Theodore Roethke

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.
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