Quotes from Theodore Roethke

Wish For A Young Wife My lizard, my lively writher May your limbs never wither May the eyes in your face Survive the green ice Of envy's mean gaze; May you live out your life Without hate, without grief, And your hair ever blaze, In the sun, in the sun, When I am undone, When I am no one.

from The Auction I left my home with unencumbered will And all the rubbish of confusion sold.

What we need is more people who specialize in the impossible.

The Mistake He left his pants upon a chair: She was a widow, so she said: But he was apprehended, bare, By one who rose up from the dead.

I learn by going where I have to go.

A fallen man, I climb out of my fear.

OPEN HOUSE 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. My truths are all foreknown, This anguish self-revealed. I'm naked to the bone, With nakedness my shield. Myself is what I wear: I keep the spirit spare. The anger will endure, The deed will speak the truth In language strict and pure. I stop the lying mouth: Rage warps my clearest cry To witless agony.

Who sighs from far away?

Oh, to be something else, yet still to be!

Am I reduced to the indignity of examples?

In a dark time, the eye begins to see

O my poor words, bear with me. — Theodore Roethke, Straw for the Fire: From the Notebooks of Theodore Roethke , ed. David Wagoner (Copper Canyon Press November 1, 2006)

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

Is pain a promise? I was schooled in pain, And found out all I could of all desire;

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.

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

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)

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

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

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

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.

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.

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