A Modern Comparison

A Modern Comparison

Bob Dylan vs. Theodore Roethke

"I consider myself a poet first and a musician second. I live like a poet and I will die like a poet."

-Bob Dylan

In our Modern Culture, Theodore Roethke’s double may very well be Bob Dylan. In every sense but the physical, their lives and lyrics seem to parallel one another. Born in the midst of Roethke’s career, Dylan is an American singer, songwriter and yes, a poet. Like Roethke, Dylan was also born and raised in a small town in the rural Midwest, Duluth, Minnesota. At an early age Dylan’s father was stricken with polio and passed away. Dylan went on to college at the University of Minnesota, though his education was ended much sooner than Roethke’s, his successful career would carry Dylan even farther. Through the decades Dylan has continued to reinvent himself and his work much like Roethke and at the height of his career Dylan would also go on to received the distinguished Pultizer Prize for a "profound impact on popular music and American culture, marked by lyrical compositions of extraordinary poetic power." Dylan is truly the great, modern-day, American-poet that Roethke was for the two generations prior.

Compare/contrast Song to poem

I Want You

By Bob Dylan

The guilty undertaker sighs,

The lonesome organ grinder cries,

The silver saxophones say I should refuse you.

The cracked bells and washed-out horns

Blow into my face with scorn,

But it’s not that way,

I wasn’t born to lose you.

I want you, I want you,

I want you so bad,

Honey, I want you.

The drunken politician leaps

Upon the street where mothers

Weep

And the saviors, who are fast asleep,

They wait for you.

And I wait for them to interrupt

Me drinking from my broken cup

And ask me to

Open up the gate for you.

I want you, I want you,

I want you so bad,

Honey, I want you.

Now all my fathers, they’ve gone down

True love they’ve been without it.

But all their daughters put me down

Cause I don’t think about it.

Well, I return to the queen of spades

And talk with my chambermaid.

She knows that I’m not afraid

To look at her.

She is good to me

And there’s nothing she doesn’t see.

She knows where Id likes to be

But it doesn’t matter.

I want you, I want you,

I want you so bad,

Honey, I want you.

Now you’re dancing

Child with his Chinese suit,

He spoke to me, I took his flute.

No, I wasn’t very cute to him,

Was I?

But I did it, though, because he lied

Because he took you for a ride

And because time was on his side

And because I . . .

I want you, I want you,

I want you so bad,

Honey, I want you.

In a Dark Time

Theodore Roethke

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 storm 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.

In a Dark Time Vs. I Want You

The modern man is finds himself in a very odd place in society in current times. A man physically is made to build bridges and fight wars. But Bridges have been build and there are few wars left to fight. Due to this change the Modern man had to evolve into a creature that can provide for his family and live his life in peace. No matter how much Man evolved there is still a large part of him left in the Stone Age. The part when it comes to dealing with his emotions. Society tells man that he cannot talk about the way he feels. Love, Fear, and Longing are things that are taboo for the modern male to speak of.

In Both “I want you” and “In a Dark Time” there are blaring contradictions in the words and language used. Dylan talks about “ the guilty undertake sighs” and the “the lonesome organ grinder cries” and then he says that he want you. These blaring contradictions are present “In a Dark Time.” He says’ “in a dark time, the eye begins to see” and “I meet my shadow in the deepening shade” and then goes on to say talk about things like “the nobility of the soul.” These contradictions in both Roethke’s Poem and Dylan’s Songs are metaphors for how men are not allowed to talk about these emotions but they have them. How we need to guild or lives with a sub-conciseness thought that we are not allowed to talk about having.

Everything you every wanted to know about Theodore Reothke!