Theodore Roethke Quotes

I take this cadence from a man named Yeats:
I take it and I give it back again:
For other tunes and other wanton beats
Have tossed my heart and fiddled through my brain.
Yes, I was dancing mad, and how
That came to be the bears and Yeats would know.

She moves as water moves, and comes to me,
Stayed by what was, and pulled by what would be.

Snail, snail, glister me forward,
Bird, soft-sigh me home,
Worm, be with me.
This is my hard time.

Child On Top Of A Greenhouse

The wind billowing out the seat of my britches,
My feet crackling splinters of glass and dried putty,
The half-grown chrysanthemums staring up like accusers,
Up through the streaked glass, flashing with sunlight,
A few white clouds all rushing eastward,
A line of elms plunging and tossing like horses,
And everyone, everyone pointing up and shouting!

The grass says what the wind says:
Begin with the rock;
End with water.

I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.

So much of adolescence is an ill-defined dying,
An intolerable waiting,
A longing for another place and time,
Another condition.

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

All lovers live by longing, and endure:
Summon a vision and declare it pure.

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

And I dance with William Blake For love, for Love's sake; And everything comes to One,
As we dance on, dance on, dance on.

I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
I feel my fate in what I cannot fear.
I learn by going where I have to go.

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

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.

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