Poetry Bookclub 2

[Virgil]

I've been reading "In A Dark Time" for so many years (probably over 25 years!) and returning to it reguarly that I don't know where to begin. I guess I should start with structure and theme. It's four stanzas of six lines each of iambic pentameter and where the first four lines are unrhymed and a rhyming closing couplet. The themes of each stanza are structured in this way: Stanza 1, Disintegration or division; Stanza 2, the journey out; Stanza 3, a correspondence; Stanza 4, reunification. So there is a movement, a journey, from disintegration to reunification.

One of the poetic techniques that Roethke employes is an echoing within lines. Notice how words get repeated in a line:
Line 2: shadow/shade, Line 3 echo/echoing, Line 9 purity/pure, Line 18 natural/unantural, Line 19 dark/darker, Line 23 mind/mond. Besides the beauty of the sounds echoing, the technique supports the dichotomy of the self, the self dividing. I think Quasi is correct that the heron and the wren also shows a metaphor of splitting.

Another incredible technique that Roethke employs is literary allusions to other poems. Notice the allusions throughout: Plato's allegory of the cave, Dante's Purgatory of the winding path on an edge, Baudelaire's poem"Correspndences," Emily Dickenson's poem "I Heard a Fly Buzz When I Died," Wallace Stenven's "Final Soliloquy Of The Interior Paramour," and Dante's Paridisio. At least these are the ones I can identify. You will have to look them up and find them. Perhaps I will post them myself later.

One last thing for now. I must highlight one of the absolute greatest lines not just of poetry but of all humanity: "What's madness but nobility of soul/At odds with circumastances."

I definitely will have more to say.

[Virgil]

I mentioned some allusions in that last post. Here are the full poems Roethke alludes to.

CORRESPONDENCES
by Charles Baudelaire

Nature is a temple in which living pillars
Sometimes emit confused words;
Man crosses it through forests of symbols
That observe him with familiar glances.

Like long echoes that mingle in the distance
In a profound tenebrous unity,
Vast as the night and vast as light,
Perfumes, sounds, and colors respond to one another.

Some perfumes are as fresh as the flesh of
children, Sweet as the sound of oboes, green as pastures
-- And others corrupt, rich, and triumphant,

Having the expanse of things infinite,
Such as amber, musk, benzoin, and incense,
That sing of the flight of spirit and the senses.

Here's the original French:

CORRESPONDANCES
by Charles Baudelaire

La nature est un temple où de vivants pilliers
Laissent parfois sortir de confuses paroles;
L'homme y passe à travers des forêts de symboles
Qui l'observent avec des regards familiers.

Comme de longs échos qui de loin se confondent
Dans une ténébreuse et profonde unité,
Vaste comme la nuit et comme la clarté,
Les parfums, les couleurs et les sons se repondent.

Ii est des parfums frais comme des chairs d'enfants,
Doux comme les hautbois, verts comme les prairies,
-Et d'autres corrompus, riches et triomphants,

Ayant l'expansion des choses infinies,
Comme l'ambre, le musc, le benjoin et l'encens
Qui chantent les transports de l'esprit et des sens.

I heard a Fly buzz -- when I died
by Emily Dickinson

I heard a Fly buzz -- when I died --
The Stillness in the Room
Was like the Stillness in the Air --
Between the Heaves of Storm --

The Eyes around -- had wrung them dry --
And Breaths were gathering firm
For that last Onset -- when the King
Be witnessed -- in the Room --

I willed my Keepsakes -- Signed away
What portion of me be
Assignable -- and then it was
There interposed a Fly --

With Blue -- uncertain stumbling Buzz --
Between the light -- and me --
And then the Windows failed -- and then
I could not see to see --

Final Soliloquy Of The Interior Paramour
by Wallace Stevens

Light the first light of evening, as in a room
In which we rest and, for small reason, think
The world imagined is the ultimate good.

This is, therefore, the intensest rendezvous.
It is in that thought that we collect ourselves,
Out of all the indifferences, into one thing:

Within a single thing, a single shawl
Wrapped tightly round us, since we are poor, a warmth,
A light, a power, the miraculous influence.

Here, now, we forget each other and ourselves.
We feel the obscurity of an order, a whole,
A knowledge, that which arranged the rendezvous.

Within its vital boundary, in the mind.
We say God and the imagination are one...
How high that highest candle lights the dark.

Out of this same light, out of the central mind,
We make a dwelling in the evening air,
In which being there together is enough.

You will have to look up Dante and Plato yourself, but I think you can see the allusions to them and within the poems I posted here.

[quasimodo1]

Virgil, your choice of the most outstanding lines..."What's madness but nobility of soul/ At odds with circumstances." are the highlight for myself as well and Stlukesguild's comment ..."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." defines this further and perfectly.

[Virgil]

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.

Oh I missed the concluding posts on the previous page. I agree with everything you say. I had never thought about The Dark Night of the Soul as an allusion. I do think Roethke intended it.

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.

JBI, there is a play of words on tear as in weeping and tear as in rip. The narrator is a "lord of nature weeping to a tree" but later is "tearless." And certainly there is a pun in the last line of "tearing." Remember that the lord of nature is the alter ego, a split self, someone who has been torn from his central ego. The lord of nature is the noble soul which gets picked up in the next stanza and is the mad, schitzophrenic half of the narrator. The lord of nature is also the one who corresponds with nature in the third paragraph. But in the fourth paragraph the nature is reduced to a maddened fly and a wind that tears. He has escaped the disintegrating forces of nature, the physical world, to an absorbing God, into the mind, an abstract form. I hope you see how that all interweaves.

[JBI]

We ready for the next poem?

[quasimodo1]

Just as an aside, I thought this quote from a blog was quite good, about Roethke- generally: "Among the many books I ordered from Amazon last December, the one that I've been reading a lot lately has been Theodore Roethke's Collected Poems. In fact I'm enjoying it so much that over the next few weeks I intend to read it from cover to cover - perhaps the first Collected I've read that way in a long time, since perhaps T.S. Eliot's, which I read shortly after graduating from university (over 20 years ago now…). Like Eliot's, Roethke's Collected is not particularly long, running some two hundred and sixty pages. It reads more like a selected. Minor poems, major linked works, but not a weak poem to be found, so far at least. (At this point, I've almost finished the second of seven collections in the book, The Lost Son and Other Poems, first published in 1948.)

What is remarkable about Roethke is that he constructs a far-reaching and resonant dialogue from a limited - obsessively limited -- set of themes and images, practically all pastoral. I find that kind of singularity amazing in an age when we are bombarded by so many different influences from so many different directions. In times of hyper-abundance, such narrowness of focus could almost be taken as dishonest. Where Roethke is honest, where he takes risks, is in his fidelity to his subject matter (I'm sure I'm being tautological here, but being true to ones subject matter always entails great risk), his sensitivity, his vulnerability, his expression of his very real throes of manic-depressive illness, his adventurous thrust into a world of wholly subjective language. The pastoral provided a refuge and mooring place -- the beauty and archetypal qualities of plants, winds, soil, greenhouses, as well as the structured rhythms and rhyme schemes which no matter how committed he was to free verse he always returned to. Whatever Silliman may say (I honestly don't know what Silliman thinks of Roethke), no Poetry of Quietude this. Too much edginess and anxiety here; too much flight into the unknown.

In his first book, Open House (1941) Roethke establishes himself on very solid if conservative ground. Aside from a few starchy, highly compressed constructions where he tries to sum up Reality in a few words (I'm thinking of "The Adament", in particular, and a couple of others), these short poems - and those that begin his second collection -- are among his most successful and highly anthologized. I'm thinking of the title poem, "Cuttings 1 & 2", "My Papa's Waltz", & others. (For a link containing a Roethke bio and many of these, click here.)" source= http://briancampbell.blogspot.com/20...g-roethke.html And JBI: Virgil might have more to add about "In a Dark Time" but if not we are ready to move on. q1

[Virgil]

One last thing on this poem. I wanted to discuss the last stanza. Here:

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.

Do people think that the poem ends with death and unification with God or does the poem end as escape from maddeness into sanity, the unification with God being a metaphor? On the death side, the allusion to Dickenson's poem would suggest a death. On the sanity part, the allusion to Stevens's poem:

Here, now, we forget each other and ourselves.
We feel the obscurity of an order, a whole,
A knowledge, that which arranged the rendezvous.

Within its vital boundary, in the mind.
We say God and the imagination are one...
How high that highest candle lights the dark.

Out of this same light, out of the central mind,
We make a dwelling in the evening air,
In which being there together is enough.

I think suggests an imaginative integration of his schitzophrenic personas. At least to me. Perhaps he means both. Any comments?

[quasimodo1]

My take on the ending is that transformation takes place, put only as one of an endless series of epistemological summits which for Roethke will lead to another.

[Dark Muse]

Though I do not know Roethke as well as most of the rest of you, from my reading of the poem and what I took from it, I did not see the end as being death. I will have to agree with quasi

[JBI]

How about for the next one, "I Knew a Woman"?

[quasimodo1]

Seems like an intriqueing poem to me and since I've never read it, I can't wait to see how Roethke percieved knowing a woman.

[stlukesguild]

Ah... JBI! You are after my own heart! That was surely the poem I wished to suggest as well.

http://gawow.com/roethke/poems/122.html

[quasimodo1]

First reactions to Roethke usually are not worth much but if anyone ever wished Roethke would stop placing perfume on a goat...they get their wish here.

[quasimodo1]

http://www.folkways.si.edu/trackdeta...x?itemid=30800 -- Hear Roethke recite the first stanza of "I Knew a Woman" from the Smithsonian.

[Virgil]

How about for the next one, "I Knew a Woman"?

Good choice. That's a fine poem, and very different from the two we've read so far.