Out of the Box Coaching and
Breakthroughs with the Enneagram, Mary R. Bast, Ph.D. 
Copyright © 1999. All rights reserved. Revised: October 05, 2008  

Poetry & Personality

Some people are perfectionists, who preach at others for falling short of perfection. The driving force of this personality style is anger, which usually erupts when someone has failed to live up to their expectations.

First Totems Lawrie Dignan

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"If Only..." -- The One 
We all have an internal judging voice. For some of us this is coupled with a compulsion to make things perfect. On good days, wanting to fix things can be an inspiration to higher attainment. Too often, though, the critical voice begins to preach when things fall short of what should be.

Dear Lord, I have sinned against thee.
For I do not love all flowers equally.

For daffodils have come up in my yard instead of tulips.
For I hate their stupid yellow faces...

For my anger is implacable against them.
Yet they grow in clusters like families...

For in the morning I wish it were evening

So they would be gone from my sight.
For I cannot forgive...

For I suspect their connivance against my favorite tulips.
For their golds are gall to me.

For in truth, my will is not done.

This excerpt from Susan Fromberg Schaeffer's poem Confession in April conveys exquisitely the inner conflict of the One, whose underlying anger is fed by an impossible perfectionism.  Impossible, as the will cannot be done perfectly.

Former poet laureate Stanly Kunitz shows us in The Portrait how his mother's unforgiving anger over his father's suicide "when I was waiting to be born" was passed on to him:

When I came down from the attic
with the pastel portrait in my hand…
she ripped it into shreds
without a single word
and slapped me hard.
In my sixty-fourth year
I can feel my cheek
still burning.

A quirky metaphor for those of us who have felt cut off at the knees by a One's anger is shared by David Allan Evans in his poem about hunting for frog's legs.  Here's the last verse of Bullfrogs:

ready to go home
we looked down and saw
what we had thrown back in:
quiet-bulging eyes nudging along
the moss's edge, looking up at us,

asking for their legs.

Constance Menefee's poignant If Only portrays the One's finger pointed inward. It also illustrates the self-bemused humor that is their true salvation as they evolve. Those angry tirades we sometimes endure are nothing compared to their inner strafing attacks:

Perfection
is a stubble-tongued whore
who clacks her bedroom
slipper false-teeth
and twitches well-oiled hips
knowingly
you coulda done more
shoulda done better
if only and if only...

Ones can also have a "running amok" side that allows temporary escape from their own high standards. We have seen this in charismatic preachers who are caught in houses of ill repute, but it can also show up in innovative and charming slants on reality. May Swenson's poems are uninhibited, playful, and experimental. Though born in 1912 and writing at a time when young southern girls were being taught how to be prim and proper, she cared little for "what the neighbors might say."  In Beast, for example, she admits:

my Brown self
goes on four paws
supple-twining in the
lewd Gloom

arching against the
shaggy hedges
with a relishing Purr
tasting among his
spurted fur...

my Brown self
a thing gleam-jawed
goes downright
Four-pawed

It would be good for Ones to be less upright, more downright and four-pawed.  If only they let go of self-judgment, of holding themselves accountable to an unrealistic ideal, they will nurture their gift of idealism. The Buddhist nun Pema Chödrön teaches the breathing practice of Tonglen to remind us that we can only feel compassion for others if we do so for ourselves: "Rather than beating yourself up, use your own stuckness as a stepping stone to understanding what people are up against all over the world." 

Mary Oliver calls us to such humanity in Wild Geese -- a moving invocation for Ones:

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting...
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting--
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.

Other Poems by Published Poets that Illustrate this Personality

Refusal (Carol Frost)
The Lightning (May Swenson)  

My Poem about Style One   

Avenging Angel  
 

Poems by Readers

Can't the charmed (Lynn Lefebvre)
Coming of Age--26 Years Ago (Constance Lee Menefee)
On Leaving the Catholic Religion at Thirteen (Judith Searle)
A Prayer for My Father (Judith Searle)
Epitaph for an Enneagram One (Hilary Sinclair)
Namamka (Paula Thornton)

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