In a Dark Time by Theodore Roethke
"In a Dark Time" by Theodore Roethke is a confessional poem that explores the themes of mental anguish, personal transformation, and the search for identity during periods of psychological distress. The poem reflects Roethke's own experiences with mental illness, depicting his journey through a "dark time" characterized by confusion and despair. This struggle is framed as a necessary descent into chaos, suggesting that true clarity and wholeness emerge only after confronting profound inner turmoil.
Throughout the poem, Roethke employs vivid imagery and a complex structure, utilizing a unique rhyme scheme that mirrors the themes of fragmentation and eventual unity. He grapples with the dualities of existence, navigating between beauty and brutality, madness and nobility. The poem ultimately conveys a sense of rebirth, as the poet emerges from darkness into a new awareness, feeling a connection to the world despite its inherent violence. Roethke's work invites readers to consider the intricate relationship between suffering and enlightenment, emphasizing that through deep personal struggle, one may find a new sense of purpose and understanding.
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In a Dark Time by Theodore Roethke
First published: 1960; collected in The Far Field, 1964
Type of poem: Lyric
The Poem
In this confessional poem, Theodore Roethke describes a passage through a “dark time” in his life and his emergence from this episode, not into peace and quietude, but at least into wholeness. The journey to and out of the psychic pit described in the poem may be a metaphor for personal tragedy, spiritual emptiness, or, more likely, because it is known that Roethke suffered from periods of psychosis, a poetic attempt to deal with a mental breakdown.
The poet insists that a plunge to the bottom of the abyss of psychological disorientation and dislocation of identity is necessary to achieve clarity: “In a dark time, the eye begins to see.” There must be painful struggle, though, before this end is reached. In the first stanza, the poet has glimpses of his personality, but he finds only fragments and pieces, meeting not himself but his shadow, hearing not his voice but his echo. As he says later in the poem, “The edge is what I have.” He also finds that he is not sure of his place in the larger scheme of life because he “live[s] between the heron” (a stately, beautiful creature) “and the wren” (an ordinary bird), between “beasts of the hill” (highly placed, but brutal animals) “and serpents of the den” (associated with evil and danger, but also with knowledge).
In the second stanza, the poet specifically identifies his problem as mental illness but implies that it is not he but the world which is out of joint: “What’s madness but nobility of soul/ At odds with circumstance?” In fact, madness may not necessarily be “a cave” in which one is lost, but may be “a winding path” to a new awareness. Despair experienced completely may lead to “purity.”
Meanwhile, there is the chaos described in the third stanza, in which daytime is suddenly replaced by midnight, ordinary objects blaze as if lit from within, and images are thrown one upon another at such a dizzying pace that the experience is described as “a steady storm of correspondences.” Nevertheless, the confusion is necessary because the old personality must be destroyed before a new one can be born: “Death of the self in a long, tearless night.”
Although the paradoxes (“dark, dark my light”) and the unanswered questions (“Which I is I?”) continue in the final stanza, there is an apparently unexpected resolution of the conflict, as the poet touches the bottom and then begins to rise: “A fallen man, I climb out of my fear.” At last, there comes a mystic union with God and the poet feels a part of everything (“one is One”), but there is no safe haven. The poet has been born again into a violent world, but this time he is able to face it “free in the tearing wind.”
Forms and Devices
Although, at first glance, “In a Dark Time” seems to be a collection of outbursts and slapped-together images which is less a description of madness than an example of it, the poem is really a carefully crafted work in which its conclusion is implicit in all of its elements, beginning with the rhyme pattern of the poem. Roethke uses a six-line stanza, the rhyme scheme of which is abcadd. This pattern, which appears at first glance to be no rhyme scheme at all until the stanza’s last three lines, reinforces the point of the poem, which is that disintegration may be necessary to achieve unity. There appears to be no rhyme after the first three lines, but with the end of the fourth comes a resonance of the first—the suggestion that there is order where there had appeared to be none. The last two lines of the stanza, a strongly rhymed couplet, imply that the poet is drawing his world together again into a type of order.
The a rhyme of the first stanza (“see” and “tree”) is strong and definite, but the same element of the second stanza (“soul” and “wall”) is only a near rhyme, as is that of the third (“correspondences” and “what he is—”) and fourth (“desire” and “fear”). These near rhymes reinforce the idea that the poet is only barely in control of himself and the poem, but the strongly rhyming last couplet of each stanza pulls the poem and the reader away from formlessness. As a final seal on the idea that to endure this kind of psychic torment is to break through into a new kind of reality, the last two lines of the poem, the ones which in each stanza had borne a strong rhyme, themselves yield to near rhyme (“mind” and “wind”). It is as if the poet is telling his readers that they thought they had his poem figured out, but that they do not. To experience fully the reality that the poet is describing, it is necessary to see things in a totally new way.
The imagery of the poem, at first confusing, also reinforces the idea that from apparent paradox and nonsense come new knowledge. Some of the images embody contradiction, such as the serpent with its double meaning in Western culture. Others lose their paradoxical quality when seen in the terms of the poem’s entire statement. It seems impossible that a “light” could be “dark,” but Roethke means that one must embrace all elements of one’s personality in order to integrate them, even those parts which one does not regard as admirable (“beasts of the hill”) and even if the process is confusing (“Which I is I?”). Confusion and disorientation are necessary, Roethke says, for only by asking the question and admitting ignorance can one begin to find new ways of learning.
Bibliography
Bloom, Harold, ed. Theodore Roethke. New York: Chelsea House, 1988.
Bogen, Don. Theodore Roethke and the Writing Process. Athens: Ohio University Press, 1991.
Bowers, Neal. Theodore Roethke: The Journey from I to Otherwise. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1982.
Kalaidjian, Walter B. Understanding Theodore Roethke. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1987.
Kusch, Robert. My Toughest Mentor: Theodore Roethke and William Carlos Williams (1940-1948). Lewisburg, Pa.: Bucknell University Press, 1999.
Malkoff, Karl. Theodore Roethke: An Introduction to the Poetry. New York: Columbia University Press, 1966.
Seager, Allan. The Glass House: The Life of Theodore Roethke. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1968.
Stiffler, Randall. Theodore Roethke: The Poet and His Critics. Chicago: American Library Association, 1986.
Wolff, George. Theodore Roethke. Boston: Twayne, 1981.