if you knew I was not _ if you knew that I was _

"if thou knewest I was" - ggl
? that I was weak, that I was not ___ //tht bible. ~ no.. / tht Gerard Manley Hopkins ~no... but finally w 'I was weak' got it (bcs: "knew'st") , was still thinking GMH but no it is:
Carlos Drummond de Andrade, trans Elizabeth Bishop. Seven-Sided Poem
My God, why hast Thou forsaken me
if Thou knew'st I was not God,
if Thou knew'st that I was weak?

Andrew Motion - Wkp


Motion has said of himself: "My wish to write a poem is inseparable from my wish to explain something to myself."


Sir Andrew Motion, FRSL (born 26 October 1952; now age 58) is an English poet, and biographer of Keats and of Larkin, who presided as Poet Laureate of the United Kingdom from 1999 to 2009 -- appointed following the death of Ted Hughes, the previous incumbent.
Motion was born in London and raised in Stisted in Essex. After being sent, at the age of seven, to boarding school, he was educated at Radley College, wHere, in the sixth form, he encountered Mr Wray, an English teacher who introduced him to poetry: first Hardy, then Larkin, W H Auden, Heaney, Hughes, Wordsworth, and Keats. He read English at University College, Oxford, where he studied with W. H. Auden in weekly sessions. Motion says “I worshipped him the other side of idolatry and it was like spending an hour each week in the presence of God.”

from his author statement for the British Council Biography:
My poems are the product of a relationship between a side of my mind good bollas cracking up (why think of? re conscious-unconscious) which is conscious, alert, educated, and manipulative, and a side which is as murky as a primaeval swamp. hughes dancer to god 'still the same inchoate keeper of the dreams' I can't predict when this relationship will flower. If I try to goad it into existence I merely engage with one side of my mind or the other, and the poem suffers. I want my writing to be as clear as water. No ornate language; very few obvious tricks. I want readers to be able to see all the way down through its surfaces into the swamp. I want them to feel they're in a world they thought they knew, but which turns out to be stranger, more charged, more disturbed than they realised. In truth, creating this world is a more theatrical operation than the writing admits, and it's this discretion about strong feeling, and strong feeling itself, which keeps drawing me back to the writers I most admire: Wordsworth, Edward Thomas, Philip Larkin.