-
Annotated by:
- Aull, Felice
- Date of entry: Jan-30-1997
- Last revised: Jan-20-2010
Summary
This beautiful poem appears in a section called "Sequence, Sometimes Metaphysical." It is a penetrating rendering, at one and the same time, of "pure despair" and of transcendence; of the curse and simultaneous exaltation of heightened awareness; of the personal experience of "madness," "my shadow pinned against a sweating wall," "the edge is what I have," and of a more profound soul-searching that contemplates union with nature and with God: "I climb out of my fear / The mind enters itself, and God the mind, / And one is One, free in the tearing wind."
Miscellaneous
First published: 1964
Primary Source
The Collected Poems of Theodore Roethke
Publisher
Doubleday
Place Published
New York
Edition
1966
Commentary