greatpoetry | Entries tagged with theodore roethke

duathir.livejournal.com

Snake

I saw a young snake glide
Out of the mottled shade
And hang, limp on a stone:
A thin mouth, and a tongue
Stayed, in the still air.

It turned; it drew away;
Its shadow bent in half;
It quickened and was gone

I felt my slow blood warm.
I longed to be that thing.
The pure, sensuous form.

And I may be, some time.

by Theodore Roethke

duathir.livejournal.com

The Meadow Mouse

1

In a shoe box stuffed in an old nylon stocking
Sleeps the baby mouse I found in the meadow,
Where he trembled and shook beneath a stick
Till I caught him up by the tail and brought him in,
Cradled in my hand,
A little quaker, the whole body of him trembling,
His absurd whiskers sticking out like a cartoon-mouse,
His feet like small leaves,
Little lizard-feet,
Whitish and spread wide when he tried to struggle away,
Wriggling like a minuscule puppy.

Now he's eaten his three kinds of cheese and drunk from his
bottle-cap watering-trough--
So much he just lies in one corner,
His tail curled under him, his belly big
As his head; his bat-like ears
Twitching, tilting toward the least sound.

Do I imagine he no longer trembles
When I come close to him?
He seems no longer to tremble.

2

But this morning the shoe-box house on the back porch is empty.
Where has he gone, my meadow mouse,
My thumb of a child that nuzzled in my palm?--
To run under the hawk's wing,
Under the eye of the great owl watching from the elm-tree,
To live by courtesy of the shrike, the snake, the tom-cat.

I think of the nestling fallen into the deep grass,
The turtle gasping in the dusty rubble of the highway,
The paralytic stunned in the tub, and the water rising,--
All things innocent, hapless, forsaken.

by Theodore Roethke

susannah.livejournal.com

Elegy for Jane (My student, thrown by a horse)

By Theodore Roethke

I remember the neckcurls, limp and damp as tendrils;

And her quick look, a sidelong pickerel smile;

And how, once startled into talk, the light syllables leaped for her,

And she balanced in the delight of her thought,

A wren, happy, tail into the wind,

Her song trembling the twigs and small branches.

The shade sang with her;

The leaves, their whispers turned to kissing,

And the mould sang in the bleached valleys under the rose.

Oh, when she was sad, she cast herself down into such a pure depth,

Even a father could not find her:

Scraping her cheek against straw,

Stirring the clearest water.

My sparrow, you are not here,

Waiting like a fern, making a spiney shadow.

The sides of wet stones cannot console me,

Nor the moss, wound with the last light.

If only I could nudge you from this sleep,

My maimed darling, my skittery pigeon.

Over this damp grave I speak the words of my love:

I, with no rights in this matter,

Neither father nor lover.

punkinelf.livejournal.com

“Cuttings (Later)” by Theodore Roethke

This urge, wrestle, resurrection of dry sticks,
Cut stems struggling to put down feet,
What saint strained so much,
Rose on such lopped limbs to a new life?
I can hear, underground, that sucking and sobbing,
In my veins, in my bones I feel it—
The small waters seeping upward,
The tight grains parting at last.
When sprouts break out,
Slippery as fish,
I quail, lean to beginnings, sheath-wet.

elenbarathi.livejournal.com

The Meadow Mouse

1

In a shoe box stuffed in an old nylon stocking
Sleeps the baby mouse I found in the meadow,
Where he trembled and shook beneath a stick
Till I caught him up by the tail and brought him in,
Cradled in my hand,
A little quaker, the whole body of him trembling,
His absurd whiskers sticking out like a cartoon-mouse,
His feet like small leaves,
Little lizard-feet,
Whitish and spread wide when he tried to struggle away,
Wriggling like a minuscule puppy.

Now he's eaten his three kinds of cheese and drunk from his
bottle-cap watering-trough--
So much he just lies in one corner,
His tail curled under him, his belly big
As his head; his bat-like ears
Twitching, tilting toward the least sound.

Do I imagine he no longer trembles
When I come close to him?
He seems no longer to tremble.

2

But this morning the shoe-box house on the back porch is empty.
Where has he gone, my meadow mouse,
My thumb of a child that nuzzled in my palm?--
To run under the hawk's wing,
Under the eye of the great owl watching from the elm-tree,
To live by courtesy of the shrike, the snake, the tom-cat.

I think of the nestling fallen into the deep grass,
The turtle gasping in the dusty rubble of the highway,
The paralytic stunned in the tub, and the water rising,--
All things innocent, hapless, forsaken.

by Theodore Roethke

ravengirl.livejournal.com

In a dark time, the eye begins to see,
I meet my shadow in the deepening shade;
I hear my echo in the echoing wood--
A lord of nature weeping to a tree.
I live between the heron and the wren,
Beasts of the hill and serpents of the den.
What's madness but nobility of soul
At odds with circumstance? The day's on fire!
I know the purity of pure despair,
My shadow pinned against a sweating wall.
That place among the rocks--is it a cave,
Or a winding path? The edge is what I have.

A steady storm of correspondences!
A night flowing with birds, a ragged moon,
And in broad day the midnight come again!
A man goes far to find out what he is--
Death of the self in a long, tearless night,
All natural shapes blazing unnatural light.

Dark, dark my light, and darker my desire.
My soul, like some heat-maddened summer fly,
Keeps buzzing at the sill. Which I is I?
A fallen man, I climb out of my fear.
The mind enters itself, and God the mind,
And one is One, free in the tearing wind.

the-grynne.livejournal.com

RIVER INCIDENT

A shell arched under my toes,
Stirred up a whirl of silt
That riffled around my knees.
Whatever I owed to time
Slowed in my human form;
Sea water stood in my veins,
The elements I kept warm
Crumbled and flowed away,
And I knew I had been there before,
In that cold, granite slime,
In the dark, in the rolling water.

THEODORE ROETHKE

little-lady-d.livejournal.com

theodore roethke - epidermal macabre

Indelicate is he who loathes
The aspect of his fleshy clothes, --
The flying fabric stitched on bone,
The vesture of the skeleton,
The garment neither fur nor hair,
The cloak of evil and despair,
The veil long violated by
Caresses of the hand and eye.
Yet such is my unseemliness:
I hate my epidermal dress,
The savage blood's obscenity,
The rags of my anatomy,
And willingly would I dispense
With false accouterments of sense,
To sleep immodestly, a most
Incarnadine and carnal ghost.

praxilla (trans. by sherod santos) - adonis in the underworld

Of all the pleasures in the upper world,
what I miss most is sunlight,
after that the stars, a full moon, summer's
late season harvest of fruits,
cucumber, apple, pomengranate, pear.

Current Mood: thoughtful

the-grynne.livejournal.com

SHE

I think the dead are tender. Shall we kiss?--
My lady laughs, delighting in what is.
If she but sighs, a bird puts out its tongue.
She makes space lonely with a lovely song.
She lilts a low soft language, and I hear
Down long sea-chambers of the inner ear.

We sing together; we sing mouth to mouth.
The garden is a river flowing south.
She cries out loud the soul's own secret joy;
She dances, and the ground bears her away.
She knows the speech of light, and makes it plain
A lively thing can come to life again.

I feel her presence in the common day,
In that slow dark that widens every eye.
She moves as water moves, and comes to me,
Stayed by what was, and pulled by what would be.

THEODORE ROETHKE

the-grynne.livejournal.com

from THE SHAPE OF THE FIRE

Where’s the eye?

The eye’s in the sty.

The ear’s not here

Beneath the hair.

When I took off my clothes

To find a nose,

There was only one shoe

For the waltz of To,

The pinch of Where.

Time for the flat-headed man. I recognize that listener,

Him with the platitudes and rubber doughnuts,

Melting at the knees, a varicose horror.

Hello, hello. My nerves knew you, dear boy.

Have you come to unhinge my shadow?

Last night I slept in the pits of a tongue.

The silver fish ran in and out of my special bindings;

I grew tired of the ritual of names and the assistant keeper of the

mollusks:

Up over a viaduct I came, to the snakes and sticks of another winter,

A two-legged dog hunting a new horizon of howls.

The wind sharpened itself on a rock;

A voice sang:

Pleasure on ground

Has no sound,

Easily maddens

( The uneasy man )

spence137.livejournal.com

The Waking
by Theodore Roethke

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.

We think by feeling. What is there to know?
I hear my being dance from ear to ear.
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.

Of those so close beside me, which are you?
God bless the Ground! I shall walk softly there,
And learn by going where I have to go.

Light takes the Tree; but who can tell us how?
The lowly worm climbs up a winding stair;
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.

Great Nature has another thing to do
To you and me, so take the lively air,
And, lovely, learn by going where to go.

This shaking keeps me steady. I should know.
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.

consonantia.livejournal.com

SILENCE

There is a noise within the brow
That pulses undiminished now
In accents measured by the blood.
It breaks upon my solitude --
A hammer on the crystal walls
Of sense at rapid intervals.
It is the unmelodic ring
Before the breaking of a string,
The wheels of circumstance that grind
So terribly within the mind,
The spirit crying in a cage
To build a complement to rage,
Confusion's core set deep within
A furious, dissembling din.

If I should ever seek relief
From that monotony of grief,
The tight nerves leading to the throat
Would not release one riven note:
What shakes my soul to disrepair
Shall never touch another ear.

-- Theodore Roethke

projectmatt.livejournal.com

this poem gets me every time.

My Papa's Waltz

The whiskey on your breath
Could make a small boy dizzy;
But I hung on like death:
Such waltzing was not easy.

We romped until the pans
Slid from the kitchen shelf;
My mother's countenance
Could not unfrown itself.

The hand that held my wrist
Was battered on one knuckle;
At every step you missed
My right ear scraped a buckle.

You beat time on my head
With a palm caked hard by dirt,
Then waltzed me off to bed
Still clinging to your shirt.

Theodore Roethke

sideway.livejournal.com

Day after somber day,
I think my neighbors strange;
In hell there is no change.
Where's my eternity
of inward blessedness?
I lack plain tenderness.

Where is the knowledge that
could bring me to my God?
Not on this dusty road
or afternoon of light
diminished by the haze
of late November days.

I lived with deep roots once:
Have I forgotten their ways--
the gradual embrace
of lichen around stones?
Death is a deeper sleep,
and I delight in sleep.

I feel dumb, because I copied this into my journal a few years ago without thinking to write down the title. No amount of googling can help me. Woe!

notyourbroom.livejournal.com

From the fourth section, proceeding to the end.

I believe! I believe!--
In the sparrow, happy on gravel;
In the winter-wasp, pulsing its wings in the sunlight;
I have been somewhere else; I remember the sea-faced uncles.
I hear, clearly, the heart of another singing,
Lighter than bells, softer than water.

Wherefore, O birds and small fish, surround me.
Lave me, ultimate waters.
The dark showed me a face.
My ghosts are all gay.
The light becomes me.

Also, a quick ( question. )

okapi-4evr.livejournal.com

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.

We think by feeling. What is there to know?
I hear my being dance from ear to ear.
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.

Of those so close beside me, which are you?
God bless the Ground! I shall walk softly there,
And learn by going where I have to go.

Light takes the Tree; but who can tell us how?
The lowly worm climbs up a winding stair;
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.

Great Nature has another thing to do
To you and me; so take the lively air,
And, lovely, learn by going where to go.

This shaking keeps me steady. I should know.
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

moireach.livejournal.com

Wish For a Young Wife
Theodore Roethke

My lizard, my lively writher,
May your limbs never wither,
May the eyes in your face
Survive the green ice
Of envy's mean gaze;
May you live out your life
Without hate, without grief,
And your hair ever blaze,
In the sun, in the sun,
When I am undone,
When I am no one.

notyourbroom.livejournal.com

Theodore Roethke - "The Waking."

( But not the 'The Waking' you've read. )

// From The Lost Son and Other Poems, 1948. His later "The Waking" is in The Waking, 1953.

Edit: Looking through the archives, I see that the later-written "The Waking" has been posted four times in this community and his "My Papa's Waltz" has been posted thrice; in fact, out of fifteen spread-out postings of Roethke poems, eleven are just repostings of his well-known works. Perhaps I should continue injecting some lesser-known gems of his into the discourse.

penguinpunk.livejournal.com

To celebrate finding a collection of poetry for a $1.75 at a used bookstore.

Dolor
I have known the inexorable sadness of pencils,
Neat in their boxes, dolor of pad and paper-weight,
All the misery of manilla folders and mucilage,
Desolation in immaculate public places,
Lonely reception room, lavatory, switchboard,
The unalterable pathos of basin and pitcher,
Ritual of multigraph, paper-clip, comma,
Endless duplication of lives and objects.
And I have seen dust from the walls of institutions,
Finer than flour, alive, more dangerous than silica,
Sift, almost invisible, through long afternoons of tedium,
Dropping a fine film on nails and delicate eyebrows,
Glazing the pale hair, the duplicate gray standard faces.

Theodore Roethke

Current Music: wilco

notyourbroom.livejournal.com

No Bird

Now here is peace for one who knew
The secret heart of sound.
The ear so delicate and true
Is pressed to noiseless ground.

Slow swings the breeze above her head,
The grasses whitely stir;
But in this forest of the dead
No bird awakens her.

- Theodore Roethke, for Emily Dickinson

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I Eat Poetry

Entries tagged with theodore roethke

Theodore Roethke, 'Snake'

Theodore Roethke, 'The Meadow Mouse'

'ELEGY FOR JANE' by Theodore Roetkhe

“Cuttings (Later)” by Theodore Roethke

'The Meadow Mouse' by Theodore Roethke

In A Dark Time by Theodore Roethke

Theodore Roethke, "River Incident"

two poems (for contrast)

Theodore Roethke, "She"

Theodore Roethke, "The Shape of the Fire"

One of my all-time favorites:

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My Papa's Waltz - Theodore Roethke

Theodore Roethke

Praise to the End - Theodore Roethke

The Waking by Theodore Roethke

Wish For a Young Wife, Theodore Roethke

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some Roethke

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