The puppet that calls up the angel — the image evokes the possibility of an

innocence at once original and somehow, with patience, restored. It is an

innocence lent or given in the moment, fragile, speculative, but capable of
challenging narrower, more idealized, defensive, or nostalgic versions of
innocence. It is an innocence that includes knowledge of loss. The puppet and
the angel seem to hover over the child who stands “in the infinite, blissful
space between world and toy, / at a point which, from the earliest beginning, /
had been established for a pure event.” And yet the angel is itself no pure
being, no purely redemptive or wholly comforting thing. The poet knows that
such an angel might be half a demon, a thing bound to time, an angel of the
earth, something fallen into time, past and future, rather than redeeming
puppets from time. It brings fear as well as love. This creature would be hard to
know, a little unpredictable, clumsy, even dangerous, ready to wound. Like that
creature which visits Jacob in his sleep, this angel among the puppets bears a
difficult blessing, a blessing along with a wound. But it is a creature with whom
we might learn to dance as well as wrestle.