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Quotes from The Lost Son and Other Poems — Theodore Roethke

1908–1963 United States

← All quotes by Theodore Roethke

21 quotes

Voice, come out of the silence.
Say something.

The Lost Son and Other Poems (1948)

To know that light falls and fills, often without our knowing.

The Lost Son and Other Poems (1948)

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.

The Lost Son and Other Poems (1948)

Nothing would give up life:
Even the dirt kept breathing a small breath.

The Lost Son and Other Poems (1948)

The mind moved, not alone,
Through the clear air, in the silence.

The Lost Son and Other Poems (1948)

I study the lives on a leaf: the little
Sleepers, numb nudgers in cold dimensions.

The Lost Son and Other Poems (1948)

A lively understandable spirit
Once entertained you.
It will come again.
Be still.
Wait.

The Lost Son and Other Poems (1948)

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.

The Lost Son and Other Poems (1948)

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

The Lost Son and Other Poems (1948)

Nothing would sleep in that cellar, dank as a ditch

The Lost Son and Other Poems (1948)

Mother of quartz, your words writhe into my ear.
Renew the light, lewd whisper.

The Lost Son and Other Poems (1948)

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?

The Lost Son and Other Poems (1948)

Goodbye, goodbye, old stones, the time-order is going,
I have married my hands to perpetual agitation,
I run, I run to the whistle of money.

The Lost Son and Other Poems (1948)

The wind sharpened itself on a rock;
A voice sang

The Lost Son and Other Poems (1948)

Over the gulfs of dream
Flew a tremendous bird
Further and further away
Into a moonless black,
Deep in the brain, far back.

The Lost Son and Other Poems (1948)

Death was not. I lived in a simple drowse:
Hands and hair moved through a dream of wakening blossoms.
Rain sweetened the cave and the dove still called;
The flowers leaned on themselves, the flowers in hollows;
And love, love sang toward.

The Lost Son and Other Poems (1948)

I saw the separateness of all things!
My heart lifted up with the great grasses;
The weeds believed me, and the nesting birds.

The Lost Son and Other Poems (1948)

Who stunned the dirt into noise?
Ask the mole, he knows.
I feel the slime of a wet nest.
Beware Mother Mildew.
Nibble again, fish nerves.

The Lost Son and Other Poems (1948)

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.

The Lost Son and Other Poems (1948)

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.

The Lost Son and Other Poems (1948)

Attribution

Quotes and notes from Wikiquote: Theodore Roethke (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0.