Quotes By Author: theodore roethke

“My Papa’s Waltz:The whiskey on your breathCould make a small boy dizzy;But I hung on like death:Such waltzing was not easy.We romped until the pansSlid from the kitchen shelf;My mother’s countenanceCould not unfrown itself.The hand that held my wristWas battered on one knuckle;At every step you missedMy right ear scraped a buckle.You beat time on my headWith a palm caked hard by dirt,Then waltzed me off to bedStill clinging to your shirt.”

“What’s madness but nobility of soulAt 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 winding path? The edge is what I have…………… Dark,dark my light, and darker my desire.My soul, like some heat-maddened summer fly,Keeps buzzing at the sill.~From “The Waking” by Theodore Roethke”

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

“I have gone into the waste lonely placesBehind the eye; the lost acres at the edge of smoky cities.What’s beyond never crumbles like an embankment,Explodes like a rose, or thrusts wings over the Caribbean.There are no pursuing forms, faces on walls:Only the motes of dust in the immaculate hallways,The darkness of falling hair, the warning from lint and spiders,The vines graying to a fine powder.There is no riven tree, or lamb dropped by an eagle.There are still times, morning and evening:The cerulean, high in the elm,Thin and insistent as a cicada,And the far phoebe, singing,The long plaintive notes floating down,Drifting through leaves, oak and maple,Or the whippoorwill, along the smoky ridges,A single bird calling and calling:A fume reminds me, drifting across wet gravel;A cold wind comes over stones;A flame, intense, visible,Plays over the dry pods,Runs fitfully along the stubble,Moves over the field,Without burning.In such times, lacking a god,I am still happy.”