"In A Dark Time" by Theodore Roethke

Mea culpa: The first line ("In a dark time, the eye begins to see) actually scans as: pyrrhic, spondee, iamb, iamb, iamb. 

Topics discussed in this episode include:
 
-How to pronounce (or not) this dude's name
-Romanticism
-Romanticism's problem child, Confessional poetry
-Mysticism via mental illness
-Meter and rhyme zaniness
-Two new kinds of feet!
-Paradoxes thrust one into figurative interpretations
-Darkness and Light
-Dante cameo! 
-Biblical allusions
-The tasteful use of personification
-Imitative instances of awesome alliteration
-Neurotypical normativity and Foucault
-Psychedelic psychosis
-Ego, Ego death, dissociation
-Existential crisis via identity crisis
-Pantheism returns! 
-...or does it? 

Text of poem: 

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. 

Art by David Anthony Klug 

Transcript

Versecraft Episode 2: Theodore Roethke’s “In A Dark Time”

(Music)

Today we’ll be looking at Theodore Roethke’s dense and spiritual poem, “In A Dark Time.” First, a note about the pronunciation: to my best knowledge, the proper pronunciation of this poet’s name is “Roethke,” but the Americanized pronunciation of the name is still a subject of debate in the poetry world. I’m going to stick with “Roethke” for this episode, but there’s no reason you should take that as authoritative—it’s a more or less arbitrary decision. 

Roethke, who lived from 1908 to 1963, was one of the most prominent poets and teachers of poetry in the mid-20th century. To a large degree, Roethke’s art was of the romantic persuasion— his poems center around his personal experiences and feelings, and express both a passionate love for Nature, and a desire to achieve mystical unity with Nature. You might recall from the last episode that this is precisely the impulse that Bowers is tempted by, yet ultimately denies. Roethke, as we will see, has a very different attitude. 

More than anything though, Roethke’s work is concerned with probing the depths of his own psyche; he suffered throughout his life from manic-depression, and used poetry to address his psychic agony and explore his own mental states. As one of the first poets to include sensationally personal sentiments, as well as private details and memories of his life in his poetry, Roethke was crucial in pioneering the reconfiguration of the romantic tradition in poetry— by which I mean self-oriented poetry which prioritizes the imagination over rationality—  into what has come to be called confessional poetry—self-oriented poetry which prioritizes passionate reflection on one’s personal experiences, often to the exclusion of other themes and, if we’re being honest, to the detriment of form. 

Yet Roethke, in his mature moments, was capable of imaginative objectivity and careful craftsmanship. “In A Dark Time,” is a fascinating piece which examines the experience of personal identity threatened by madness, an experience which in turn becomes, upon meditation, a stepping stone to mystical transcendence. The poem goes like this: 

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.

Looking at the poem as a whole, we see that it consists of twenty-four lines—twice the length of a sonnet— split up into four stanzas of six lines each. A six-line stanza is called a sestain. When we look at the meter, we see that, like last week’s poem, it is in iambic pentameter—yet Roethke’s uses pentameter far less conservatively than in Bowers’ poem. Unlike in Bowers’ poem, we see two instances of feminine endings—interestingly, they rhyme—“fire” and “desire”— though the two lines are spread out from one another in the poem. More significantly, we see much more metrical variation of the iambic pentameter line than in the Bowers poem, though unlike in that poem, we find no enjambment here. In the first line alone, there is so much substitution that we may not be sure at first which meter we’re in: “In a dark time, the eye begins to see.” Only the second half of this line is iambic: “the eye begins to see.” The first half is what is called an anapest followed by a trochee. We will remember from last week that a trochee is an inverted iamb: instead of ba-BUM, it goes BA-bum. An anapest is a metrical foot that is like an iamb, but with an extra unstressed syllable at the beginning: ba-ba-BUM, a galloping rhythm. Put together in the poem, the anapest and trochee go: ba-ba-BUM BA-bum:  “in a dark time the.” followed by the iambs, it goes: “In a dark time the eye begins to see.” This double variation allows Roethke to put two stressed syllables on the words “dark time” thereby ringing in the title of the poem with sonic significance, while at the same time giving him some warm up time to conversationally sneak into an iambic rhythm. In the next two lines we see Roethke use anapests again, but this time at the end of his lines: on the words “deepening shade” and “echoing wood.” In this ending position, especially when repeated, the anapest provides an incantatory effect. I’ll speak about some further metrical variations once we dive into the poem.

For now, let’s take a look at the quirky way that Roethke uses rhyme. We see that each sestain contains the rhyme scheme ABBACC: That is, the first and fourth lines rhyme, the second and third lines rhyme, and the fifth and sixth lines rhyme. This in itself is unremarkable. What is remarkable is the liberality of Roethke’s rhyme schemes. You may recall from last week that Bowers permitted himself one slant rhyme in his whole poem. Roethke, by contrast, mixes perfect rhymes and slant rhymes with irreverent gusto: he rhymes “see” with “tree”, and “wren” with “den,” but also “shade’ with “wood” and “soul” with “wall.” More interestingly, he also uses a specific kind of slant rhyme, called “eye rhyme,” to conclude his second and fourth stanzas: these are words that look like they would rhyme but are pronounced differently. In grammar, such words are known as heteronyms. We see this when Roethke rhymes “cave” with “have”, and “mind’ with “wind.” 

Now that we’re aware of these formal attributes, let’s begin again with the first stanza:

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.

“In a dark time, the eye begins to see—” an alluring paradox: the eye, the organ which renders light, performs its function better in darkness. To resolve this paradox, we are forced to consider the line metaphorically, and conclude that Roethke intends to say that it is in the distressful periods of life, the “dark times” when one “begins to see”— that is, to achieves insight. Mental illumination is found in emotional darkness. In the second line, we have another paradox— “I meet my shadow in the deepening shade.” On a literal level, this makes no sense—a shadow would only disappear in a larger shade. Again, this calls for a figurative reading—the speaker discerns his  “shadow,” a Jungian term for his unconscious personality, the self which in normal circumstances he’s unaware of-- in the “deepening shade”—the darkness of despair and depression. This inversion of expectation and meaning using the polarity of light and darkness is reiterated throughout the poem, as we’ll soon see. 

To knowledgeable lovers of poetry, line 3—“I hear my echo in the echoing wood” will not only appear to be a rhetorical elaboration of the previous line, but a subtle allusion to the famous first line of Dante’s Inferno, which reads: “In the middle of our life’s journey, I found myself in a dark wood.” In the case of both Dante and Roethke, this is the dark wood of the soul, an allegory for existential despair. The speaker’s echo heard in the echoing wood is then described as a lord of nature weeping to a tree. A poignant image with biblical overtones, the speaker is here identifying himself as his own echo— as an ethereal emanation from an unknown true self— and this echo—himself— as a member of mankind and a descendent of Adam, the first lord of nature as decreed by the book of Genesis. This so-called lord of nature breaks down however before one of his own supposed subjects, a tree, just as Adam did before the tree of knowledge. This tree represents the overwhelming power of forces outside oneself. In a typical romantic move, Roethke laments and rejects the classical idea that mankind can master nature and oneself. Clearly, the speaker is master of neither. 

The concluding lines of this stanza are potentially enigmatic—I don’t know if herons and wrens held personal significance for Roethke, and within the context of the poem, their specific symbolism, if there is any, is unexplained. One may observe however that wrens are birds of the air and herons are birds of water, and when joined to a litany which includes beasts of the hill and serpents of the den, that is, earthly creatures above and below ground, we can reasonably posit that the speaker is here forsaking his claim to be a lord of nature, instead situating himself amphibiously within it, amongst all animals and all elements. 

Newly equipped with our analysis, let’s savor this stanza once more as a whole, and move on into the next: 

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.

We start strong with “What’s madness but nobility of soul at odds with circumstance?” A highly interesting rhetorical question, which marks a stark stylistic break from the previous stanza. In the previous stanza, the speaker spoke in symbols and riddles; here, he breaks free of this conceit, and addresses his readers head-on with a shocking query that almost comes off as indignant. The speaker criticizes the marginalizing effect of the label “madness” and sympathizes with all those who suffer under its stigma. Interestingly, Michel Foucault’s “Madness and Civilization,” which makes a similar argument, came out just three years before the publication of this poem. Roethke, like his contemporary Foucault, argues that the madman may simply be a noble nonconformist, a person ostracized because of their disposition to view reality differently than the status quo. This leading question is followed by a jarring interjection: “The day’s on fire!” We transition from the speaker as defender of madness to madman himself. The words take a backseat to the phrase’s manic, enthusiastic effect—we are not told in what way the world is on fire, though we surmise that in the speaker’s altered states of consciousness, he perceives the world as both radiant and painful. 

In the third line, “I know the purity of pure despair,” the speaker returns to his thesis from the first stanza— “in a dark time, the eye begins to see”— unadulterated despair can actually lead one to a sense of clarity and purity. “My shadow pinned against a sweating wall” is a vivid image which captures the experience of this despair. This is the first of two times that we will see personification in this poem used to striking effect— why is the wall sweating? how can a wall sweat? The answer is that the speaker himself identifies with the wall, and is himself sweating in anxiety and despair. In a state of psychotic dissociation, he is unable to distinguish subject from object, and his sense of self is unstable. Like the echo from the first stanza, he reverberates onto himself and the outside world.

In the last two lines of this stanza, the speaker fully returns to the symbolic mode of the first stanza, puzzling the reader with a cryptic image: “That place among the rocks, is it a cave, or winding path? The edge is what I have.” What is this place among the rocks? Death, oblivion, sanity or insanity? Roethke leaves us in the dark as to his meaning, and we are left to freely interpret. 

We encounter here a troubling example of unresolvable vagueness, an instance of what the anti-modernist critic Yvor Winters would have called “pseudo-reference”—that is, a poetic image which is treated as if it is a profound symbol of something, but the something of which it is a symbol is undiscoverable. I would add that we should distinguish vagueness from ambiguity. An ambiguous statement has multiple interpretations, any of which could reasonably be the case. The effective use of ambiguity in a work of art can be an artistic triumph—for example, the power of Henry James’s famous ghost story, “The Turn of the Screw” largely results from our uncertainty about whether the ghosts in the story are real or not.  By contrast though, a vague statement has no definitive set of possible interpretations, and thus abandons all ascription of meaning to the whim of the reader. This vague, “place among the rocks,” whatever it intimates, is given a sense of ambiguity as well in the second half of the stanza— is it a cave, or a winding path? In other words, is it a dark dead end, or the beginning of a journey? 

The last line of the stanza is—“the edge is what I have.” As we have seen, the speaker is very much on the edge, not only emotionally but metaphysically— his consciousness, the edges and demarcations of himself, are bleeding, dissolving, into the larger world. The edge is what the “I’—the speaker’s ego—has. Without this edge, without distinctions, the sense of “I” disappears. 

Starting again from the top of the poem, let’s observe how the third stanza explodes: 

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.

The psychedelic energy which was released but quickly suppressed in the second stanza—“The day’s on fire!”  is allowed a full flowering here in the third. “A steady storm of correspondences” describes the tempestuous sensation of perceiving endless connections between objects and ideas when in an altered state of consciousness, connections which elude one in a sober state of consciousness. Roethke would have been familiar with such an experience-- not only did he undergo personal flights of ecstasy such as the one described here, but he was a connoisseur of mystical literature, and no doubt acquired some of the language for this stanza from his reading of Evelyn Underhill and Meister Eckhardt. 

Notice too how the relentless alliteration of “s” sounds: “A steady storm of correspondences,” gives the poem a rushing kinetic energy which makes the very words sound like the storm he describes. When form imitates subject matter in this way, it is called mimetic form. In Classical music, the equivalent term is word-painting. 

The next two lines, “In broad day the midnight come again!” echo the light and dark imagery of the first stanza— yet here, we are at liberty to interpret midnight in the daytime as either literal or figurative, the former interpretation justified by the passage’s hallucinatory nature, the latter interpretation justified by the light and dark motif employed earlier in the poem. Here, we do see a compelling example of ambiguity. 

The fourth line: “a man goes far to find out what he is” is also ambiguous and can be interpreted both literally and figuratively at the same time. Indeed, the speaker has figuratively gone quite far, endured depression and psychosis to attain a greater understanding of himself. Yet he has also spread out his literal self, his identity, quite far, encompassing the world around him, in order to discover what his actual existence is comprised of. He confirms this latter idea in the next line, “death of the self in a long, tearless night.” Another paradox, the speaker finds himself by losing himself, echoing the words of Jesus in Matthew 10:39: “Whoever finds their life will lose it, and whoever loses their life for my sake will find it.” The night is tearless because the self has been destroyed— who can feel sadness, who can cry, when the self no longer exists? 

Also interesting to note about this line is how metrically varied it is. “Death of the self in a long, tearless night” is hardly an iambic line. In fact it goes: trochee, iamb, anapest, trochee, iamb. BA-bum ba-BUM ba-ba-BUM BA-bum BUM. Roethke sonically mimics the death of the self by giving us the death of the iambic line. 

The “natural shapes blazing unnatural light” calls back to the speaker’s assertion that the day is on fire— and now we understand that this light, this fire, is the spiritual flame of a consciousness which perceives the world unbound by the limitations of the ego, a consciousness which perceives every part of the world as dancing together in a supernatural storm of correspondences. The rhyme here between night and light cements the paradoxical and dialectical relationship between darkness and light which has emerged as a principle theme throughout the poem, meant to convey the necessity of experiencing despair and dissolution for achieving insight into oneself and the world. 

Let’s begin again— this time, all the way through. 

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.

The first thing we should notice here is the dramatic double stress on the first two words: “Dark, dark my light.” Here we are introduced to another kind of metrical foot, one of the rarest, called a spondee, which consists of two accented beats in isolation: BUM, BUM. Its presence, along with the repetition of the word “dark,” imparts a haunting gravity, a brooding emotional weight, to this concluding stanza of the poem. 

We have well established at this point that light is found in darkness—thus, the “dark light,” rather than a confusion, is an affirmation of previous ideas. “Dark desire,” however, is a new development—what is this desire, and what makes it dark? The speaker once again flirts with vagueness here, but I believe we can assert with confidence that the desire is for death, at least the ego’s death, and is therefore dark because it is morbid. The speaker imagines his soul as a fly beating itself senseless against a window pane. His soul resents the boundary of his body, and, incensed by the heat of the blazing spiritual fire it perceives in the consciousness beyond its mortal boundaries, longs for complete release. In a final moment of indecision, the speaker ponders: which I is I? The I which is myself, or the I which is the transcendent fire, the pure being which calls out to me beyond the flesh, beyond the grave? 

The speaker, rather suddenly, emerges from indecision triumphant: “a fallen man, I climb out of my fear.” Though not a sonnet, this line serves as a kind of volta for the poem. The speaker acts on the insight he has found in the darkness, and overcomes his fear, which we understand to be his fear of death. Having chosen to identify himself, not with his personal identity, but with pure being itself, he no longer clings to the possession of his personality. In this moment of enlightenment, the mind of the speaker, a mere echo of the divine mind, merges once again with its eternal source, and in so doing, this mind now realizes that it is itself the mind of God. All division has been erased between subject and object—the speaker, Nature, and God are one. The Lord of Nature and Nature itself are revealed to be the same. Bound to nothing but itself, this One is free in the highest sense.

 In a final twist however, this one is within the “tearing wind.” How could this be so? if all is One, how does wind exist in any distinguishable way? In bringing us back down to earth, Roethke seems to say that, though he has recognized his divine heritage and dispensed with his fear of death, he is nevertheless still experiencing life through his mortal body. The wind tears because the sensation of it upon his body continues to separate him from unity, yet it also tears—and here we have the final magnificent use of personification in this poem, which also doubles as a pun. The wind tears as an act of separation, yet it tears as an act of unity. Just as the tearless night suggested a unity of the self with objective nature, so a tearing wind suggests a unity of nature with the subjective self. The wind cries because the wind is the speaker, just as the speaker is the wind. The suspension of meaning which results from the inability to choose between reading this penultimate word as tearing or tearing, and furthermore whether we interpret the tears as ones of grief or of joy, are triumphs of ambiguity. 

With all that we have learned and explored, let us encounter the poem one last time as an old friend: 

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 (tearing) wind.

Thank you so much for listening, and for letting me put a little verse in your universe. If you liked this episode, please consider rating the show or leaving me a review on Apple Music. If you have friends who love poetry, or even better, friends who don’t get poetry but wish they did, please let them know about the show. Thanks again, and until next time.