Throwback Thursdays” at ClimbingSky feature posts I wrote over a 15 year period for various blogs. This was first posted on December 02, 2012.

The second day of December brings a foggy morning to the North Country. Out my back window only the black silhouettes of a few winter-bare trees and the nearest houses are visible. The rest of my small corner of the world is hidden behind veils of gray.

A recent note from my friend Mitch Stocks led me to pull a volume of Theodore Roethke off the shelf yesterday and flip through it. According to my usual note on the front cover, I purchased the volume and read it in early winter of 1983… while I was living in Chicago and studying theology by day and poetry by night.

Roethke as a teacher and a poet influenced some of my favorite poets – Richard Hugo and James Wright – who like Roethke also battled melancholy and depression. But for that, most poets do… maybe all.

On a gray morning, Roethke seems like just the thing.

Enjoy!

 

 

 

 

 

Listening with a pencil and my ear, these are the lines I marked:

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.

 

These lines bring quickly to mind Kierkegaard’s lines about poets that I quoted a few posts back at the beginning of a review of a James Wright poem: And people flock around the poet and say:  ‘May new sufferings torment your soul but your lips be fashioned as before, for the cry would only frighten us, but the music, that is blissful.”

These are the kind of lines that Kierkegaard had in mind. These are the kind of lines that you can carry with you on foggy days like this… and on those days when only you can see the gray fog that surrounds your little corner of the world.