In a dark time Essay

read and understanding poems is a creative process that goes on in while 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 input on the experience, and his essay is another attempt to record his mystical enlightenment. apiece 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 phrase A gentle humanness goes far to find out what he is that by is planetaryity universalizes and distances the speaker systems quest. His search is less for personal identity than it is for defining characteristics of the merciful condition-mans nature and the limits of his understanding. His mystical experience dissolves idiosyncrasies into ultimate concerns, yet we take care more of a union with the divine, a phase he saves for the closing curtain stanza.At the end of In a Dark Time, the speaker returns to the go-ahead paradox that natural darkness is actually a spiritual light, only when at present the paradox has a more agonizing relevance. Instead 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 origination 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 angiotensin converting enzyme beyond God, and what is more, identifying himself with the greater of the two. While he is not the final say-so on the meaning of In a Dark Time, Roethkes variation demands the close attention if only by the necessities of his art, he has lived with the poem long-life and more intimately than his readers.Reference Roethke, T. (1960). Roethke Colleted Poems. Do uble-day & Company, Inc.