Theodore Roethke Quotes

I knew a woman, lovely in her bones, When small birds sighed, she would sigh back at them; Ah, when she moved, she moved more ways than one: The shapes a bright container can contain!

Great Nature has another thing to do To you and me; so take the lively air, And, lovely, learn by going where to go.

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

I know the purity of pure despair,
My shadow pinned against a sweating wall.
That place among the rocks — is it a cave,
Or winding path? The edge is what I have. — Theodore Roethke, from “In a Dark Time,” The Collected Poems of Theodore Roethke. (Anchor Books January 10, 1975) Originally published 1961.

I feel her presence in the common day,
In that slow dark that widens every eye.
She moves as water moves, and comes to me,
Stayed by what was, and pulled by what would be. — Theodore Roethke, from “She,” Words for the Wind: The Collected Verse of Theodore Roethke (Indiana University Press, 1964)

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

(I measure time by how a body sways.)

The wasp waits.
The edge cannot eat the center.
The grape listens.
The path tells little to the serpent.
An eye comes out of the wave.
The journey from flesh is longest.
A rose sways least.
The redeemer comes a dark way.

الرجل يرى وهو يحتضر
احتمالات الموت
قلبي يتأرجح مع العالم
وقد صرتُ ذلك الشيء الأخير
رجلٌ يتعلم الغناء

في أزمنة الظلام، تبدأ العينُ بالرؤية

Perhaps no person can be a poet, or even can enjoy poetry, without a certain unsoundness of mind.

Money money money
Water water water

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

In a dark time, the eye begins to see,
I meet my shadow in the deepening shade;
I hear my echo in the echoing wood — A lord of nature weeping to a tree.
I live between the heron and the wren,
Beasts of the hill and serpents of the den.

What's madness but nobility of soul
At odds with circumstance? The day's on fire!
I know the purity of pure despair,
My shadow pinned against a sweating wall.
That place among the rocks — is it a cave,
Or winding path? The edge is what I have.

A steady storm of correspondences!
A night flowing with birds, a ragged moon,
And in broad day the midnight comes again!
A man goes far to find out what he is — Death of the self in a long, tearless night,
All natural shapes blazing unnatural light.

Dark, dark my light, and darker my desire.
My soul, like some heat-maddened summer fly,
Keeps buzzing at the sill. Which I is I?
A fallen man, I climb out of my fear.
The mind enters itself, and God the mind,
And one is One, free in the tearing wind.

The Surly One

1
When true love broke my heart in half,
I took the whisky from the shelf,
And told my neighbors when to laugh.
I keep a dog, and bark myself.

2
Ghost cries out to ghost –
But who’s afraid of that?
I fear those shadows most
That start from my own feet.