The following piece is in response to having shared a poem I found relevant with a friend and being asked in a text “What do you get from this, Peter?”.
On Theodore Roethke’s “In a Dark Time”
In a Dark Time
In a dark time, the eye begins to see,
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 between the heron and the wren,
Beasts of the hill and serpents of the den.
What’s madness but nobility of soul
At odds with circumstance? The day’s on fire!
I know the purity of pure despair,
My shadow pinned against a sweating wall.
That place among the rocks—is it a cave,
Or winding path? The edge is what I have.
A steady storm of correspondences!
A night flowing with birds, a ragged moon,
And in broad day the midnight come again!
A man goes far to find out what he is—
Death of the self in a long, tearless night,
All natural shapes blazing unnatural light.
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 One, free in the tearing wind.
These are dark times. The news is filled with daily shootings and hateful speech. I think of poetry as one of our surest consolations. It can't do much about the fear and violence running rampant in our world right now, but it testifies through taking responsibility, and speaking it’s truth out loud. Honesty may be poetry's best gift as I feel poets have the one of the most potent chances to say what needs to be said about how we can think and feel more precisely and truthfully about one another. However, poets/poetry isn’t prone to play by the rules of society. Poetry is naturally subversive, even rebellious, and is quick to use our expectations against us. Every poem is a wake up call. As it’s been said, there’s more in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophies. I’ll say more on dreams after I attempt to briefly dissect (ugh!) Theodore Roethke’s poem “In a Dark Time”.
I see Roethke’s poem ”In a Dark Time" as a poem about understanding oneself. It begins: "In a dark time, the eye begins to see," setting the tone for images of paradox that reveal universal truths about self-knowledge and the reality of identity in the "I" we all seemingly must possess.This first line feels like the thesis statement of the poem: that in darkness one can see oneself more clearly, perhaps because there is nothing else to see; or, perhaps because it is a low point in one's life, when looking inward is necessary for growth. But this self-knowing can be perilous, as the "I" one sees when in one’s worst emotional state is not the true "I" that is one’s….for the lack of a better word: soul.
Roethke goes on to write,
"I meet my shadow in the deepening shade"
and in the same verse ends with,
"I live between / ... beasts of the hill and serpents of the den."
I feel he is describing his "I" or self, as well as his "eye" or vision of himself (in a play on words). He uses nature imagery throughout the poem, describing a winding path, a cave, the moon, a storm, a fly, and the wind to illustrate adverse, if vaguely sinister forces.
I suspect when he says he "lives between" it is because he is experiencing a lack of unity, seeing himself and wondering which "I" is the real one—the watcher or the watched?
The last verse echoes the first:
"Dark, dark my light, and darker my desire,"
which again contradicts—is he light or dark, and is the darkness full of evil thoughts that alienate him from himself?
He repeats events that make no sense in the middle of the poem:,
"And in broad day the midnight come again!"
The last two lines of this poem are:
"The mind enters itself, and God the mind
And one is One, free in the tearing wind."
The split, first between "I" and "eye," continues as Roethke presents disjointed images from the natural world ("a night flowing with birds, a ragged moon"). His inability to find wholeness in himself grows until God enters the picture. Yet I think the last two lines resolve all his issues. In God, his sense of being split into two—the watcher and the watched—is finished. He is free, although nature ("the tearing wind") is still present—but now outside of him.
Roethke states that "death of the self" is what he seeks, but it's impossible for him to know his true self when he identifies with his despair. Through God, he sees the "I" clearly, and claims a unity of self.
Roethke as a poet seems to be insisting that a plunge to the bottom of the abyss of psychological disorientation and dislocation of identity is necessary to achieve clarity. There must be painful struggle, though, before this end is reached.
I learned to write my own poetry from my dreams, as every night I am mocked by shadow experiences that follow no rules of conduct and manage to subversively excite and depress me from within. Being that half my life is lived in this way, days devoted to the literal, nights negating it, a continuous dance between expansion and contraction…I realized that I could reveal as much to myself by paying attention to my interior voices as I might learn from a friend, enemy, or person bent on impressing upon me their own agenda. Since all of life’s greatest motivators are made of an un-manipulatable grace….happiness, love, sadness, anger….these things all arrive like guests (invited or uninvited) to which we can choose to host or cast out. As an experienced host in my own home (and my community) I always set out to be welcoming in attitude no matter who arrives, providing fresh linens so to speak, good food, respectfulness, appreciation, attention, acknowledgment, etc. These guests come to show me themselves in two distinct ways. The face they want me to see and the one they may very well conceal. That’s what a poem is for; a sacred space for the marriage and reconciliation of both realities in service of the light.
Peter Valentyne
June 22, 2020
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