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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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Theodore Roethke
Age: 55 †
Born: 1908
Born: May 25
Died: 1963
Died: August 1
Poet
Teacher
Writer
Saginaw
Michigan
Came
Rivers
Water
Stones
Ears
Sang
Rain
Veins
Summer
Waters
Early
Ran
Joy
Streams
Knew
River
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Pain wanders through my bones like a lost fire
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I lose and find myself in the long water. I am gathered together once more.
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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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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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By daily dying, I have come to be.
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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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How terrible the need for God.
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Reason? That dreary shed, that hutch for grubby schoolboys.
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All lovers live by longing, and endure: Summon a vision and declare it pure.
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The poet: would rather eat a heart than a hambone.
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How body from spirit slowly does unwind, until we are pure spirit at the end.
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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 visible exhausts me. I am dissolved in shadow.
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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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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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Nothing would give up life: Even the dirt keeps breathing a small breath.
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What falls away is always. And is near.
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The living all assemble! What's the cue?-- Do what the clumsy partner wants to do!
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