Lines 1-5

“The Room” begins with the speaker telling of a past struggle, which took place in a particular but unidentified room. As if pointing, he says, “Through that window . . . I saw the struggle”—a “struggle / Of darkness against darkness” in which the darkness “turned and turned” and “dived downward.” Everything besides the speaker and the window now is gone, “all else being extinct / Except itself [the window] and me.” No reason is given for the struggle or its origin, history, or circumstances.

The insight the speaker gains from seeing the struggle is that he “saw / How order might—if chaos wished—become”—that is, how order can come into being out of chaos. Chaos is depicted as having potential: order might come into existence “if chaos wished.”

Lines 6-11

In this section, the speaker traces the way chaos is transformed into order. He “saw the darkness crush...