Lord-Bondsman Dialectic

He knows my hand, he'll feel my strength
Until the animal is tame—

The CEO, who will not yield,
Is leashed to his ship: it’s bought, not leased;
He'll sink if his costs are doing the same.

—I'm strong but by the dog's pull on his length.
	    
Who of the men or gods am I
Who asked of Abraham his son
And secretly had realized
He gambled that which made him God?

Share

Explanation

A bit of a tricky one this week! But don’t worry: I can explain.

This poem is about people that are putative lords but actually bondsmen, due to their dependence on their own bondsman for their status of lord. (This argument comes from the 19th century German philosopher, G.W.F. Hegel.) 

I understand his argument as follows. 

Thesis: 

Prima facie, a bondsman is a thing that depends on a lord for its survival. For example, a lord might guarantee security in exchange for submission. 

Antithesis: 

However, you can’t be called a lord if you don’t have a bondsman. The bondsman calls you lord—and other people call you a lord—because you have a bondsman. 

Conclusion: 

So the lord needs the bondsman to exist: their roles, and their names, are reversed.

In this poem, I have given three examples of situations where this reversal occurs. 

1. A dog and its owner

2. A CEO and their company 

3. God and Abraham

In the first stanza, a dog owner says that the dog will “know my hand” and “feel my strength,” meaning that the dog will submit to its master; the owner plans to make it thus. However—and here you actually have to skip stanza two and go to stanza three, the one-liner—the owner is only a master because they have purchased a dog. 

The dog regains some independence in this way. The dog makes the owner what they are, and therefore the owner depends on the dog.

The same is said of a CEO and their company in stanza 2. I manage to squeeze a dog pun in when I say the CEO is “leashed to his ship”—the ship is a metaphor for a company; sinking, a metaphor for going bankrupt. 

In stanza 3, I turn to the story of Abraham and Isaac. God asked Abraham to sacrifice his son, Isaac, to prove his faith. 

On my reading (probably quite unorthodox) God was gambling here. He knew that he stood to lose Abrahams’s faith by asking such a horrible thing of him, all while needing Abraham to see him as God, in the same way an owner needs a dog. The interesting thing about this is, that God obviously knew that he was making this gamble, and did it anyways, instead of avoiding giving such a test to “that which made him God,” i.e. Abraham. Proof of Abraham’s loyalty is worth a lot to God. 

Note, lastly, that the speaker identifies himself with the dog owner, and then speaks in third person about God and the CEO. This indicates that the speaker, and the poem, are allegorizing the domestic: they are metaphorizing dog ownership as Godlike and like a CEO.

Lesson

Treat your bondsmen with respect, my lords.

Scansion (poem stats)

10 lines

Iambic tetrameter

Rhyme scheme:

AB CDB A EFEG