Theodore Roethke

Theodore Roethke was born in Saginaw, Michigan (1908). Was influenced by psychological theories of Jung and Freud. He believed that when he opened up his private life, he was describing basic human nature. It took him ten years to publish his first book of poetry, Open House (1941). Thirteen years later he won the Pulitzer Prize for his collection The Waking (1954). Roethke battled bipolar disorder his entire life, and spent a lot of time in mental hospitals. But he said he used these periods of depression to gather material for his poetry, and many of his poems are about his own mental struggles.

Roethke said, "Art is the means we have of undoing the damage of haste. It's what everything else isn't."

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.