Summary

The Sword in the Stone – first person, past tense / multiple stanzas, blank verse. The poem begins with a discussion of the speaker’s experience at analysis, or psycho-therapy, describing the intimacy with the analyst as having “grown up between us / like a forest around a castle” (38). Narration comments that the sessions had been continuing for seven years; that the speaker had begun to draw again; and that the analyst watched like “a mother star[ing] at her sleeping child / forgiveness preceding understanding” (39). The speaker then comments that it was more like his brother staring at him, the silence between them like the silence between him (the speaker) and the analyst. When the hour of analysis ends, the speaker leaves the office and goes to an appointment, feeling like his life is being filmed and noticing the work of his artist friends in various galleries...