Quote

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

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Theodore Roethke
Age: 55 †
Born: 1908
Born: May 25
Died: 1963
Died: August 1
Poet
Teacher
Writer
Saginaw
Michigan
Alive
Pink
Fours
Everything
Weed
Indignity
Whole
Pale
Blooming
Grave
Crawling
Graves
Weeds
Lovely
Slippery
Rose
Lilies
Fields
Roses
Inviolate

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Love is not love until love's vulnerable.
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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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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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The living all assemble! What's the cue?-- Do what the clumsy partner wants to do!
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But when I breath with the birds, The spirit of wrath becomes the spirit of blessings, And the dead begin from their dark to sing in my sleep.
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The stones were sharp, The wind came at my back Walking along the highway, Mincing like a cat.
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The poet: would rather eat a heart than a hambone.
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By daily dying, I have come to be.
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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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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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What is madness but nobility of soul at odds with circumstance?
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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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The visible exhausts me. I am dissolved in shadow.
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Reason? That dreary shed, that hutch for grubby schoolboys.
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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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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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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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Art is our defense against hysteria and death.
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I came to love, I came into my own.
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Live in a perpetual great astonishment.
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