Theodore Roethke Quotes
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To follow the drops sliding from a lifting oar, Head up, while the rower breathes, and the small boat drifts quietly shoreward.
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A mind too active is no mind at all.
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The indignity of it!- With everything blooming above me, Lilies, pale-pink cyclamen, roses, Whole fields lovely and inviolate,- Me down in the fetor of weeds, Crawling on all fours, Alive, in a slippery grave.
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I always felt mean, jogging back over the logging road,As if I had broken the natural order of things in that swampland;Disturbed some rhythm, old and of vast importance,By pulling off flesh from the living planet;As if I had committed, against the whole scheme of life, a desecration.
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Pain wanders through my bones like a lost fire
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What is desire?-- The impulse to make someone else complete? That woman would set sodden straw on fire.
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I am overwhelmed by the beautiful disorder of poetry, the eternal virginity of words.
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I have gone into the waste lonely places
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Art is the means we have of undoing the damage of haste. It's what everything else isn't.
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The body and the soul know how to play In that dark world where gods have lost their way.
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I wish I could find an event that meant as much as simple seeing.
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Too much reality can be a dazzle, a surfeit;Too close immediacy an exhaustion
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My Papa's Waltz: The whiskey on your breath Could make a small boy dizzy; But I hung on like death: Such waltzing was not easy. We romped until the pans Slid from the kitchen shelf; My mother's countenance Could not unfrown itself. The hand that held my wrist Was battered on one knuckle; At every step you missed My right ear scraped a buckle. You beat time on my head With a palm caked hard by dirt, Then waltzed me off to bed Still clinging to your shirt.
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I learned not to fear infinity, The far field, the windy cliffs of forever, The dying of time in the white light of tomorrow, The wheel turning away from itself, The sprawl of the wave, The on-coming water.
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The light comes brighter from the east; the cawOf restive crows is sharper on the ear.
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Fear was my father, Father Fear. His look drained the stones.
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What have I done, dear God, to deserve this perpetual feeling that I'm almost ready to begin something really new?
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I can hear, underground, that sucking and sobbing, In my veins, in my bones I feel it,- The small water seeping upward, The tight grains parting at last. When sprouts break out, Slippery as fish, I quail, lean to beginnings, sheath-wet.
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What falls away is always. And is near.
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Death was not. I lived in a simple drowse:Hands and hair moved through a dream of wakening blossoms.Rain sweetened the cave and the dove still called;The flowers leaned on themselves, the flowers in hollows;And love, love sang toward.
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Who rise from flesh to spirit know the fall: The word outleaps the world, and light is all.
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How body from spirit slowly does unwind, until we are pure spirit at the end.
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I can't go on flying apart just for those who want the benefit of a few verbal kicks. My God, do you know what poems like that cost? They're not written vicariously: they come out of actual suffering, real madness.
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Teach as an old fishing guide takes out a beginner.
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How terrible the need for God.
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I bleed my bones, their marrow to bestowUpon that God who knows what I would know.
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The fields stretch out in long unbroken rows. We walk aware of what is far and close. Here distance is familiar as a friend. The feud we kept with space comes to an end.
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My truths are all foreknown,This anguish self-revealed.I'm naked to the bone,With nakedness my shield.
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And what a congress of stinks!- Roots ripe as old bait, Pulpy stems, rank, silo-rich, Leaf mold, manure, lime, piled against slippery planks, Nothing would give up life: Even the dirt kept breathing a small breath.
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Should we say the self, once perceived, becomes the soul?
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