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How body from spirit slowly does unwind, until we are pure spirit at the end.
Theodore Roethke
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Theodore Roethke
Age: 55 †
Born: 1908
Born: May 25
Died: 1963
Died: August 1
Poet
Teacher
Writer
Saginaw
Michigan
Pure
Spirit
Ends
Doe
Body
Unwind
Slowly
More quotes by Theodore Roethke
You must believe: a poem is a holy thing - a good poem, that is. The poem, even a short time after being written, seems no miracle unwritten, it seems something beyond the capacity of the gods.
Theodore Roethke
In this place of light: he dares to live Who stops being a bird, yet beats his wings Against the immense immeasurable emptiness of things.
Theodore Roethke
Nothing would give up life: Even the dirt keeps breathing a small breath.
Theodore Roethke
By daily dying, I have come to be.
Theodore Roethke
Death was not. I lived in a simple drowse:Hands and hair moved through a dream of wakening blossoms.Rain sweetened the cave and the dove still calledThe flowers leaned on themselves, the flowers in hollowsAnd love, love sang toward.
Theodore Roethke
The stones were sharp, The wind came at my back Walking along the highway, Mincing like a cat.
Theodore Roethke
And soon a branch, part of a hidden scene,The leafy mind, that long was tightly furled,Will turn its private substance into green,And young shoots spread upon our inner world.
Theodore Roethke
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.
Theodore Roethke
A terrible violence of creation,A flash into the burning heart of the abominableYet if we wait, unafraid, beyond the fearful instant,The burning lake turns into a forest pool,The fire subsides into rings of water,A sunlit silence.
Theodore Roethke
The living all assemble! What's the cue?-- Do what the clumsy partner wants to do!
Theodore Roethke
Reason? That dreary shed, that hutch for grubby schoolboys.
Theodore Roethke
How terrible the need for God.
Theodore Roethke
What falls away is always. And is near.
Theodore Roethke
I am overwhelmed by the beautiful disorder of poetry, the eternal virginity of words.
Theodore Roethke
I came to love, I came into my own.
Theodore Roethke
Art is our defense against hysteria and death.
Theodore Roethke
The indignity of it!- With everything blooming above me, Lilies, pale-pink cyclamen, roses, Whole fields lovely and inviolate,- Me down in the fetor of weeds, Crawling on all fours, Alive, in a slippery grave.
Theodore Roethke
The self says, I am The heart says, I am less The spirit says, you are Nothing.
Theodore Roethke
What's important? That which is dug out of books, or out of the guts?
Theodore Roethke
So much of adolescence is an ill-defined dying, An intolerable waiting, A longing for another place and time, Another condition.
Theodore Roethke