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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
Body
Unwind
Slowly
Pure
Spirit
Ends
Doe

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Fear was my father, Father Fear. His look drained the stones.
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Who rise from flesh to spirit know the fall: The word outleaps the world, and light is all.
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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.
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The self says, I am The heart says, I am less The spirit says, you are Nothing.
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What is madness but nobility of soul at odds with circumstance?
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And I walked, I walked through the light air I moved with the morning.
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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 swamplandDisturbed some rhythm, old and of vast importance,By pulling off flesh from the living planetAs if I had committed, against the whole scheme of life, a desecration.
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Art is our defense against hysteria and death.
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What have I done, dear God, to deserve this perpetual feeling that I'm almost ready to begin something really new?
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I learn by going where I have to go.
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I am overwhelmed by the beautiful disorder of poetry, the eternal virginity of words.
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So much of adolescence is an ill-defined dying, An intolerable waiting, A longing for another place and time, Another condition.
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A too explicit elucidation in education destroys much of the pleasure of learning. There should be room for sly hinters, masters of suggestion.
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I wish I could find an event that meant as much as simple seeing.
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What falls away is always. And is near.
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Pain wanders through my bones like a lost fire
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All lovers live by longing, and endure: Summon a vision and declare it pure.
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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.
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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.
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We think by feeling. What is there to know?
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