In a dark time Essay

Reading and understanding poems is a creative impact that goes on in time and from line to line even as the poets creation does. In the poem Roethke tries to break through the barriers of rational language with paradoxes and short, seemingly unrelated statements. In a sense, Roethkes poem is also a commentary on the get wind, and his essay is another attempt to record his unfathomed enlightenment. Each expression in turn becomes its own experience for the writer. In a Dark Time, was a dictated poem, something scarcely mine at all.The allegorical nature of his spiritual journey is clear from the express A man goes far to find out what he is that by is generality universalizes and distances the speakers quest. His search is less for personal identity than it is for defining characteristics of the human condition-mans nature and the limits of his understanding. His mystical experience dissolves idiosyncrasies into ultimate concerns, yet we expect more of a union with the divine, a p hase he saves for the come through stanza.At the end of In a Dark Time, the speaker returns to the opening paradox that natural apparition is actually a spiritual light, but now the paradox has a more agonizing relevance. kinda of the general statement that In a dark time, the eye begins to see, he now confesses that Dark, dark/my light, and darker my desire. In mystical literature God remains the source of all light, although He may appear as darkness to mans limited mind.Roethke, in the poem, would be restoring the original power of the One beyond God, and what is more, identifying himself with the greater of the two. While he is not the final authority on the meaning of In a Dark Time, Roethkes interpretation demands the close attention if only by the necessities of his art, he has lived with the poem long-lived and more intimately than his readers.Reference Roethke, T. (1960). Roethke Colleted Poems. Double-day & Company, Inc.