In a Dark Time

Theodore Roethke

• 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.