Poetry Feature

In the Dark

The present is always dark.
--Mark Strand

We're still living in caves. Very still. Listening. When the lights go out, we listen hard, like we did during the big New York City Black-Out [25 hours: July 12, 1977]. That was a dark time. We thought it was the end of the world, as many did long before us during solar eclipses. Or every night. Who knew, with certainty, that the sun would come up the next morning?

That dark and light work on a quid pro quo or relative basis, just as we experience them, is evident already from the dictionary definition.

dark: without light; with very little light.

There is more. We've got "gloomy, cheerless, dismal"; "sullen, frowning"; "morally or spiritually blind"; "hard to understand, obscure"; "hidden, secret (a dark purpose)"; "silent, reticent." We've even got "the sound of back vowels," thus, the English 'i' is darker than French 'i'.

There is no mention of death, fear, insomnia, or of "romp[ing] with joy in the bookish dark" ("Eating Poetry" -- Mark Strand), though an array of metaphorical and allegorical meanings are covered.

We can go to the Bible, to philosophers or to poets for their take on the dark. We can go back to childhood or look at the now dark which may have no more heart than the harsh light.

The dark has not only cowed and comforted us; it has made us rebel: to wipe it out, control it--fire, torches, oil, candles, gas lanterns, electric bulbs, neon, night-vision goggles, obliterating the natural lights in our heavens.

True or not, but most of us would wager that the best poetry has been written at night--or, as Charles Lamb would qualify it, in his time, "by candlelight," perhaps the original source for "lucubration."

Coleridge's "Frost At Midnight," Keats's "Ode To A Nightingale," Stevens's "Sunday Morning," Roethke's "In A Dark Time," Byron's sci-fi poem "Darkness," Arnold's "Dover Beach," Strand's Darker, and many other poems we treasure, rely on the dark as a thematic and organizing principle.

The dark, a friend to insomniacs, has self-evident inspirational aspects, going back before Longinus. Schiller praises Goethe:

As long as you produce or work, you are
really in the dark; the light is in you alone.

Rilke offers another take:

Poverty is a great light from within.

The poems in this collection have no doubt been enriched by the tension of this compositional principle--without today's unpleasant and distorted view of Romanticism.

--NJ