Out of the Box Coaching and
BREAKTHROUGHS WITH THE ENNEAGRAM, Mary R. Bast, Ph.D.

Poetry & Personality

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"Heart, you bully, you punk" -- The Eight
Eights have the reputation of being controlling, because it is difficult for them to acknowledge any vulnerability.  In one of my own poems, Veteran, I imagine that their blunt aggressiveness counters a feared Mayan sacrifice:  if you show any weakness your beating heart will be torn from your chest: 

...You seek her belly,
seek her nipple,
want to turn into
the Earth of her,
be guarded as
she lulls you,
rocks you, croons,
and eats your
soft heart.

Many people fail to sympathize with Eights, not realizing that typically there was simply no safe place to be a "sissy" when they were young.  Gary Gildner's football coach in First Practice made this message clear to the young men on his squad:

...he was Clifford Hill, he was
a man who believed dogs
ate dogs...   and
if there were any girls present
for them to leave now...

The Eight's key characteristics are stereotypically masculine, making it particularly difficult for females with this style to find acceptance.   Sharon Thomson is an outrageous performance poet who can fill a room with her passion and her profanity.  In the poem,  Pigeons, she gives us a glimpse of how early this relationship to the world develops:

when I was a girl

a sultry sunday
about 3pm in mid-august
was the best time to hunt pigeons

it was then they felt safe
to swoop from the roofs
scrounging...

I aimed straight for the eyeball
black staring back at me
dumbly before I fired

Thomson admitted in a poetry workshop that the pigeon scene had never actually occurred.  But as a metaphor her poem tells us a lot about Eights' need to be strong and fearless, as well as their impatience with weakness -- at times they seek out others' weakness in order to feel strong (the pigeons' eyes "staring back at me dumbly"). 

Behind this gruff, tough exterior is an untended child who learned early, as depicted by Luis J. Rodriguez in Cloth of Muscle and Hair, that "soft things" can "become creatures of clawed meat":

Pink, oily bodies hang on a line
like cloth of muscle and hair.
Flayed in rapid order with a delicate slice
of pelt, they are held by their feet...
...The five-year-old girl wept, having held
these same rabbits only a day before,
gathering them close, fur to face, stroking them
and sensing their pulse beneath her fingers...
...speaking to her of how soft things can lose
their mild yielding, how they can become
creatures of clawed meat, become objects
that invade wretched memory when something,
anything, pushes out the soft white sheath
of innocence.

Both male and female Eights -- when healthy -- are sought out by others for nurture and protection.  Teresa Noelle Roberts introduces us to this strong character in Apotheosis of the Kitchen Goddess II:

There is a goddess and I know her.  Her hands are not clean,
And she is large and strong and not too young... 
...I know the truth, because her calloused hands turn earth
To things good to eat, and green, and lovely.

Paul Zimmer's The Great Bird of Love is a more fanciful depiction of the Eight's often endearing tough love. In the early part of his poem we see a longing to release the huge burden of responsibility, to "fly above the troubles of the land":

I want to become a great night bird
Called the Zimmer, grow intricate gears
And tendons, brace my wings on updrafts,
Roll them down with a motion
That lifts me slowly into the stars
To fly above the troubles of the land...

The last verse of Zimmer's poem shows the sweet side of the Eight's strength -- the wish that just to see his silhouette will assure us we are safe:

People will see my silhouette from
Their windows and be comforted,
Knowing that, though oppressed,
They are cherished and watched over,
Can turn to kiss their children,
Tuck them into their beds and say:
     Sleep tight.
     No harm tonight,
     In starry skies
     The Zimmer flies.

Eights love a good fight, but even then they hold a hand "pressed close to the heart" for protection:  "What a great battle you and I have fought," writes Anna Wickham in The Marriage...

...A fight of sticks and whips and swords,
A one-armed combat,
For each held the left hand pressed close to the heart,
To save the caskets from assault.

How tenderly we guarded them;
I would keep mine and still have yours,
And you held fast to yours and coveted mine...

Were they not afraid of opening their hearts, the couple in Wickham's poem could have found an Eight-ish truce:

Could we have dropt the caskets
We would have thrown down weapons
And been at each other like apes,
Scratching, biting, hugging
In exasperation...

An Eight's biggest battle is internal.   Bound by a war mentality, they fight the fear that their hearts will rule them if not locked up.  Marie Ponsot, in One Is One, offers perhaps the most succinct lines ever written on these opposing forces: 

Heart, you bully, you punk, I'm wrecked, I'm shocked
stiff. You? you still try to rule the world--though
I've got you: identified, starving, locked
in a cage you will not leave alive, no
matter how you hate it, pound its walls,
& thrill its corridors with messages...

The cost is great with an Eight's determination "to do something others are determined not be done," as Marge Piercy writes in For Strong Women -- how "Her head hurts" from always "trying to butt her way through a steel wall":

...People waiting for the hole
to be made say, hurry, you're so strong...
A strong woman
is a mass of scar tissue that aches
when it rains and wounds that bleed...
What comforts her is others loving
her equally for the strength and for the weakness...

Seamus Heaney's Doubletake is indeed a double take: Eights' drive to be just is a projection of their own suffering.  When unhealthy, their so-called justice is self-defined and rationalizes revenge. But developing Eights can hope to be loved equally for their strength and their weakness:

Human beings suffer,
they torture one another,
they get hurt and get hard.
No poem or play or song
can fully right a wrong
inflicted and endured...

So hope for a great sea-change
on the far side of revenge.
Believe that a further shore
is reachable from here.
Believe in miracles
and cures and healing wells...

Other Poems by Published Poets that Illustrate this Type's Personality

To Kill a Deer (Carol Frost)
Unwritten Law (Louise Glück)
The Stranger (W.S. Merwin)
The Meadow Mouse (Theodore Roethke)

My Poems   

Stalker         

Poems by Readers

The Art of Self-Disclosure (Katja Amyx)
A Dragon's Wit (Katherine Chernick Fauvre)
Prison Song (Sherwood Pine)

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Out of the Box Coaching and Breakthroughs with the Enneagram. Mary R. Bast, Ph.D.
Copyright © 1999. All rights reserved. Revised: January 28, 2008.