Wednesday, March 3, 2010

Theodore Roethke and Archetypes

Every now and again you find a poem that seems anachronistic or a very early precursor to a movement that takes shape later. Theodore Roethke's "Night Crow" is a good example: it seems so much like a Deep Image poem that it could be caught lurking in the Robert Bly section of the library:

When I saw that clumsy crow
Flap from a wasted tree,
A shape in the mind rose up:
Over the gulfs of dream
Flew a tremendous bird
Further and further away
Into a moonless black,
Deep in the brain, far back.

Roethke's poem examines a moment in which perception, cognition, and the attribution of meaning are all tangled up. The event itself, the crow lifting into flight, sparks a process in the imagination that seems to escape the conscious mind and burrow into the dark recesses of the unconscious: "A shape in the mind rose up." The poem relies on the associations of crows with doom and darkness. The vagueness of "a shape" fits with the collective unconscious in which crows are creatures of darkness. The ambiguity of movement is also operating on a very sophisticated level: the "tremendous bird" flies further away, and yet seems to be entering into the brain. Moving away and yet moving in. That situation describes the unconscious, which is somehow fundamental in terms of our drives, and yet it is the repressed, further away from the ego or our conscious selves. The speaker's experience allows sudden access to the unconscious rather than providing a careful and reflective consideration. This might be the sudden appearance of the Shadow, alien and yet familiar. The poem establishes threads of connection and spaces of distance at the same time, suggesting our complicated relation to the constructed self.

1 comment:

  1. thanks for this posting...I have an English Lit. class and this poem was driving me mad as to the meaning. Thanks so much!!!

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