Often I Am Permitted to Return to a Meadow

Robert Duncan creates the image of another world in is poem “Often I Am Permitted to Return to a Meadow”. The world is, “a scene made-up by the mind.” Here Duncan tells the reader that this world is “made-up” meaning it is an illusion of his own mind. However, he goes on to clarify the vision. Duncan continues, “that is not mine, but is a made place, / that is mine, it is so near to the heart.” Here Duncan clarifies that though this other world is made by the mind it does not belong to it. This separates the mind from what goes on inside it in the imagination. The alternate existence of a place made in his mind by another self, not the interacting with the world, conscious, physical me. Instead it is the I need to find a way to cope with the madness of the world and my own existential realization of myself as separate from the world and in which I am absolutely capable of dying – type of self.
The place is created by light as well as the mind. This shows the reader that the inner self conscious self is the light, or truth. Thus this truth of the metaphysical is seen in the individual as, “the shadows that are forms.” This escape from the physical is essential to the existential existence of humanity and Duncan even says that this illusion of the meadow of thought is, “ given property of the mind.” This striving by our selves for the metaphysical is “given” and may even provide the “certain bounds” which may “hold against chaos.