Poetry Bookclub 2

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What’s this? A dish for fat lips.
Who says? A nameless stranger.
Is he a bird or a tree? Not everyone can tell.


Water recedes to the crying of spiders.
An old scow bumps over black rocks.
A cracked pod calls.


Mother me out of here. What more will the bones allow?
Will the sea give the wind suck? A toad folds into a stone.
These flowers are all fangs. Comfort me, fury.
Wake me, witch, we’ll do the dance of rotten sticks.

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Now that is typical Roethke. :) The key phrase I think is "Mother me out of here."

One expression that recurs in Roethke criticism is "confessional surrealism" where older methods are given up in favor of something more suggestive and emotive. I can see that working here. Since as Stlukesguild accurately reports...without ever being able to be reduced to a logical narrative meaning.

Oh, Virgil, missed that post. At this point I would rather be discussing "Feud" but that will wait until we get a better handle on this piece.

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Originally Posted by quasimodo1

One expression that recurs in Roethke criticism is "confessional surrealism" where older methods are given up in favor of something more suggestive and emotive. I can see that working here. Since as Stlukesguild accurately reports...without ever being able to be reduced to a logical narrative meaning.

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"Confessional Surrealism" yes I would concur with that characterization. Which is interesting because he was predated the confessional poetry movement that took off in the 1960s. I just looked up confessional poetry on wiki and they include Roethke. I had not considered Roethke as part of the confessional poets, but I guess it fits to some degree. I don't think he's as "confessional" as Robert Lowell.

Upon a second reading I am struck by thoughts of some similarities in theme with Eliot's Wasteland and Hollow Men. The poem begins with a collection of images of earth and soil... and yet suggestions that such have become barren... wasted:

Water receded to the crying of spiders
An old scow bumps over black rocks
A cracked pod calls

Mother me out of here. What more will the bones allow?
Will the sea give the wind suck? A toad folds into a stone.
The flowers are all fangs. Comfort me, fury.
Wake me, witch, we'll do the dance of rotten sticks.

Shale loosens. Marl reaches into the field...

In the hour of ripeness, the tree is barren.

Like the closing stanza of Eliot's Hollow Men there are the sections that suggest a mocking nursery rhyme:

Where’s the eye?
The eye’s in the sty.
The ear’s not here
Beneath the hair.
When I took off my clothes
To find a nose,
There was only one shoe
For the waltz of To,
The pinch of Where.

The closing two sections of the poem contrast greatly with this as they look back in time... to a world far more succulent... fertile...lush...:

4

Morning-fair, follow me further back
Into that minnowy world of weeds and ditches,
When the herons floated high over the white houses,
And the little crabs slipped into silvery craters.
When the sun for me glinted the sides of a sand grain,
And my intent stretched over the buds at their first trembling.

That air and shine: and the flicker’s loud summer call:
The bearded boards in the stream and the all of apples;
The glad hen on the hill; and the trellis humming.
Death was not. I lived in a simple drowse:
Hands and hair moved through a dream of wakening blossoms.
Rain sweetened the cave and the dove still called;
The flowers leaned on themselves, the flowers in hollows;
And love, love sang toward.


5

To have the whole air!—
The light, the full sun
Coming down on the flowerheads,
The tendrils turning slowly,
A slow snail-lifting, liquescent;
To be by the rose
Rising slowly out of its bed,
Still as a child in its first loneliness;
To see cyclamen veins become clearer in early sunlight,
And mist lifting out of the brown cat-tails;
To stare into the after-light, the glitter left on the lake’s surface,
When the sun has fallen behind a wooded island;
To follow the drops sliding from a lifted oar,
Held up, while the rower breathes, and the small boat drifts quietly shoreward...

I can see this poem having a certain confessional asepct to it.

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The closing two sections of the poem contrast greatly with this as they look back in time... to a world far more succulent... fertile...lush...:

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Yes, in the words that Quasi used, I cannot remember if he said it here, or just in his PM to me, but the last half of the poem does strike me as being more "innocent" than the first half.

For sure, Stlukes, Eliot immediately comes to mind when reading some of Roethke's more complex, longer poems. In this particular poem, it seems accessability was never a consideration.

Pleasure on ground
Has no sound,
Easily maddens
The uneasy man.

Who, careless, slips
In coiling ooze
Is trapped to the lips,
Leaves mare than shoes;

The Shape of the Fire has these mini-poem assemblies; does anyone have any idea what function they are serving?

III
The wasp waits.
The edge cannot eat the center.
The grape glistens.
The path tells little to the serpent.
An eye comes out of the wave.
The journey from flesh is longest.
A rose sways least.
The redeemer comes a dark way.


{part three of THE SHAPE OF THE FIRE}

I notice he seems to use all these currious little contradictions of words within the poem. Though I cannot make heads or tails of what they mean.

In the begining it starts with

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Is he a bird or a tree? Not everyone can tell.

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And than

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The edge cannot eat the center.

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The path tells little to the serpent.

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They strike me as odd little lines, of things which relate to each other, but I cannot completely grasp what he is trying to say with his use of them.

Muse, these lines stood out to me as well and as Stlukesguild said...he is creating a (psychological) mood and atmosphere. Before we all forget that Roethke had a more accessible side, I remember these lines from a NYTimes review.... Roethke, another quirky, intense Northwest Pacific soul, and these Gravesian words from Roethke's final book:


Now I adore my life

With the Bird, the abiding Leaf,

With the Fish, the questing Snail,

And the Eye altering all;

And I dance with William Blake

For love, for Love's sake;

And everything comes to One,

As we dance on, dance on, dance on

refering back to Roethke's T.S.Eliot like sound..."Roethke taught at the University of Washington in Seattle. He was a talented tennis player (according to a friend's father, who had him for freshman comp at Penn in the '40s). These are the credentials of a bourgeois academic, for sure. And yet he wrote like a drum-beating wild man and had an unfortunate need to check into the psychiatric ward on occasion to check his mania. His last poems take after the litanizing Whitman and make way for the Deep Image movement of the '60s-yet he continued to acknowledge T.S. Eliot as the master. It's Eliot's advice from the sublime Four Quartet that Roethke's answering, with decisive concision, at the end of "The Longing":

Old men should be explorers?
I'll be an Indian.
Ogalala?
Iroquois
{ http://www.artseditor.com/html/janua..._roethke.shtml }

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Originally Posted by quasimodo1

After some research and because this poem seems so inaccessible, here are a few ideas about its makeup: The poems in this series, including "The Lost Son" are psychological comparisons, similar to what the German poets used to call a "bildungsroman" but also quite different because the poems don't show a linear progression from innocence to ethical strength. Also relative to the psychological factor is this quote from "Madness in the New Poetry" by Peter Davison..."Is madness a conflict between imagination and reality? (Theodore Roethke would call it "nobility of soul at odds with circumstance.") Perhaps, but what else but that very conflict gives rise to poetry? Where madness enters in we may expect incoherence; but let us take care to discriminate between the incoherence of not knowing how, and the incoherence of reaching beyond. Madness without poetry can sometimes, through the excitement that rises from it, arouse in the reader feelings much like those that would be aroused by poetry without madness. Longinus defined the difference as between the sublime and the beautiful; but twentieth-century psychiatric madness has all too little of the sublime about it. Where it engages the poet too closely with himself it tends to damage poetry, for the self should be the reservoir of poetry rather than its shallop. Poetry has suffered long from the preponderance of the idea that it exists to scratch the poet's itch. When madness enters in, the poet may try to cure himself upon the page, or to drive himself on to further intoxications of madness. If madness damages poetry, poetry must be defended. The poet as poet bears responsibility for the excellence and wholeness of his poem more than for his self's wholeness, no matter how mad he happens to be. In examining some of the books of verse published in the last year, I have kept in mind poetry before madness. Let us watch the outcome of each struggle." http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/65jan/davison.htm

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Yea, but is this more about deconstructing Roethke or understanding his poetry? *The Shape of Fire* insofar as I can do this without a text of my own at hand, seems to be, indeed, about fire and its transitory dance, fragile existence. Think about the line "a dish at lips". This could be a face looking into a reflective surface, which mimics the attraction of fire as a visual experience. The entire first section may in fact be the voice of fire dreading the heaviness of water and dampness.

For now, I will leave the above paragraph as a suggestion--but would also suggest, for those of us who care about sustained readings of one author, we need to find a better way to go about this--if I am going to stay with the club anyway. The specific novel discussions seem much better organized than what *we* have done here.

I do agree with Virgil that discussing every poem in a standard collection length is impractical, but I think also that during the nominating process, links to the texts should be placed so they can be ordered before the vote closes, and we should use the polls like they do in the forum book club. The poll is a good measuring and organizational tool.

The way in which he uses reputition, as well as some of the discriptions he uses, reading this poem, in some ways made me think of Joyce.

These verses in particular struck me as being Joyce like

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Where's the eye?
The eye's in the sty.
The ear's not here
Beneath the hair.
When I took off my clothes
To find a nose,
There was only one shoe
For the waltz of To,
The pinch of Where.

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Must pull off clothes
To jerk like a frog
On belly and nose
From the sucking bog

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Jozanny: I like your observations and theories about what Roethke is getting at. If this poem is somehow about his psychological formation, I am assuming at a young age, then these metaphors (?) are running all over the place. I think we will give this poem tonight for more ovservations and tomorrow push on with poem chosen by someone else. As for the method of this discussion, I'm all ears. If it doesn't follow a clear and linear progressions like some prose discussions, well, perhaps poetry is not linear and our responses to it certainly are not. And Jozanny, I'll send the entire text in a bit.

:rolleyes: Thank you for your efforts quasi, I know they are sincere. It isn't that I can't afford the text of the collected poems; merely, I don't want to buy what I don't want to keep, and my seller's list at Amazon isn't moving.

I am sort of busy right now, but I will make a vain attempt at the free library next week. I need to renew my card anyway--I have access at my alma mater, and I could also possibly negotiate library usage on the University of Pennsylvania campus--they tend to be accommodating toward pretenders to the throne--but I do not want to go back into North or West Philly unless my own personal research requires it, so I am at the mercy of whatever public collections are available.

"Death was not. I lived in a simple drowse:
Hands and hair moved through a dream of wakening blossoms.
Rain sweetened the cave and the dove still called;
The flowers leaned on themselves, the flowers in hollows;
And love, love sang toward." Going out on a small limb here, this section most likely refers to a slice of time when Roethke lived in the house with many greenhouses and "a simple drowse" probably refers to a time before self-awareness, a time before manhood.

Or, perhaps we could take a Frye approach, and look at the greenhouse for an allusion to Eden, and, I guess in the case of Roethke's life, a metaphor representing the fall from Eden, as related in the first chapters of Genesis, and even more importantly, in Milton. It isn't too long a shot to say, that in the context of the poem, the poem supports the Greenhouse as a sort of modern Eden - a containment of the refined goodness of life, without the outside negativity (being that it is walled off).

"And mist lifting out of the brown cat-tails;
To stare into the after-light, the glitter left on the lake's surface,
When the sun has fallen behind a wooded island;
To follow the drops sliding from a lifted oar,
Held up, while the rower breathes, and the small boat drifts quietly
Shoreward;"
This section, especially "the sun has fallen behind a wooded island" seems like Roethke's northern temperate zone version of Eden.

The more I read "The Shape of Fire" the more I love it. It is a magnificent work. Like everyone else I cannot graps it, but I do think the central thrust of the poem is a birthing process. From what he's birthing from and to I can't grasp it. But I think each section has a reference to a passage from one place to another.
Section 1: "Mother me out of here"
Section 2: "Up over a viaduct I came, to the snakes and sticks of another winter"
Section 3: "An eye comes out of the wave. /The journey from flesh is longest."
Section 4: "Morning-fair, follow me further back /Into that minnowy world of weeds and ditches"
Section 5: "To be by the rose /Rising slowly out of its bed"

This birthing to a new world is one set of tensions that are going on in the poem. Notice how there are constant references to an edge, the transition point between things:
"This is only the edge of whiteness," "The edge cannot eat the center," and "As an opaque vase fills to the brim from a quick pouring, /Fills and trembles at the edge yet does not flow over, /Still holding and feeding the stem of the contained flower."

Another set of tension that I see is between the physical world with a temporal, shadowy world:
"Spirit, come near," "Have you come to unhinge my shadow?," "The redeemer comes a dark way," and "Hands and hair moved through a dream of wakening blossoms."

So if you put together the notions of birthing, transition, physical and shadowy worlds, I think the poem is mostly about a transition from the physical world to a spiritual world. These lines from right at the center of the poem seem central: "An eye comes out of the wave. /The journey from flesh is longest."

One thing that I have found with Roethke is that he is very Platonic, the philosophy of Plato, that is. There are constant references to shadows and caves and light. He seems to use Plato's allegory of the cave as a framework for many of his themes.

Virgil, I think you have it. This bit about transition to a spiritual life was mentioned is two of the better critiques of the poem, which also mentioned psychological growth.

Thanks Quasi. I'm not sure if we are finished with "The Shape of Fire" but Quasi has gven me the go ahead to select the next poem. I select my favorite Roethke poem, a poem I consider one of the finest of the 20th century, "In A Dark Time." You can find the poem here: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/arch...html?id=172120.

Now this does not mean that one can't still comment on the previous poem. Feel free to start the discussion on the new poem or discuss the previous.

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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.

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I adored this stanza. It was so superbly dark and rich. And there is something quite heathenistic about which I just love.

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I hear my echo in the echoing wood—

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This line was just phenomenal.

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A lord of nature weeping to a tree.

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I loved this too

This poem too me seems to be about a journey of the soul, ones quest to find themselves, and an awakening period, or time of Self-realization.

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I live between the heron and the wren,

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I find these line interesting, I have noticed these two birds specifically seem to often appear in his pomes. Does anyone know why the heron and the wren have such significance to Roethke.

Also I have noticed in a lot of his work he references water, and considering the heron is a bird with a connection to water. Did he by chance live near water?

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What’s madness but nobility of soul

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I really like this line

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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.

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This seems to reflect a time of awakening, and struggle with the self. With the mention of day on fire, it seems to be the light breaking through the darkness.

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That place among the rocks—is it a cave,
Or winding path? The edge is what I have.

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This seems to reflect a moment of possible freedom, or escape, for while the cave would result in a dead end and more darkness, a winding path offers another alternative, a way out.

Well, I am not finished with "The Shape of Fire", so the rest of you can feel free to move on without me while I continue to examine it. I do not think the poem is truly about rebirth, even though Roethke certainly toys with the conceit. My reason for this is, I know something about both mental illness and broken bodies. Neither gets fixed, and I suspect Roethke knew it as well as Wittgenstein knew it, as well as I know it. Drugs and the brutality of good old fashioned psychiatric hospital treatments may lead to periods of stability, but a damaged brain once damaged remains so, and I think what the narrative voice attempts to examine is transformation as a redeemable process, without coming to any firm conclusions about it.

This is not a traditional rite of passage piece which leans toward salvation, and when I am finished my traditional monthly cycle of ailing, I will point toward a more complex reading than I've yet seen anyone offer--which is seemingly fitting. I do not think Roethke meant to be simplicity itself once the manic rhythm is settled into.

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Originally Posted by Jozanny

Well, I am not finished with "The Shape of Fire", so the rest of you can feel free to move on without me while I continue to examine it. I do not think the poem is truly about rebirth, even though Roethke certainly toys with the conceit. My reason for this is, I know something about both mental illness and broken bodies. Neither gets fixed, and I suspect Roethke knew it as well as Wittgenstein knew it, as well as I know it. Drugs and the brutality of good old fashioned psychiatric hospital treatments may lead to periods of stability, but a damaged brain once damaged remains so, and I think what the narrative voice attempts to examine is transformation as a redeemable process, without coming to any firm conclusions about it.

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"transformation as a redeemable process" versus rebirth, isn't that about the same thing?

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This is not a traditional rite of passage piece which leans toward salvation, and when I am finished my traditional monthly cycle of ailing, I will point toward a more complex reading than I've yet seen anyone offer--which is seemingly fitting. I do not think Roethke meant to be simplicity itself once the manic rhythm is settled into.

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Looking forward to it. I must say I really liked this poem and any further explanation of it is very welcomed. :)

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Originally Posted by Virgil

"transformation as a redeemable process" versus rebirth, isn't that about the same thing?

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No, it isn't.

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Originally Posted by Jozanny

No, it isn't.

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:lol: You will have to explain it to me. When you're feeling better, of course. :)

Before another posting on the "Fire" poem, I thought this piece on Roethke from artseditor.com would be apropos..."I don't recall exactly which of Roethke's poems appeared in that anthology. (I still own the book, by the way; but I'm 200 miles away from the shelf it's on now.) But I do recall that we read the obligatory "My Papa's Waltz" as a prime example of Roethke's control of form and tone. I'm sure we read the hallucinatory recollections (fitting for our psychedelic pastimes) in the title poem of The Lost Son and Other Poems, getting off on its dark children's ditties -"The weeds whined," goes one quatrain, "The snakes cried,/The cows and briars/Said to me: Die."-and its troublesome notational utterances that sound, we probably said, like Eliot on acid:

What a small song. What slow clouds. What dark water.
Hath the rain a father? All the caves are ice. Only the snow's here.
I'm cold. I'm cold all over. Rub me in father and mother.
Fear was my father, Father Fear.
His look drained the stones.

Maybe professor-poet Plumly, ruggedly handsome and hip with thick wavy hair at the head of the class, told us that these two poems, "My Papa's Waltz" and "The Lost Son," represent the extremes of style between which Roethke usually worked in his several succeeding collections of poems. He also must have introduced us to the two outstanding sequences of poems that Roethke is perhaps best known for: the so-called "greenhouse" poems written early in his career (from The Lost Son and Other Poems) and "The North American Sequence" written toward the end of it (from The Far Field, 1964). For these have been the poems I've returned to frequently since then for an experience of the sublime. I read the compact and explosive descriptions of the greenhouse poems for almost no other reason than to enter the root cellar at his family's nursery in Michigan..." -- http://www.artseditor.com/html/janua..._roethke.shtml

An aside on Roethke: http://www.poetrysociety.org/journal...oets_02sp.html an interesting one-page vignette on the meeting of these two men.

In order to have some designated time for discussion, and considering the fact the members post from every time zone possible...we will have Sunday afternoon and evening roughly from 4 PM to 12 midnight for a common meeting time. Any other time is of couse acceptable to post on this thread. Also any member who wishes, I encourage to comment. q1

From The Collected Poems of Theodore Roethke

JOURNEY TO THE INTERIOR

I. In the long journey out of the self,
There are many detours, washed-out interrupted raw places
Where the shale slides dangerously
And the back wheels hang almost over the edge
At the sudden veering, the moment of turning.
Better to hug close, wary of rubble and falling stones.
The arroyo cracking the road, the wind-bitten buttes, the canyons,
Creeks swollen in midsummer from the flash-flood roaring into the
Narrow valley.
Reeds beaten flat by wind and rain,
Grey from the long winter, burnt at the base in late summer.
--Or the path narrowing,
Winding upward toward the stream with its sharp stones,
The upland of alder and birchtrees,
Through the swamp alive with quicksand,
The way blocked at last by a fallen fir-tree,
The thickets darkening,
The ravines ugly. {first of three parts} This is not the next poem for discussion just a favorite Roethke passage of mine. Virgil will be starting the next discussion on "In a Dark Time". Tomorrow night would be good but we shall see what members sign in.

I was wondering when I should start "In A Dark Time." Tomorrow is perfect.

I was noticing the first line of what you just posted above Quasi. " In the long journey out of the self". So much of Roethke is a journey, either out of the self or into the self.

That's a journey I can identify with. Great that tomorrow works out. I'll will sign in starting around 7PM but you just start when you can. Thanks.

from Sequence, Sometimes Metaphysical


IN A DARK TIME

In a dark time, 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. {first half of this poem...topic for tonight's discussion}

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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

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I adored this stanza. It was so superbly dark and rich. And there is something quite heathenistic about which I just love.

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I hear my echo in the echoing wood—

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This line was just phenomenal.

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A lord of nature weeping to a tree

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I loved this too

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I live between the heron and the wren,

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I find these line interesting, I have noticed these two birds specifically seem to often appear in his pomes. Does anyone know why the heron and the wren have such significance to Roethke.

Also I have noticed in a lot of his work he references water, and considering the heron is a bird with a connection to water. Did he by chance live near water?

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What’s madness but nobility of soul

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I really like this line

This poem too me seems to be about a journey of the soul, ones quest to find themselves, and an awakening period, or time of Self-realization.

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At odds with circumstance? The day's on fire!
I know the purity of pure despair,

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This seems to reflect a time of awakening, and struggle with the self. With the mention of day on fire, it seems to be the light breaking through the darkness

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That place among the rocks—is it a cave,
Or winding path? The edge is what I have.

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This seems to reflect a moment of possible freedom, or escape, for while the cave would result in a dead end and more darkness, a winding path offers another alternative, a way out.

Well Muse, a line you highlighted now seems packed with extended meanings..."I live between the heron and the wren," Beside this dual-identity and a metaphor I take to mean one persona is that of a larger, agressive (assertive) type and the other a much smaller retiring type. In emerging from this "dark time", Roethke will have to gather the assets of both.

I also thought it was interesting that while the wren, a smaller bird, and one which is more associated with the air and flight, while the heron, though it can fly, is in a way more "grounded" they are typically wading birds and are more associated with water than with air. And more often found on the ground than in the sky.

This poem is quite fabulous... and far less obscure or hermetic than The Shape of the Fire... although I would not think to reduce it to any single simple "meaning". The sound or music of this poem is more traditional with its use of rhyme... but still there are the more complex echoes... repetitions of sound: assonance, consonance, rhyme within lines and not merely at the end of lines:

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.

Knowing Roethke's connection with American Romantics of the West Coast... especially the Northwest... and their connection with Asian poetry... I wonder if Roethke's musical structure of internal rhyme and repetition might not echo such poetic uses as found in Asian... and especially Chinese poetry... as well as the Anglo-Saxon poetic forms filtered through Pound and Hopkins as I mentioned earlier.

Roethke was deeply passionate about the great Romantic and mystical poets such as Whitman, Emerson, Blake, Wordsworth, and Yeats. I definitely sense an imagery drawn from... or at least suggestive of many of the Romantic poems of the poet's personal travel through a dark place...

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--

These lines immediately suggest an affinity with nothing less than Dante's Inferno:

Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita
mi ritrovai per una selva oscura,
ché la diritta via era smarrita.

(Midway on our life's journey, I found myself
In dark woods, the right road lost. To tell
About those woods is hard -- so tangled and
rough- Pinsky tr.)

But there are also echoes of Eliot- "Footfalls echo in the memory/Down the passage which we did not take/Towards the door we never opened" (which may not be surprising considering Eliot's profound admiration of Dante).

What's madness but nobility of soul
At odds with circumstance? The day's on fire!

The suggestion of a link between madness and the poet's personal struggles might be a tired cliché in the work of many writers... but not so much with Roethke... especially when one considers his own personal experience with exorcising such demons... and the fact that he never wallows in a "woe is me" attitude, but rather suggests something of a visionary deeper understanding of or transformation of the self growing out of his experiences.

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.

Again I think of Dante's Comedia... which is essentially the journey of the soul... in which the poet awakens... in spite of the great length of the poem and the time that seemingly has passed... but a short time later... yet profoundly transformed. Also... to my mind... there are reverberations of San Juan de la Cruz' (St. John of the Cross') equally visionary Dark Night of the Soul.

...There is the lucky dark...
no sign for me to mark,
no other mark, no guide
except for my heart- the fire- the fire inside!

That led me on
keener than sunlight in the highest blue...

O dark of night, my guide!...

I stayed, I stayed; forgot me...

slipped from the me and not-me
and ties of earth untwined
among the lilies falling and out of mind.

from The Dark Night (of the Soul)- San Juan de la Cruz, tr. John Frederick Nims

Hopefully I'm making some sense as I'm actually sick as a dog this evening:sick:.

Seems interesting, just a question though;

The mind enters itself, and God the mind,
And one is One, free in the tearing wind.

Wind as in breeze, or Wind as in wound? What do you think? I personally am opting for a pun, since wind (breeze) would be the obvious word, yet wind (wound) would be the obvious rhyme, which seems fitting, and also contextually can be just as valid.

In terms of the rhyme though, he in two of the three other stanzas uses a full rhyme (wren/den, night/light), whereas he uses a half rhyme with cave and have, setting a possible president, and I think it a bit of a stretch to say he is using a half rhyme in the fourth stanza to continue a pattern (that seems a little bit unlikely). What are your thoughts on the couplet?

and, for any joiners wanting the full text, it is available here: http://famouspoetsandpoems.com/poets...ke/poems/16320