Theodore Roethke Quotes

Deep in their roots all flowers keep the light.

"The Dream"

I met her as a blossom on a stem
Before she ever breathed, and in that dream
The mind remembers from a deeper sleep:
Eye learned from eye, cold lip from sensual lip.
My dream divided on a point of fire;
Light hardened on the water where we were;
A bird sang low; the moonlight sifted in;
The water rippled, and she rippled on.

She came toward me in the flowing air,
A shape of change, encircled by its fire.
I watched her there, between me and the moon;
The bushes and the stones danced on and on;
I touched her shadow when the light delayed;
I turned my face away, and yet she stayed.
A bird sang from the center of a tree;
She loved the wind because the wind loved me.

Love is not love until love’s vulnerable.
She slowed to sigh, in that long interval.
A small bird flew in circles where we stood;
The deer came down, out of the dappled wood.
All who remember, doubt. Who calls that strange?
I tossed a stone, and listened to its plunge.
She knew the grammar of least motion, she
Lent me one virtue, and I live thereby.

She held her body steady in the wind;
Our shadows met, and slowly swung around;
She turned the field into a glittering sea;
I played in flame and water like a boy
And I swayed out beyond the white seafoam;
Like a wet log, I sang within a flame.
In that last while, eternity’s confine,

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

I saw the separateness of all things!
My heart lifted up with the great grasses;
The weeds believed me, and the nesting birds.

It’s your privilege to find me incomprehensible. I gave you my minutes; let them remain ours. I hope I haunt you.

Oh, to be something else, yet still to be!

How body from spirit slowly does unwind, until we are pure spirit at the end.

Be sure that whatever you are is you.

(Dreams drain the spirit if we dream too long.)

"سمعتُ ما قاله رجل يحتضر
لعائلته المحتشدة حوله،
" روحي معلقة في الخارج حتى تجف
مثل جلد طازجٍ مملّح
أشك في أنني سأستعملها ثانية

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

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

Necessity starves on the stoop of invention.

Light takes the Tree; but who can tell us how? The lowly worm climbs up a winding stair; I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.

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.