In A Dark Time Poem
By Theodore Roethke
In a night time, the eye begins to meet,
I meet my shadow in the deepening shade;
I hear my echo in the echoing wood—
A lord of nature weeping to a tree.
I live betwixt the heron and the wren,
Beasts of the hill and serpents of the den.
What's madness but dignity of soul
At odds with circumstance? The twenty-four hour period's on fire!
I know the purity of pure despair,
My shadow pinned confronting a sweating wall.
That place amidst the rocks—is it a cavern,
Or winding path? The edge is what I have.
A steady storm of correspondences!
A nighttime flowing with birds, a ragged moon,
And in broad day the midnight come again!
A man goes far to find out what he is—
Decease of the self in a long, tearless night,
All natural shapes blazing unnatural calorie-free.
Dark, dark my light, and darker my desire.
My soul, like some heat-maddened summer fly,
Keeps buzzing at the sill. Which I is I?
A fallen man, I climb out of my fear.
The mind enters itself, and God the mind,
And one is I, complimentary in the tearing wind.
Theodore Roethke, "In a Dark Time" from Nerveless Poems of Theodore Roethke. Copyright © 1963 by Beatrice Roethke, Administratrix of the Estate of Theodore Roethke. Used by permission of Doubleday, an banner of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.
Source: The Collected Poems of Theodore Roethke (Doubleday, 1961)
Poet Bio
Many of Theodore Roethke's finest poems evoke the plant and insect life he knew intimately growing up in Michigan around the greenhouses of his family'southward floral business concern. Troubled throughout adulthood past mental instability and alcoholism, he ofttimes dwells on his psyche's vulnerability, but also shows a deft comic touch in treating familial and erotic relationships. From 1948 until his expiry, he was a legendary teacher at the University of Washington; his posthumous collection The Far Field won the 1964 National Book Laurels. See More than By This Poet
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In A Dark Time Poem,
Source: https://www.poetryoutloud.org/poem/in-a-dark-time/
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