Theodore Roethke Quotes

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

Was I the servant of a sovereign wish,
Or ladle rattling in an empty dish?

When you begin to get good, you’ll arouse the haters of life.

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

Your words are you. You are them and not much more. The Description: the fieldness of fields, the weediness of weeds… When is description mere? Never. A freshness in the seeing, an innocency in the vision, the angle of perception, the bringing together of details, not necessarily as metaphors, even, just as objects. Be one of those on whom, as Lawrence said, nothing is lost. Don’t strain for arrangement. Look and put it down and let your sensibility be the sieve.

The ruminant, reason, chews a poisoned cud.

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.

All finite things reveal infinitude:
The mountain with its singular bright shade
Like the blue shine on freshly frozen snow,
The after-light upon ice-burdened pines;
Odor of basswood on a mountain-slope,
A scent beloved of bees;
Silence of water above a sunken tree:
The pure serene of memory in one man, –
A ripple widening from a single stone
Winding around the waters of the world.

What shakes the eye but the invisible?

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)

Many astounds before, I lost my identity to a pebble;
The minnows love me, and the humped and spitting creatures.

A mind too active is no mind at all. — Infirmity

I think the dead are tender. Shall we kiss? —

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

Much of poetry is an anguished waiting.” — Theodore Roethke