Love poems usually celebrate the beloved. William Dickey's «Love among the Manichees» spends most of its time on something less flattering: the speaker's own defensiveness. The title points the way. Manichaeism was an ancient dualist religion that saw the world as a battleground between light and darkness, spirit and matter. Dickey doesn't explain the reference, but the poem's structure enacts it. Its six stanzas alternate between two selves, a snarling animal and a longed-for transparency, and the drama lies in how little the first seems able to become the second.
The odd-numbered stanzas belong to the beast. Everything here is armoured and edgy: a "blond cowl terse as a blunt threat to injure," "claws instinctive to a triggering nerve," "tick-laden fur ruffling for winds of danger." Notice how often the language is mechanical or reflexive rather than deliberate. The claws are "instinctive," the speaker a "shut spring," the beast "dumb, menacing, not able to let go." This isn't cruelty chosen; it is a trap sprung by nerves. The poem's sharpest irony comes in the third stanza, where the animal hoards honey in a fallen tree and snarls at "approachers to these laden acres / That bind their fruit to me." The speaker guards what he has so fiercely that the possessions begin to possess him, the fruit "binding" him rather than the other way round. Even the confession "Aping the beast I serve" is telling: the speaker suggests he is imitating the very thing that rules him, a performance of ferocity he doesn't fully own.
The even-numbered stanzas answer with a string of similes that all share one quality: absence of fixed shape. The speaker would be "water glistening over your spread hands," "the pattern described in air when the bird has left it," "not yet peopled lands," a stretch of "fallow" from "the earliest world," a mountainside "too high for the spurred seed to beat and follow, / For the edged wing to glide." These images are lovely, but look closely at what they offer. Water, a trace in the air, empty land, untouched ground: each is defined by what has not happened yet or has already left. The speaker wants to be a space rather than a presence, something that makes no demands and leaves no wounds. Even the barren mountain is described through the things that cannot touch it, the spur and the edge. The longing for gentleness comes out as a longing for innocence, and for a self with nothing in it to defend.
The final stanza completes this idea with the poem's best image. He would be "a willing mirror, / Plain crystal, undefined, of itself dumb, / That shapes its voice when you first look into it, / Smiling, 'Now you have come.'" A mirror is the perfect opposite of a snarling animal, since it has no appetite and no territory. Yet it is also self-erasing: it speaks only in response, "of itself dumb." Dickey leaves a quiet question hanging. Is this the purest form of love, or a way of disappearing so completely that no real meeting can occur? The mirror's only words are a greeting, never a demand.
The fifth stanza, where the two selves collide, holds the poem's central insight. The beast cannot "conceive that who comes unconstrainéd / Stays the most easily so." Love, that is, is more secure when it is free, and the animal's grip is exactly what threatens it. The accented final "é" in "unconstrainéd" is a small formal flourish that forces the word to fit the metre, and it lingers on the idea.
Formally the poem is carefully controlled, which suits a speaker so afraid of losing control. Each stanza is a quatrain of mostly iambic lines, with the last line shortened to a quick, almost clipped close. The rhyme scheme is abab, but several rhymes are slant or loose ("nerve"/"serve," "hands"/"lands"), so the music feels slightly strained, as though the poem, like its speaker, can't quite relax into harmony.
What makes the poem memorable is its honesty about the gap between wanting and being. The speaker knows what tenderness looks like and cannot simply choose it. That ache, set out in two contrasting vocabularies of fur and water, is why a short, formal poem feels so human.