Quote of the Day (Theodore Roethke, on a Landscape Wearing ‘An April Look’)

“Soon field and wood will wear an April look.
The frost be gone, for green is breaking now;
The ovenbird will match the vocal brook,
The young fruit swell upon the pear-tree bough.
 
“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.” —Pulitzer Prize-winning American poet Theodore Roethke (1908-1963), "My Papa's Waltz" (1942) from Collected Poems of Theodore Roethke (1961) 

Quote of the Day (Theodore Roethke, on How ‘I Rejoice in the Spring’)

“When from under the barn the cat brings a similar litter,—
Two yellow and black, and one that looks in between,—
Though it all happened before, I cannot grow bitter:
I rejoice in the spring, as though no spring ever had been.”— Pulitzer Prize-winning American poet Theodore Roethke (1908-1963), “Vernal Sentiment," in The Collected Poems of Theodore Roethke (1975)

I took the image accompanying this post two years ago, in the second week of April. We’re not quite at the point in the spring now, but we’re getting there.

Quote of the Day (Theodore Roethke, on an Arriving Storm)

“Then a crack of thunder, and the black rain runs over us, over
The flat-roofed houses, coming down in gusts, beating
The walls, the slatted windows, driving
The last watcher indoors, moving the cardplayers closer
To their cards, their anisette.”—Pulitzer Prize-winning American poet Theodore Roethke (1908-1963), from “The Storm,” in The Collected Poems of Theodore Roethke (1975)

Undoubtedly, something like the scenario that Roethke evokes will play out here in the Northeast in the next day or so as the remnants of Hurricane Ida blow through.

The image accompanying this post, “The Storm,” by American painter Edward Mitchell Bannister (1828–1901), was created in 1881 and now hangs in the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, DC.

Quote of the Day (Theodore Roethke, on Awakening)

“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.”—American poet Theodore Roethke (1908-1963), from “The Waking,” in Collected Poems of Theodore Roethke (1953)

Quote of the Day (Theodore Roethke, on Madness)

“What's madness but nobility of soul

At odds with circumstance?"—American poet Theodore Roethke (1908-1963), “In a Dark Time,” in The Collected Poems of Theodore Roethke (1963) 

Quote of the Day (Roethke)

“In a dark time, the eye begins to see.”—Theodore Roethke, “In a Dark Time”

(The Pulitzer Prize-winning poet died on this date, age 55, alone and floating face down in a swimming pool on the Bainbridge Island, Wash., estate of a pair of friends, only minutes after having prepared three mint juleps. Given Roethke’s prior history, many immediately suspected that alcohol contributed to his death, but the coroner decided it resulted from a coronary occlusion. The couple who owned the pool had it filled with soil the next day. Subsequently, it was converted to a Zen rock garden in memory of the poet.)