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Reason? That dreary shed, that hutch for grubby schoolboys.

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
Reason
Hutch
Grubby
Schoolboys
Dreary
Shed

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We think by feeling. What is there to know?
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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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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 have gone into the waste lonely places
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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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Love is not love until love's vulnerable.
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Live in a perpetual great astonishment.
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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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Time marks us while we are marking time.
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The living all assemble! What's the cue?-- Do what the clumsy partner wants to do!
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I am overwhelmed by the beautiful disorder of poetry, the eternal virginity of words.
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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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In the kingdom of bang and blab.
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I came to love, I came into my own.
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When I go mad, I call my friends by phone: I am afraid they might think they're alone.
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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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I learn by going where I have to go.
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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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By daily dying, I have come to be.
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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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