Theodore Roethke Quotes

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

We breathe in unison.
The outside dies within,
And she knows all I am. — Theodore Roethke, section 1 of “Memory,” The Collected Poems of Theodore Roethke (Doubleday, 1975)

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

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.

from “She

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.

Is there a wisdom in objects? Few objects praise the Lord.

I may look like a beer salesman, but I'm a poet.

What grace I have is enough.

By daily dying, I have come to be.

Brooding on God, I may become a man.

A lively understandable spirit
Once entertained you.
It will come again.
Be still.
Wait.

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!

Listen, love,
The fat lark sang in the field;
I touched the ground, the ground warmed by the killdeer,
The salt laughed and the stones;
The ferns had their ways, and the pulsing lizards,
And the new plants, still awkward in their soil,
The lovely diminutives.
I could watch! I could watch!
I saw the separateness of all things!
My heart lifted up with the great grasses;
The weeds believed me, and the nesting birds.
There were clouds making a rout of shapes crossing a windbreak
of cedars,
And a bee shaking drops from a rain-soaked honeysuckle.
The worms were delighted as wrens.
And I walked, I walked through the light air;
I moved with the morning.

My secrets cry aloud.
I have no need for tongue.
My heart keeps open house,
My doors are widely swung. An epic of the eyes My love, with no disguise.

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