Theodore Roethke citations

Page 2

“Poetry is not a mere shuffling of dead words or even a corralling of live ones.”

“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”

“What we need are more people who specialize in the impossible.”

“Deep in their roots all flowers keep the light.”

“By daily dying, I have come to be.”

“May my silences become more accurate.”

“Art is the means we have of undoing the damage of haste. It's what everything else isn't.”

“The darkness has it's own light.”

“Over every mountain, there is a path, although it may not be seen from the valley.”

“What falls away is always. And is near.
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
I learn by going where I have to go.”

“In a dark time, the eye begins to see.”

“Pain wanders through my bones like a lost fire;
What burns me now? Desire, desire, desire.”

“So much of adolescence is an ill-defined dying,
An intolerable waiting,
A longing for another place and time,
Another condition.”

“I lose and find myself in the long water. I am gathered together once more.”

“The visible exhausts me. I am dissolved in shadow.”

“What's madness but nobility of soul at odds with circumstance?”

“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.”

“A mind too active is no mind at all.”

“I do not laugh; I do not cry;
I'm sweating out the will to die.

My past is sliding down the drain;
I soon will be myself again.”

“What falls away is always. And is near.”

“I have gone into the waste lonely places
Behind the eye.”

“I learned not to fear infinity,
The far field, the windy cliffs of forever,
The dying of time in the white light of tomorrow,
The wheel turning away from itself,
The sprawl of the wave,
The on-coming water.”

“Nothing would sleep in that cellar, dank as a ditch”

“The light comes brighter from the east; the caw
Of restive crows is sharper on the ear.”

“I take this cadence from a man named Yeats:
I take it and I give it back again:
For other tunes and other wanton beats
Have tossed my heart and fiddled through my brain.
Yes, I was dancing mad, and how
That came to be the bears and Yeats would know.”

“The salt said, look by the sea,
Your tears are not enough praise,
You will find no comfort here,
In the kingdom of bang and blab.”

“Let others probe the mystery if they can.
Time-harried prisoners of Shall and Will —
The right thing happens to the happy man.”

“The moon draws back its waters from the shore.
By the lake's edge, I see a silver swan,
And she is what I would. In this light air,
Lost opposites bend down —
Sing of that nothing of which all is made,
Or listen into silence, like a god.”