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In A Dark Night

 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 stream 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.
                           -- Theodore Roethke