Theodore Roethke

By daily dying, I have come to be.

— Theodore Roethke

In spite of all the paraphernalia for keeping things together, how haphazard life is, and the judgments of time.

— Theodore Roethke

What is madness but nobility of the soul at odds with circumstance.

— Theodore Roethke

My secrets cry aloud. My love, with no disguise.

— Theodore Roethke

My truths are all foreknown, With nakedness my shield.

— Theodore Roethke

The light comes brighter from the east; the caw Of restive crows is sharper on the ear.

— Theodore Roethke

My own agonies, which I once thought comic, have become more terrible with the passing of time.

— Theodore Roethke

And soon a branch, part of a hidden scene,And young shoots spread upon our inner world.

— Theodore Roethke

Was it my time for writing poems about McCarthy or my time for sending out fresh salmon or the time of playing happy telephone or my time for dictating memoranda about what's wrong with America?... or my time for crying.

— Theodore Roethke

He loops in crazy figures half the night When mice with wings can wear a human face.

— Theodore Roethke

Those who are willing to be vulnerable move among mysteries.

— Theodore Roethke

This urge, wrestle, resurrection of dry sticks,Rose on such lopped limbs to a new life?

— Theodore Roethke

Nothing would sleep in that cellar, dank as a ditch

— Theodore Roethke

Nothing would give up life:Even the dirt kept breathing a small breath.

— Theodore Roethke

I always felt mean, jogging back over the logging road, As if I had committed, against the whole scheme of life, a desecration.

— Theodore Roethke

Like witches they flew along rows,They trellised the sun; they plotted for more than themselves.

— Theodore Roethke

The whiskey on your breathSuch waltzing was not easy.

— Theodore Roethke

Art is the means we have of undoing the damage of haste. It's what everything else isn't.

— Theodore Roethke

Over the gulfs of dreamDeep in the brain, far back.

— Theodore Roethke

I study the lives on a leaf: the littleSleepers, numb nudgers in cold dimensions.

— Theodore Roethke

At Woodlawn I Heard the dead cry: Toads brooding wells.

— Theodore Roethke

I shook the softening chalk of my bones,This is my hard time.

— Theodore Roethke

The salt said, look by the sea, In the kingdom of bang and blab.

— Theodore Roethke

Who stunned the dirt into noise?Nibble again, fish nerves.

— Theodore Roethke

Goodbye, goodbye, old stones, the time-order is going,I run, I run to the whistle of money.

— Theodore Roethke

The mind moved, not alone, Through the clear air, in the silence.

— Theodore Roethke

A lively understandable spiritWait.

— Theodore Roethke

I saw the separateness of all things!The weeds believed me, and the nesting birds.

— Theodore Roethke

The wind sharpened itself on a rock; A voice sang:

— Theodore Roethke

Mother of quartz, your words writhe into my ear. Renew the light, lewd whisper.

— Theodore Roethke

My Papa's Waltz:

— Theodore Roethke

The wasp waits.The redeemer comes a dark way.

— Theodore Roethke

Death was not. I lived in a simple drowse:And love, love sang toward.

— Theodore Roethke

To stare into the after-light, the glitter left on the lake's surface,To know that light falls and fills, often without our knowing.

— Theodore Roethke

I'll seek my own meekness.The nest denies.

— Theodore Roethke

Bless me and the maze I'm in!Hello, thingy spirit.

— Theodore Roethke

Beginnings start without shade,Behold, in the lout's eye, love.

— Theodore Roethke

I take this cadence from a man named Yeats:That came to be the bears and Yeats would know.

— Theodore Roethke

Dante attained the purgatorial hill,Summon a vision and declare it pure.

— Theodore Roethke

What's madness but nobility of soul

— Theodore Roethke

I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow. I learn by going where I have to go.

— Theodore Roethke

Light takes the Tree; but who can tell us how? I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.

— Theodore Roethke

Great Nature has another thing to do And, lovely, learn by going where to go.

— Theodore Roethke

This shaking keeps me steady. I should know. I learn by going where I have to go.

— Theodore Roethke

I knew a woman, lovely in her bones, The shapes a bright container can contain!

— Theodore Roethke

Let seed be grass, and grass turn into hay: (I measure time by how a body sways.)

— Theodore Roethke

The night wind rises. Does my father live?Love alters all. Unblood my instinct, love.

— Theodore Roethke

I lived with deep roots once:Of lichen around stones?

— Theodore Roethke

The moon draws back its waters from the shore.Or listen into silence, like a god.

— Theodore Roethke

How can I rest in the days of my slowness?I need an old crone's knowing.

— Theodore Roethke

I have gone into the waste lonely placesBehind the eye.

— Theodore Roethke

Too much reality can be a dazzle, a surfeit; Too close immediacy an exhaustion

— Theodore Roethke

A terrible violence of creation, A sunlit silence.

— Theodore Roethke

Being, not doing, is my first joy.

— Theodore Roethke

To whom does this terrace belong? —Older than I, or the cockroach.

— Theodore Roethke

Pain wanders through my bones like a lost fire;What burns me now? Desire, desire, desire.

— Theodore Roethke

I bleed my bones, their marrow to bestowUpon that God who knows what I would know.

— Theodore Roethke

Let others probe the mystery if they can. The right thing happens to the happy man.

— Theodore Roethke

God bless the roots! — Body and soul are one!The right thing happens to the happy man.

— Theodore Roethke

Poetry is not a mere shuffling of dead words or even a corralling of live ones. (p. 89)

— Theodore Roethke

In our age, if a boy or girl is untalented, the odds are in favor of their thinking they want to write. (p. 89)

— Theodore Roethke

There's an element of desperation in the insistence of the graduate student's respect for knowledge — as opposed to wisdom. (p. 95)

— Theodore Roethke

The poem, even a short time after being written, seems no miracle; unwritten, it seems something beyond the capacity of the gods.

— Theodore Roethke

Art is the means we have of undoing the damage of haste. It's what everything else isn't.

— Theodore Roethke

You can't make poetry simply by avoiding clichés.

— Theodore Roethke

There's a point where plainness is no longer a virtue, when it becomes excessively bald, wrenched.

— Theodore Roethke

You must believe: a poem is a holy thing — a good poem, that is.

— Theodore Roethke

Yet for this we travelledIn a country of bright stone.

— Theodore Roethke

What we need is more people who specialize in the impossible.

— Theodore Roethke

I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.

— Theodore Roethke