Quote

So much of adolescence is an ill-defined dying, An intolerable waiting, A longing for another place and time, Another condition.

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
Defined
Dying
Conditions
Waiting
Intolerable
Another
Adolescence
Place
Ill
Much
Longing
Time
Condition

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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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What's important? That which is dug out of books, or out of the guts?
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How terrible the need for God.
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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.
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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.
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I have gone into the waste lonely places
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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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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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The visible exhausts me. I am dissolved in shadow.
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A mind too active is no mind at 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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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.
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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.
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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.
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Time marks us while we are marking time.
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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.
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We think by feeling. What is there to know?
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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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