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I have gone into the waste lonely places

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
Gone
Lonely
Waste
Places

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What is madness but nobility of soul at odds with circumstance?
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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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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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All lovers live by longing, and endure: Summon a vision and declare it pure.
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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.
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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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What falls away is always. And is near.
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In the kingdom of bang and blab.
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How body from spirit slowly does unwind, until we are pure spirit at the end.
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Being, not doing, is my first joy.
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Art is our defense against hysteria and death.
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We think by feeling. What is there to know?
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The visible exhausts me. I am dissolved in shadow.
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Pain wanders through my bones like a lost fire
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I came to love, I came into my own.
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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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The living all assemble! What's the cue?-- Do what the clumsy partner wants to do!
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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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And I walked, I walked through the light air I moved with the morning.
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I am overwhelmed by the beautiful disorder of poetry, the eternal virginity of words.
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