Baron Wormser: Dark Time

In a Dark Time

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.


In public hard times, such as we are currently living through, Theodore Roethke’s poem “In a Dark Time” sometimes pops up in discussions. Roethke’s poem is not overtly political but the poem’s recognition of personal darkness is bracing and welcoming in the way that even a “dark” poem can be because so little gets said about such darkness that is not clinical or a matter of self-help or uplift. The poem is part of a sequence that is, to use Roethke’s word, “metaphysical.” We are in the realm of what we intuit and experience and cannot quite define, which is one impetus to write poems. And then, as with the present moment, there is the shadow of political events that influences personal history. You cannot necessarily draw a map that takes you from one domain to another but you can trace a filament of honesty in Roethke’s poem that matters enormously and that speaks to the public situation, even as the public space is so weirdly expanded yet attenuated in the cyberspace era.

For me the key line in the poem is the very first one: “In a dark time, the eye begins to see.” He goes on (the line ends with a comma not a period) but I want to stop there. No first-person, anecdotal narrator initiates the poem. Rather, we are plunged into the metaphor and then the impersonal statement. We are told we are beginning and what might be taken for granted about eyes is not to be taken for granted. Something is happening here, as Bob Dylan once put it. I think the crux of what is happening is the possibility of vision in the spiritual sense, the sense that goes beyond surface pretenses and daily habits, the sense that is attuned to mystery and suffering. The simple article indicates that there have been such times and, in all likelihood, there will be more. Such a time is not unusual but part of the human condition.

It is also an opportunity. The eye would not begin to see were the dark time not present. The darkness may not create vision but it makes it possible. If all is light, the eye rests in its accustomed role. We are thankful for that role but that role is not the sum of what vision can be. To be sure, the vision that stems from a dark time is not one we invite. It is more like one we would avoid. Not only can darkness be frightening but we don’t know how far the beginning of vision will extend. No guarantees exist for the vision that is attuned to darkness, or, rather, that starts to learn from darkness. Darkness can descend on anyone at any time and, in that regard, has nothing to do with which political party has the upper hand. As spiritual teachers and psychologists have stressed, we carry darkness around inside of us, whether it be fear or loathing or both. An era, however, that emphasizes dark feelings is truly a dark time. Any worthy gospel testifies to good news. A dark time testifies to bad attitudes that make for bad news. The cycle can feel unbreakable. The confines can feel prison-like. Spirit feels trapped and mocked. No exit.

Still, the opportunity that is the sheer breath of life is there and Roethke seizes that opportunity. A testifying, first-person narrator enters the poem in the second line. The poet has a claim here. He is “A lord of nature weeping to a tree.” Instinctively, he turns to nature and shows how equivocal his position is, at once a “lord,” yet one who is “weeping to a tree.” What one feels in the initial stanza is the situation that echoes Dante’s at the beginning of La Divina Commedia, finding himself in “shade” and an “echoing wood,” but the deep testimony that Roethke provides comes from the tenor of the language. I mean by this that Roethke is intent on giving us the depth of each word so as to sound the depth of the experience that the word contains. Nothing is casual or atmospheric or expedient. He wants the feeling that is profoundly actual, that proceeds by direct word after direct word—“shade,” “wood,” “tree,” “heron,” “wren,” “beasts,” “hill,” “serpents,” “den.” Physical as it is, the writing has the flavor of the allegorical. A reader could think of Milton but Roethke is writing in the mid-twentieth century. His search is for a way to convey the darkness so as to not cheapen or compromise it, to show the universality of his experience yet honor his own particularity—this stems from his life, much as Dante’s poem stemmed from Dante’s life.

The poem has adjectives but it is the nouns such as I pointed to in the previous paragraph that do the real work. As with Dante, the poem is a kind of summoning but also a reckoning and an encountering. The poet’s work is get within the vision that possesses him: “A night flowing with birds, a ragged moon, / And in broad day the midnight come again!” This darkness at noon is real and speaks to how Earth is a stage set of sorts for humankind. Given the nature of our distracted heads, it cannot be otherwise, but Earth is so much more than that. It is our teacher and Roethke is one of those poets who never forgot that, who never surrendered to the wiles of the overbearing declarative life, who continually remembered the other creatures with their other lives. His spiritual predicament is exactly that and, as a predicament, seeks to honor the polarities that illuminate and darken simultaneously: “Dark, dark my light.” It is this simultaneity that poetry is particularly good at and that Roethke trusts so implicitly. As a poet he must do the work in the poem. He must invite and accommodate the fullest extent of his feelings: “A steady storm of correspondences!”

Behind Roethke one feels the spiritual searching that distinguished Eliot and Yeats (including the latter’s Crazy Jane poems) but a searching played out in an American key, not in this poem in terms of the landscape (which he did in other poems) but in the starkness of the predicament. This cuts both ways: the stripped down nouns that speak to what cannot be contravened but also the exclamation marks that portray an insouciance that is the delightful sap of life. This seems a special gift on Roethke’s part, a restless humanity that accounts for the openness, the sheer porousness that led him into “a dark time.” Vatic armor does not suit him as, for instance, it suited Eliot, for better and for worse. When Roethke writes “I know the purity of pure despair,” I am wont to believe him.

In the United States we clearly are at one of those junctures where it is easy to dismiss poetry as the preening haplessness of “words, words, words” in the face of concerted viciousness. Poetry’s stature has been middling at most in this society. It probably peaked in the world of ballads, dialect, and moralism in the nineteenth century. Modernism has rarely been home spun. Its penchant for fragments, however representative of the shattered nature of modern times, has been hard to take to heart. It eschews those wholes that for many people are central to whatever faith keeps them moored to daily life. One can feel Roethke reaching for the whole of his experience and one can say that at moments he seems to be reaching too hard. The opposites tumble out like foreordained dice. Yet in a nation given to endless posturing about its virtue and a concomitant refusal to look at its behaviors, Roethke’s poem serves as a reminder that part of living in this world lies in facing dark times and not backing down from them, much less complaining. Something staunch is at work in his poem. Something we all need.

~~~~~

Copyright 2025 Baron Wormser

Baron Wormser’s many books include The History Hotel (CavanKerry 2023). Wormser founded the Frost Place Conference on Poetry and Teaching and also the Frost Place Seminar. He currently resides in Montpelier, Vermont, with his wife.