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How terrible the need for God.

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
Need
Needs
God
Terrible

More quotes by Theodore Roethke

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The visible exhausts me. I am dissolved in shadow.
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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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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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I am overwhelmed by the beautiful disorder of poetry, the eternal virginity of words.
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And I walked, I walked through the light air I moved with the morning.
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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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Pain wanders through my bones like a lost fire
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Being, not doing, is my first joy.
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I have gone into the waste lonely places
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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 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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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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By daily dying, I have come to be.
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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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Fear was my father, Father Fear. His look drained the stones.
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What is madness but nobility of soul at odds with circumstance?
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The poet: would rather eat a heart than a hambone.
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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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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.
Theodore Roethke