In a Dark Time
(Roethke)
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.
"What's madness but nobility of soul......"
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Zlatko Waterman
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- Location: Los Angeles, CA USA
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perezoso
Yass Ted R., a bit sweet at times, though not always, could surely scribe, though I am not always of one accord with his Kierkegaardian gloom or plath-like indulgences; in terms of technique and innovation, he's a better poet than about any yankee I can think of, except for maybe Frost...though I guess there are other obscure great american poets--like aiken....
even if we, weaned on beats and dylans, either thomas or bobby, take issue with his lapses into a lutheran type of melancholy he remains a master, and a stumbling block for poetasters
even if we, weaned on beats and dylans, either thomas or bobby, take issue with his lapses into a lutheran type of melancholy he remains a master, and a stumbling block for poetasters
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Zlatko Waterman
- Posts: 1631
- Joined: August 19th, 2004, 8:30 am
- Location: Los Angeles, CA USA
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In my post above, I recommend the friend, colleague, editor and lover of Theodore Roethke, Louise Bogan. Bogan is too infrequently read now. Roethke was a great champion of her verse, and with good reason. With Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop she is one of the great twentieth century women in poetry.
Not that "woman poet" defines her, not at all.
She was one of the great women writers who, like Eudora Welty and Flannery O'Connor, was a "feminist" without resorting to any political pedantry. She simply made powerful art without proclaiming her gender as a motive.
As rigorous as Dylan Thomas in choosing her final collection, "The Blue Estuaries", Bogan knew the difficulty of poetry and the importance of saying something clearly, finally and lyrically. For many years she was a poetry editor and reviewer at THE NEW YORKER.
The Crows
The woman who has grown old
And knows desire must die,
Yet turns to love again,
Hears the crows' cry.
She is a stem long hardened,
A weed that no scythe mows.
The heart's laughter will be to her
The crying of the crows,
Who slide in the air with the same voice
Over what yields not, and what yields,
Alike in spring, and when there is only bitter
Winter-burning in the fields.
--Louise Bogan
( I am aware I have recommended Louise Bogan before, but she makes such a marvelous pair with Ted Roethke-- as they did in life-- that I didn't want to miss another chance.)
To read more of, and about Louise Bogan, click here:
http://www.english.uiuc.edu/maps/poets/ ... /bogan.htm
Zlatko
Not that "woman poet" defines her, not at all.
She was one of the great women writers who, like Eudora Welty and Flannery O'Connor, was a "feminist" without resorting to any political pedantry. She simply made powerful art without proclaiming her gender as a motive.
As rigorous as Dylan Thomas in choosing her final collection, "The Blue Estuaries", Bogan knew the difficulty of poetry and the importance of saying something clearly, finally and lyrically. For many years she was a poetry editor and reviewer at THE NEW YORKER.
The Crows
The woman who has grown old
And knows desire must die,
Yet turns to love again,
Hears the crows' cry.
She is a stem long hardened,
A weed that no scythe mows.
The heart's laughter will be to her
The crying of the crows,
Who slide in the air with the same voice
Over what yields not, and what yields,
Alike in spring, and when there is only bitter
Winter-burning in the fields.
--Louise Bogan
( I am aware I have recommended Louise Bogan before, but she makes such a marvelous pair with Ted Roethke-- as they did in life-- that I didn't want to miss another chance.)
To read more of, and about Louise Bogan, click here:
http://www.english.uiuc.edu/maps/poets/ ... /bogan.htm
Zlatko
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tinkerjack
- Posts: 987
- Joined: May 20th, 2005, 7:27 pm
- Location: a graveyard in Poland if I was lucky
e-dog
If I had sixty five thousand dollars I would buy this for you. Then you could see her Roethke indulgence.
I guess you have not read Plath. It is more like she had Roethke indulgences than Roethke had Plath indulgences.what is a plath-like indulgence? specifically what oes she indulge in, and how is it roetke-similar?
If I had sixty five thousand dollars I would buy this for you. Then you could see her Roethke indulgence.
PLATH, Sylvia. The Colossus.
Poems. London: Heinemann (1960). First edition of Plath's first regularly published book.
Presentation copy, inscribed by Plath to the poet Theodore Roethke on the front free endpaper: "For Theodore Roethke with much love and immense admiration, Sylvia Plath, April 13, 1961". Theodore Roethke was the most important of Plath's literary influences, the mentor through whose example she found her own true voice. "
"Plath had begun reading the poetry of Theodore Roethke, whose poetry collection Words for the Wind contained a sequence of experimental poems in which he attempted to reproduce the imagery of mental breakdown. Roethke's poetry excited Plath to attempt a similar sequence of 'mad' poems. 'I have experienced love, sorrow, madness, and if I cannot make these experiences meaningful, no new experience will help me,' she mused in her journal. Roethke's example would show her how to use these experiences in her art, and 'be true to my own weirdness.' The result was 'Poem for a Birthday', which Ted Hughes admired very much and regarded as Plath's breakthrough into the subject of her mature style ... it was Roethke's artistic originality that stirred her to emulation. Roethke's poems contained no explanations; they presented an eddying flow of associations from which a reader could fetch themes but no reasons. Adopting Roethke's techniques, at Yaddo Plath experimented for the first time with finding subjective images for the experience of shock therapy.... Words poured from her during those six weeks: a third of the poems that made it into her first published book, The Colossus and Other Poems, were written at Yaddo." [Diane Middleton, Her Husband: Hughes and Plath - A Marriage, (N. Y.: Viking, 2003), pp. 109-110.] So influential was Roethke's poetry on Plath's mature poetry that when she submitted "Poem for a Birthday" to Poetry magazine, it was turned down because it displayed "too imposing a debt to Roethke."
Price: $65,000.00
http://www.jamessjafferarebooks.com/det ... cord=18792
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