Versecraft
Versecraft
"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
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My favorite poetry podcasts for:
Sharp thoughts and cutting truths (Matthew): Sleerickets
Lovely introspection and sensitive reflection (Alice): Poetry Says
The landscape of Ohioan poetry (Jeremy): Poetry Spotlight
Supported in part by The Ohio Poetry Association
Art by David Anthony Klug
List of the most common metrical feet:
Iamb: weak-STRONG (u /)
Trochee: STRONG-weak (/ u)
Anapest: weak-weak-STRONG (u u /)
Amphibrach: weak-STRONG-weak (u / u)
Dactyl: STRONG-weak-weak (/ u u)
Cretic: STRONG-weak-STRONG (/ u /)
Pyrrhic: weak-weak (u u)
Spondee: STRONG-STRONG (/ /)