"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