dark passage

[Poetry’s] alleged obscurity is due not to its own nature, which is to enlighten, but to the darkness which it explores, and must explore: the dark of the soul herself and the dark of the mystery which envelops human existence.

—St-John Perse, essay entitled "On Poetry," translation by W.H. Auden, St. John Perse: Collected Poems (Princeton U. Press, 1971)