What seeks to shrink must first have grown; what seeks weakness surely was strong. What seeks its ruin must first have risen; what seeks to take has surely given.

This is called the small dark light: the soft, the weak prevail over the hard, the strong.

Note UKLG: There is a third stanza in all the texts:

Fish should stay underwater: the real means of rule should be kept dark.

Or, more literally, “the State’s sharp weapons ought not to be shown to the people.” This Machiavellian truism seems such an anticlimax to the great theme stated in the first verses that I treat it as an intrusion, perhaps a commentator’s practical example of “the small dark light.”