There is a line you wrote once that was better than you are. It landed, and you knew, quietly, that you hadn't made it. You'd caught it. It came from somewhere you didn't put anything.
The north had a name for that feeling. They called it a mead — a drink of inspiration you did not brew and could not buy. You had to go and take it. The good words were always stolen goods. Nobody was ever simply handed the draught.
And the north's own god of poetry knew the price of it better than anyone. Odin. Not born — he wakes out of the ice, the universal mind, the one who can order everything beneath him and never quite reach his own bottom.
The Hávamál, the Sayings of the High One, tells how he got his wisdom. He hung on the World Tree. Nine days, wounded by his own spear, no food given him, no drink. And at the end of it he did not receive the runes. He reached down and seized them. Took them, from the dark under the roots, when there was nothing left of him to protect.
Before that, at Mimir's pool, he had already paid an eye for a single drink of understanding. Half his sight, for a little more depth. That is the exchange the whole tradition keeps making. You give a lesser thing to keep a greater one. And the real sacrifice never stands there weighing whether the trade is fair. It just pays.
Notice what Odin did not do. He did not fight the runes for them. You cannot win wisdom by force. You cannot shout it out of the world or lift it by being strong. It doesn't answer to muscle. It answers to what you're willing to hang over.
Hall points to Athena for the same lesson. She springs full-grown from the head of Zeus — no mother, mind-born, armed. He calls her unpolarized: ignorance has an opposite, but wisdom has none. It is not, he says, the kind won by the labour of man. It is wisdom bestowed. And Bacon read the old fables the same way — that counsel and power, put together, are what make prudence. Cunning first. Then strength. Never strength alone.
So the mead was never really stolen by cleverness the way a thief is clever. It was won by being willing to go down where the strong won't go. To give the eye. To hang the nine nights. To stop protecting the version of yourself that thought it already knew.
That is why the line arrived and you didn't. You weren't stronger that day. You were emptier. And the draught only fills a cup that has already been poured out.