Memory

The power of memory and the nature of memory are underlying themes of “The Room.” The poem begins with a recollection that represents both active and repressed memory, a memory the speaker has pushed down into unconsciousness. “Through that window . . . I saw,” the speaker begins. He is recounting something that happened but that has remained in his memory only as a mythic image of “the struggle / Of darkness against darkness.” The work of the poem involves the speaker in freeing himself through the act of creation from the weight of the memory he has pushed down. In creating, he can experience the emotion attached to that buried memory. Even after succeeding, the speaker reminds himself not to forget either the grief he has experienced or the process of creation he has accomplished. “Remember,” he says to himself, “how chaos died / To shape the shining leaf.”

Repression

In “The...