This chapter concerns Graham’s rich period of creative activity between 1953 and 1958. In poems ‘The Dark Intention’ and ‘The Dark Dialogues’, an unconscious underside to language is revealed that Graham’s lyric apparatus may recognise but cannot always account for. The chapter provides an account of the complex self-conscious scaffold exposed in Graham’s workbooks and manuscripts relating to ‘The Dark Dialogues’, before making a case for ‘The Dark Intention’, an unpublished villanelle, as a discrete formal achievement. This poem reflects an emphasis on poetic artifice which recalls the critical and poetic work of William Empson and Veronica Forrest-Thomson—whose villanelles are also considered—but departs from their examples in its embrace of a linguistic unconscious.