence, Lines 1-5, presents the problem—the dropping of the bagel and how the narrator feels about this accident. The second sentence, Lines 6-13, discusses the consequences of the event and makes an imaginative leap as the speaker correlates themself with the fugitive piece of bread.

The poem begins with a matter of fact statement: “I stopped to pick up the bagel” (Line 1). The only information revealed is that the speaker is retrieving their item. Depending on the reader’s impression, the line can be interpreted as the speaker “stopped” to “pick up” (Line 1) a bagel from a shop. Alternately, they are “pick[ing] up” (Line 1) the bagel from a counter, a stand, or from the ground. Given that bagels are a traditional Jewish bread product—and Jewish people tended to immigrate to larger cities—the reader may also get the sense of an urban environment from the poem just with the first line, long before Ignatow later mentions “the street” (Line 10).