DARK ANGEL

 

 

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 a rough knife’s thrust should God my life 

thus claim, 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

16^th to 19^th centuries in which I had immersed myself. In this case the

syntactic inversions, in conjunction with the sequences of stressed vowels, 

are meant to parallel and suggest the conceit. Some readers may discern

the influence of G. M. Hopkins as well as that of earlier writers.