There may be something to be said for moving some of the line breaks
around, e.g.:
Commitment is knowing
that darkness
follows the sun
with night challenging
faith in oneself
to rise with the
dawn believing
in love
There is enough syntactic ambiguity in the poem, unpunctuated as it
is, for this to accentuate a number of "ghost" readings that are less
strongly implied, or more strongly ruled out, by the placement of
line-endings in the original.
For instance, the above could be punctuated like this:
Commitment is knowing that darkness: follows the sun, with night,
challenging faith-in-oneself to rise, with the dawn believing, in
love.
In particular, the ambiguity between knowing as a fact that darkness
follows the sun, and knowing - all too well - that darkness which
follows the sun, is worth accentuating.
I don't very much like "Commitment is" as a first line anyway - it
sounds like it's introducing a homily.
"Faith in oneself" is also not as strong as it might be, just because
"oneself" is a distancing way of talking about intimate experience,
and for that reason carries a whiff of self-help about it. "Myself"
and "yourself" are worth considering as alternatives; as is dropping
"in oneself" altogether and going with something like "challenging /
faith to rise / with the dawn believing / in love".
On the other hand, the ambiguity of "challenging faith in oneself to
rise" between "challenging one's faith in one's own ability to rise"
and "challenging one's faith-in-oneself to rise" is also worth hanging
onto.
I have tried to create in the version above an additional ambiguity
between "believing, in love" and "believing in love". Being in love,
believing in love, and believing oneself to be in love are sometimes
tragically distinct states - all questions of faith in different ways.
Dominic
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