Studio8 - Uniting the Arts

deny the gods
but not their attributes
for these are eternal
and can reach across the millennium
with an impact, so profoundly ironic,
as to reveal not only a divine presence
but our own flickering mortality

like death, you can't avoid them
though you run desperately
for a thousand years,
just as the theban
who chases his fate,
as others offer tribute
to the scylla and charybdis
of hand to mouth -
no more, no less will do

and the horror of his innocence
exposed the gods themselves,
perpetrators of what no man deserves,
but inherits still - the bounty
buried precisely at the spot
where character surely will propel him -
the ambush, patiently waiting
at the crossroads of the damned

I love it when you get down to your roots. I think it is one of your most authentic tropes.
I guess I will have to google tropes and see if that is the best word for what I meant.

Emily Dickinson (1830–86). Complete Poems. 1924.

Part One: Life

CXIV

FATE slew him, but he did not drop;
She felled—he did not fall—
Impaled him on her fiercest stakes—
He neutralized them all.

She stung him, sapped his firm advance, 5
But, when her worst was done,
And he, unmoved, regarded her,
Acknowledged him a man.