“Snail, snail, glister me forward,
Bird, soft-sigh me home,
Worm, be with me.
This is my hard time.”
"The Lost Son," ll. 8-11
The Lost Son and Other Poems (1948)
Context: I shook the softening chalk of my bones,
Saying,
Snail, snail, glister me forward,
Bird, soft-sigh me home,
Worm, be with me.
This is my hard time.
“And everything comes to One,
As we dance on, dance on, dance on.”
Theodore Roethke book The Far Field
Once More, the Round," ll. 11-12
The Far Field (1964)
Context: p>And I dance with William Blake
For love, for Love's sake;And everything comes to One,
As we dance on, dance on, dance on.</p
The Lost Son, ll. 24 - 35
The Lost Son and Other Poems (1948)
"The Renewal," ll. 7-10
Words for the Wind (1958)
“Like witches they flew along rows,
Keeping creation at ease”
"Frau Bauman, Frau Schmidt, and Frau Schwartze," ll. 19-25
The Lost Son and Other Poems (1948)
Context: Like witches they flew along rows,
Keeping creation at ease;
With a tendril for needle
They sewed up the air with a stem;
They teased out the seed that the cold kept asleep, —
All the coils, loops and whorls.
They trellised the sun; they plotted for more than themselves.
"Unfold! Unfold!," ll. 59-64
Praise to the End! (1951)
“There's time enough.
Behold, in the lout's eye, love.”
"I Cry, Love! Love!," ll. 33-39
Praise to the End! (1951)
Context: Beginnings start without shade,
Thinner than minnows.
The live grass whirls with the sun,
Feet run over the simple stones,
There's time enough.
Behold, in the lout's eye, love.
“Ah, when she moved, she moved more ways than one:
The shapes a bright container can contain!”
"I Knew a Woman," ll. 1 - 4
Words for the Wind (1958)
Context: I knew a woman, lovely in her bones,
When small birds sighed, she would sigh back at them;
Ah, when she moved, she moved more ways than one:
The shapes a bright container can contain!
"I Knew a Woman," ll. 22-28
Words for the Wind (1958)
Context: Let seed be grass, and grass turn into hay:
I'm martyr to a motion not my own;
What's freedom for? To know eternity.
I swear she cast a shadow white as stone.
But who would count eternity in days?
These old bones live to learn her wanton ways:
(I measure time by how a body sways.)
Theodore Roethke book The Far Field
"The Abyss"
The Far Field (1964)
Context: A terrible violence of creation,
A flash into the burning heart of the abominable;
Yet 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.
"Open House," ll. 7 - 11
Open House (1941)
“Poetry is not a mere shuffling of dead words or even a corralling of live ones.”
Source: Poetry and Craft (1965), p. 89
"Frau Bauman, Frau Schmidt, and Frau Schwartze," ll. 19-25
The Lost Son and Other Poems (1948)
Context: Like witches they flew along rows,
Keeping creation at ease;
With a tendril for needle
They sewed up the air with a stem;
They teased out the seed that the cold kept asleep, —
All the coils, loops and whorls.
They trellised the sun; they plotted for more than themselves.
“Too much reality can be a dazzle, a surfeit;
Too close immediacy an exhaustion”
Theodore Roethke book The Far Field
"The Abyss"
The Far Field (1964)
“Art is the means we have of undoing the damage of haste. It's what everything else isn't.”
Poetry and Craft (1965)
Source: On Poetry and Craft: Selected Prose