The poem
Indelicate is he who loathes The aspect of his fleshy clothes, -- The flying fabric stitched on bone, The vesture of the skeleton, The garment neither fur nor hair, The cloak of evil and despair, The veil long violated by Caresses of the hand and eye. Yet such is my unseemliness: I hate my epidermal dress, The savage blood's obscenity, The rags of my anatomy, And willingly would I dispense With false accouterments of sense, To sleep immodestly, a most Incarnadine and carnal ghost.
As a teacher, I want adolescents to see this poem. It speaks to the identity crisis, and especially to those who have eating/cutting disorders, as it seems to me. I only don't like the word "carnal" at the end--it carries a kind of "sinner" connotation--though I do like incarnadine (a word I've only seen in Macbeth--Roethke's probably the first one to use it since Shakespeare).
this is a very good poem that touches on the subject of self-loathing. Theodore Roethke was really in touch with these kinds of things because of his illness...