"The Room" by Conrad Aiken

Conrad Aiken was a poet and novelist of the mid 20th century. He published on a variety of topics, but much of his poetry is deeply introspective and psychoanalytic in content, and often musical in form and structure.

Key terms: metaphor, imagery, repetition

The Room

Through that window — all else being extinct
Except itself and me — I saw the struggle
Of darkness against darkness. Within the room
It turned and turned, dived downward. Then I saw
How order might — if chaos wished — become:
And saw the darkness crush upon itself,
Contracting powerfully; it was as if
It killed itself: slowly: and with much pain.
Pain. The scene was pain, and nothing but pain.
What else, when chaos draws all forces inward
To shape a single leaf? . . .

                                  For the leaf came,
Alone and shining in the empty room;
After a while the twig shot downward from it;
And from the twig a bough; and then the trunk,
Massive and coarse; and last the one black root.
The black root cracked the walls. Boughs burst the window:
The great tree took possession.

                                   Tree of trees!
Remember (when time comes) how chaos died
To shape the shining leaf. Then turn, have courage,
Wrap arms and roots together, be convulsed
With grief, and bring back chaos out of shape.
I will be watching then as I watch now.
I will praise darkness now, but then the leaf. 

This profound poem feels like a psychotic breakdown. The narrator is meditating on the pain and chaos caused by leaves and trees as he looks through the window... but at the same time, he's making fantastic observations and drawing some very significant (although disturbing) conclusions. After reading a bit about Aiken, I found that his father went mad when he was a boy and killed himself and Aiken's mother. While I can't be sure, it feels like this poem is a reflection on this: "The scene was pain, and nothing but pain. / What else, when chaos draws all forces inward / to shape a single leaf?" The paradox is that which exists between life and death, between living trees and dying leaves. The narrator thinks of the tree springing from the leaf, instead of the other way around, which seems to give him a sense of stability and reliance. There is, among the horror and chaos of death, an element of hope in the analogy: new leaves conquer the chaos year after year. 

http://www.poetryoutloud.org/poem/236962