Theodore Roethke (1908 – 1963)
American poet who published several volumes of poetry characterized by their rhythm and natural imagery.
You must believe: a poem is a holy thing — a good poem, that is.
I always felt mean, jogging back over the logging road,
As if I had broken the natural order of things in that swampland;
Disturbed some rhythm, old and of vast importance,
By pulling off flesh from the living planet;
As if I had committed, against the whole scheme of life, a desecration.
There's a point where plainness is no longer a virtue, when it becomes excessively bald, wrenched.
Poetry is not a mere shuffling of dead words or even a corralling of live ones.
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.
Mother of quartz, your words writhe into my ear.
Renew the light, lewd whisper.
Being, not doing, is my first joy.
I study the lives on a leaf: the little
Sleepers, numb nudgers in cold dimensions.
God bless the roots! — Body and soul are one!
The small become the great, the great the small;
The right thing happens to the happy man.
I bleed my bones, their marrow to bestow
Upon that God who knows what I would know.
He loops in crazy figures half the night
Among the trees that face the corner light.
But when he brushes up against a screen,
We are afraid of what our eyes have seen:
For something is amiss or out of place
When mice with wings can wear a human face.
A lively understandable spirit
Once entertained you.
It will come again.
Be still.
Wait.
Art is the means we have of undoing the damage of haste. It's what everything else isn't.
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.
Dante attained the purgatorial hill,
Trembled at hidden virtue without flaw,
Shook with a mighty power beyond his will, —
Did Beatrice deny what Dante saw?
All lovers live by longing, and endure:
Summon a vision and declare it pure.
Voice, come out of the silence.
Say something.
Appear in the form of a spider
Or a moth beating the curtain.
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
I feel my fate in what I cannot fear.
I learn by going where I have to go.
My truths are all foreknown,
This anguish self-revealed.
I’m naked to the bone,
With nakedness my shield.
I saw the separateness of all things!
My heart lifted up with the great grasses;
The weeds believed me, and the nesting birds.
How can I rest in the days of my slowness?
I've become a strange piece of flesh,
Nervous and cold, bird-furtive, whiskery,
With a cheek soft as a hound's ear.
What's left is light as a seed;
I need an old crone's knowing.