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Theodore Roethke Quotes
103 Sourced Quotes
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Teaching: one of the few professions that permit love.
Theodore Roethke
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The night wind rises. Does my father live?
Dark hangs upon the waters of the soul.
My flesh is breathing slower than a wall.
Love alters all. Unblood my instinct, love.
Theodore Roethke
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I came where the river Ran over stones; My ears knew An early joy. And all the waters Of all the streams Sang in my veins That summer day.
Theodore Roethke
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O who can be
Both moth and flame? The weak moth blundering by.
Whom do we love? I thought I knew the truth;
Of grief I died, but no one knew my death.
Theodore Roethke
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Long live the weeds that overwhelm
My narrow vegetable realm!
The bitter rock, the barren soil
That force the son of man to toil;
All things unholy, marred by curse,
The ugly of the universe.
Theodore Roethke
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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.
Theodore Roethke
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You must believe: a poem is a holy thing — a good poem, that is.
Theodore Roethke
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To whom does this terrace belong? —
With its limestone crumbling into fine greyish dust,
Its bevy of bees, and its wind-beaten rickety sun-chairs?
Not to me, but this lizard,
Older than I, or the cockroach.
Theodore Roethke
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Like witches they flew along rows,
Keeping creation at ease;
With a tendril for needle
They sewed up the air with a stem;
They teased out the seed that the cold kept asleep, —
All the coils, loops and whorls.
They trellised the sun; they plotted for more than themselves.
Theodore Roethke
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The light comes brighter from the east; the caw
Of restive crows is sharper on the ear.
Theodore Roethke
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I have gone into the waste lonely places
Behind the eye.
Theodore Roethke
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The wind sharpened itself on a rock;
A voice sang:
Pleasure on ground
Has no sound,
Easily maddens
The uneasy man.
Theodore Roethke
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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!
Theodore Roethke
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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.
Theodore Roethke
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Old men should be explorers? I'll be an Indian. Ogalala? Iroquois.
Theodore Roethke
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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
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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
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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
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I see, in evening air,
How slowly dark comes down on what we do.
Theodore Roethke
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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
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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
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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
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And I walked, I walked through the light air; I moved with the morning.
Theodore Roethke
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The mind enters itself, and God the mind,
And one is One, free in the tearing wind.
Theodore Roethke
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What's important? That which is dug out of books, or out of the guts?
Theodore Roethke
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Quote of the day
Now if the harvest is over, And the world cold, Give me the bonus of laughter, As I lose hold.
John Betjeman
Theodore Roethke
Wikipedia
Born:
May 25, 1908
Died:
August 1, 1963
(aged 55)
Bio:
Theodore Huebner Roethke was an American poet. He published several volumes of award-winning and critically acclaimed poetry. Roethke is regarded as one of the most accomplished and influential poets of his generation.
Known for:
The Waking
The Far Field
Words for the Wind (1958)
Collected poems
Most used words:
love
light
time
stones
dark
man
live
air
life
small
god
heart
dance
eye
desire
Theodore Roethke on Wikipedia
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