In a Dark Time - Poem by Theodore Roethke

In a Dark Time

BY THEODORE ROETHKE

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.

Theodore Roethke, "In a Dark Time" from Collected Poems of Theodore Roethke.  Copyright © 1963 by Beatrice Roethke, Administratrix of the Estate of Theodore Roethke.  Used by permission of Doubleday, an imprint 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)