Quote

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

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Theodore Roethke
Age: 55 †
Born: 1908
Born: May 25
Died: 1963
Died: August 1
Poet
Teacher
Writer
Saginaw
Michigan
Turns
Wait
Fearful
Water
Creation
Lakes
Heart
Beyond
Flash
Subsides
Terrible
Pool
Sunlit
Silence
Forests
Abominable
Violence
Rings
Unafraid
Fire
Instant
Lake
Waiting
Burning
Forest

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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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The poet: would rather eat a heart than a hambone.
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Art is our defense against hysteria and death.
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I lose and find myself in the long water. I am gathered together once more.
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Love is not love until love's vulnerable.
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The living all assemble! What's the cue?-- Do what the clumsy partner wants to do!
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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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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 stones were sharp, The wind came at my back Walking along the highway, Mincing like a cat.
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I have gone into the waste lonely places
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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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Who rise from flesh to spirit know the fall: The word outleaps the world, and light is all.
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A mind too active is no mind at all.
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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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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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Pain wanders through my bones like a lost fire
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And I walked, I walked through the light air I moved with the morning.
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Let others probe the mystery if they can.Time-harried prisoners of Shall and Will -The right thing happens to the happy man.
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The visible exhausts me. I am dissolved in shadow.
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