Theodore Roethke Quotes

103 Sourced Quotes

At Woodlawn I heard the dead cry;
I was lulled by the slamming of iron,
A slow drip over stones,
Toads brooding in wells.
All the leaves stuck out their tongues;
I shook the softening chalk of my bones,
Saying,
Snail, snail, glister me forward,
Bird, soft-sigh me home.
Worm, be with me.
This is my hard time.

Theodore Roethke
This shaking keeps me steady. I should know.
What falls away is always. And is near.
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
I learn by going where I have to go.

Theodore Roethke
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.

Theodore Roethke
I see, in evening air,
How slowly dark comes down on what we do.

Theodore Roethke
Over the gulfs of dream
Flew a tremendous bird
Further and further away
Into a moonless black,
Deep in the brain, far back.

Theodore Roethke
To stare into the after-light, the glitter left on the lake's surface,
When the sun has fallen behind a wooded island;
To follow the drips sliding from a lifted oar
Held up, while the rower breathes, and the small boat drifts quietly shoreward;
To know that light falls and fills, often without our knowing.

Theodore Roethke
I always felt mean, jogging back over the logging road,
As if I had broken the natural order of things in that swampland;
Disturbed some rhythm, old and of vast importance,
By pulling off flesh from the living planet;
As if I had committed, against the whole scheme of life, a desecration.

Theodore Roethke
And I walked, I walked through the light air; I moved with the morning.

Theodore Roethke
The mind enters itself, and God the mind,
And one is One, free in the tearing wind.

Theodore Roethke
What's important? That which is dug out of books, or out of the guts?

Theodore Roethke
I can hear, underground, that sucking and sobbing, In my veins, in my bones I feel it,- The small water seeping upward, The tight grains parting at last. When sprouts break out, Slippery as fish, I quail, lean to beginnings, sheath-wet.

Theodore Roethke
Who rise from flesh to spirit know the fall:
The word outleaps the world, and light is all.

Theodore Roethke
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 upon a mountain slope, A scene beloved of bees; Silence of water above a sunken tree: The pure serene of memory of one man,- A ripple widening from a single stone Winding around the waters of the world.

Theodore Roethke