Anyone who knows the myth of Eros and Psyche knows what happens when a lamp is lit in the dark: Psyche, who has only ever known her lover by night, lights it to see his face, and that act of looking costs her the relationship. Mike Stone's short poem borrows that moment and hands it to a modern speaker. The title's "Revisited" and the "(2)" suggest a sequence of retellings, though the poem itself is all we have to go on. What it offers is a compressed meditation on the wish to see someone truly, and on how little that wish guarantees.
The first sentence runs across seven lines and moves like a confession. "There came a point at which / I could no longer say just where / The border's drawn between / What is dreamt and what is real." The phrasing is plain and conversational, almost prose, and the line breaks do quiet work. The line ends on "between," so the reader hangs over a gap before the two sides, "dreamt" and "real," arrive. The form acts out the confusion it describes. There is no rhyme and no steady metre, and the lines swell and shrink with the speaker's thinking. That looseness suits a speaker who has lost his bearings.
The central image is the lantern: "so I lit a lantern with words." In the traditional story Psyche's light is a physical lamp. Here the light is language, which turns the poem into the act it describes. The speaker is writing in order to see, and the poem is the lantern. The parenthesis is the most striking moment: "(Struck like matches against a soul)." Placing it in brackets makes it sound like an aside, something half-whispered, yet it carries the poem's most physical image. A match needs a rough surface, and friction is what makes the flame. If the soul is that surface, then the words come at a price, scraped out of the speaker's inner life. Matches also burn briefly and can be used only once, so the light the speaker makes may not last. The sound of the line helps, with the hard "st" of "struck" followed by the long, dark "soul."
The word "real" appears twice, first in the border between "dreamt and real," then in "your real face." The repetition shows what the speaker wants. Having lost the line between dream and reality, he hopes the beloved's face will fix it, as if one true face could settle everything. Notice, though, that the sentence ends on the purpose, "To see your real face," and not on the seeing. We never learn what the lantern reveals. The poem withholds that moment, so the reader stays in the dark with the speaker.
The second stanza is only two lines, and it arrives like a door closing. "But your history was rewritten / And our fates not ours." The "But" turns hard against the hopeful act of the first stanza. The verb "was rewritten" is passive, so nobody is named as the rewriter. It could be time, circumstance, other people, or the retelling of the myth itself, since the poem is a "revisiting." That ambiguity is deliberate, and one reasonable reading is that the beloved's story has been changed by forces the speaker cannot see or control. The last line is also oddly built. "And our fates not ours" has no verb, as though the sentence has lost its footing. Its repetition of "our" followed by a negated "ours" makes the phrase circle back on itself, so that ownership is claimed and denied in four words. Fate, in the poem's logic, belongs to someone else.
What gives the poem its weight is the tension between its two halves. The first stanza trusts words to illuminate, and the second suggests that illumination is not the same as power. Psyche's lamp, in the old story, shows her the truth and still cannot protect her from its consequences. Stone's speaker faces a similar problem. Even a "real face" cannot hold still if the history behind it keeps changing. In nine lines, the poem lets us feel both the courage of looking and its limits, and it ends without comfort, which feels honest.