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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.
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
Turn
Hidden
Turns
Substance
Upon
Spread
Part
Inner
Leafy
Young
Private
Shoots
Long
Green
Tightly
Mind
Soon
Branch
World
Scene
Branches
More quotes by Theodore Roethke
The visible exhausts me. I am dissolved in shadow.
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I have gone into the waste lonely places
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Pain wanders through my bones like a lost fire
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We think by feeling. What is there to know?
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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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I am overwhelmed by the beautiful disorder of poetry, the eternal virginity of words.
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How body from spirit slowly does unwind, until we are pure spirit at the 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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What falls away is always. And is near.
Theodore Roethke
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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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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How terrible the need for God.
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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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When I go mad, I call my friends by phone: I am afraid they might think they're alone.
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What's important? That which is dug out of books, or out of the guts?
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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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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 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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Nothing would give up life: Even the dirt keeps breathing a small breath.
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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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