Iron John: A Book about Men

by Robert Bly

Our story simply says that after wandering around a while, having no “craft,” the young man at last got a job

I am too alone in the world, and not alone enough to make every moment holy. I am too tiny in this world, and not tiny enough just to lie before you like a thing, shrewd and secretive. I want my own will, and I want simply to be with my will, as it goes toward action, and in the silent, sometimes hardly moving times when something is coming near, I want to be with those who know secret things or else alone.

When a woman whom a man has never met appears in his dream, it may mean that the Woman with Golden Hair is approaching. This poem is called “A Dream of an Afternoon with a Woman I Did Not Know.”

die, you meet the Old Hag, and she eats your scars. If you have no scars, she will eat your eyeballs, and you will be blind in the next world.” That story moves awfully fast but it certainly defends the value of scars. If one has no scars, one becomes blind in the next world, but perhaps the man without scars is blind also in the imaginative world. Odysseus