Now I the anti-Jacob night-long lie
wrestling with my dark angel for my soul:
there is no hold he does not know—and I,
so subtly does he intertwine with mine
his limbs, so wreathe him close, I cannot breathe
but for his breathing.
Better like Isaac in the waste bound, blind,
waiting the rough knife’s thrust should God my blood
require, than strive and strive, only to taste
the old salt of defeat and loss and shame....
But now—from bed to wall I turn my face
and take the fall.
Note: This is a revision of one of my earliest attempts at “significance,”
albeit autobiographical. It dates from the 1960s. At that time I had not
overcome the influence of the archaic language of the literature of the
16th to 19th centuries in which I had immersed myself. In this case the
syntactic inversions, in conjunction with the sequences of stressed
vowels, parallel and suggest the conceit. Some readers may discern
the influence of G. M. Hopkins as well as that of earlier writers.
