The Labyrinth: 2
There’ll never be a door. You’re inside and the keep encompasses the world and has neither obverse nor reverse nor circling wall nor secret center. Hope not that the straitness of your path that stubbornly branches off in two, and stubbornly branches off in two, will have an end. Your fate is ironbound, as if your judge. Forget the onslaught of the bull that is a man and whose strange and plural form haunts the tangle of unending interwoven stone. He does not exist. In the black dusk hope not even for the savage beast.
The Labyrinth: 2 - meaning Summary
No Exit, No Monster
The poem presents the labyrinth as an inescapable condition rather than a place with an exit or a center. Its speaker rejects familiar consolations: a final door, a monster to confront, or a meaningful route through confusion. The endlessly dividing path suggests a fate governed by limitation and uncertainty. Even the feared bull-man is denied reality, leaving the traveler alone with the maze itself.
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