Quotes from Theodore Roethke

In a dark time, the eye begins to see / I meet my shadow in the deepening shade...Dark, dark my light, and darker my desire.

Let others probe the mystery if they can.Time-harried prisoners of Shall and Will -The right thing happens to the happy man.

Beginnings start without shade,Thinner than minnows.The live grass whirls with the sun,Feet run over the simple stones,There's time enough.Behold, in the lout's eye, love.

I'm sure I've been a toad, one time or another. With bats, weasels, worms...I rejoice in the kinship. Even the caterpillar I can love, and the various vermin.

I lose and find myself in the long water. I am gathered together once more.

Love begets love. This torment is my joy.

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

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

I measure time by how a body sways.)

Nothing would give up life: Even the dirt keeps breathing a small breath.

I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.

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?

What is madness but nobility of the soul at odds with circumstance.

Self-contemplation is a curse That makes an old confusion worse.

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

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

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.

from I Knew a Woman 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!

I teach my sighs to lengthen into songs, Yet, like a tree, endure the shift of things.

The fields stretch out in long unbroken rows. We walk aware of what is far and close. Here distance is familiar as a friend. The feud we kept with space comes to an end.

I fear those shadows most that start from my own feet.

My father is a fish.

A house for wisdom, a field for revelation. Speak to the stars, and the stars answer. At first the visible obscures: Go where the light is.

Love alters all. Unblood my instinct, love.