"In a Dark Time" by Theodore Roethke

In a Dark Time by Theodore Roethke : The Poetry Foundation

I think I’ve heard that Theodore Roethke’s “In a Dark Time” is one of his more admired poems, but I'm not sure how to think about it. I think I’d use that handy reviewer word, “uneven,” to describe it. I find some of the lines gorgeous: 

            I hear my echo in the echoing wood—

            A lord of nature weeping to a tree.

            I live between the heron and the wren . . .    

Or provocative:

            What’s madness but nobility of soul

            At odds with circumstance?

Or personalized, unique, and convincing images of nightmare and desperation:

           

           My shadow pinned against a sweating wall.   

            That place among the rocks . . .

            The edge is what I have.

            A night flowing with birds, a ragged moon . . .

I also like the fact the final line leaves some ambiguity about just how much of a

solution this union of the human mind and God might be, as we find it “free” only to

exist in a “tearing wind.” How comforting is that? How complete is that salvation?

There’s a realism in that uncertainty that works well against a facile cure-all for

closure.

However, some of Roethke’s lines and images feel a bit hyperbolic and histrionic, or

pat and predictable. The images can be rather non-specific, as if collected from a

psychology text, a formula, rather than testaments of this particular speaker’s

individual, personalized imagery of being on the brink:

                                    The day’s on fire!   

            I know the purity of pure despair,

            And in broad day the midnight come again! 

            All natural shapes blazing unnatural light.

            Dark, dark my light, 

I hear more rhapsody than agony in those lines. Even the poem’s title, “In a Dark Time” strikes me as a rather generic summation of angst. To say “a dark time” is to speak something a lot of folks might have uttered. Is it wrong to expect from a major poet a higher percentage of original images and thoughts about psychological chaos? It’s not that those are absent here, but aren’t they a bit inconstant?

Let me know if the subject interests you. If it does, I’ll try to post one or two of G.M.

Hopkins’ “terrible sonnets” where the themes are similar, but the imagery seems to me more consistently stunning and creative, even though Hopkins is almost a century older than Roethke.

In a Dark Time by Theodore Roethke : The Poetry Foundation