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            The Waking

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.

     -- Theodore Roethke

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               The Waking

I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
    When you "take your waking slow", you sacrifice
    the beauty of the language to the exigencies of versification.

I feel my fate in what I cannot fear.
    How is it, you "cannot fear"?
    Is it courage, blindness, denial or ignorance
    that protects you from fear?

I learn by going where I have to go.
    Why will you not anticipate where you're going?
    Is it because you're myopic,
    is it because you can't think,
    because you don't want to think,
    or because you feel not thinking is a virtue?


We think by feeling. What is there to know?
    Feeling is NOT thinking. Thought and feeling are distinct,
    different, and, to some extent mutually exclusive.
    What is there to know? Everything, knowledge is the
    very essence of intellectual existence.
    Most important: to know oneself.
    Refusal to know, inability to know, is a deficiency of mind,
    a mental defect, the result of brain injury or genetic disorder,
    surely to be lamented and be mourned,
    but just as surely not to be celebrated.

I hear my being dance from ear to ear.
    Or, as the popular saying has it:
    In one ear and out the other,
    with nothing between the ears.

I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.


Of those so close beside me, which are you?
    Don't know; don't know myself, don't know my friends,
    don't know my loved ones, don't know a thing;
    just feel my way along, like the worm.

God bless the Ground! I shall walk softly there,
    Obviously, that's where the lowly worm lives.
And learn by going where I have to go.

Light takes the Tree; but who can tell us how?
    The end of language is its disintegration into words
    that are meaningless. When language has lost its meaning
    no one can tell anyone anything.
The lowly worm climbs up a winding stair;
    Worms can't climb stairs; mindless human beings
    may act like worms in other ways but still be able
    to climb stairs.
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,
    It's too late. Worm status is irreversible.
And, lovely, learn by going where to go.
    - - As worms do. Presumably worms have no
    plan, no thought no reason, but just inch ahead.

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.

     -- Theodore Roethke


     When you suggest a poem for me to read, it's as if you
introduced a friend, or at minimum, an acquaintance to me;
and I feel obligated to be friendly and well disposed to the
poem as I would be to a person.  You know my dictum that
understanding precludes dislike.  In the case of Roethke's
poem, that understanding requires some effort.

     I don't dislike Roethke's poem; I surely don't dislike
Roethke.  But, judging from this poem, we are different: very
different.  I try to live by reason, by reflection; and mind
(nous) is the center of my universe.  Reason is the music of
concepts (Begriffe), and concepts in turn are related to
words, as objects are related to their shadows.  Language is
inseparable from thought.  When Roethke disparages thought,
he disparages language: and it shows in the poverty of his
vocabulary.  Poetry is language; to presume to write poetry
by feeling only, devoid of thought leads to such lines as:

"Light takes the Tree; but who can tell us how?"

          ==============================
          ==============================

             Dover Beach

The sea is calm to-night.
The tide is full, the moon lies fair
Upon the straits; -on the French coast the light
Gleams and is gone; the cliffs of England stand,
Glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay.
Come to the window, sweet is the night air!
Only, from the long line of spray
Where the sea meets the moon-blanch'd land,
Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling,
At their return, up the high strand,
Begin, and cease, and then again begin,
With tremulous cadence slow, and bring
The eternal note of sadness in.

> This is an account of endogenous sadness
> which is appropriately mirrored in the
> nocturnal seascape.

Sophocles long ago
Heard it on the Aegean, and it brought
Into his mind the turbid ebb and flow
Of human misery;

> As I said previously, the maritime quotations from
> Sophocles cited by Web commentators make no reference
> to sad tranquillity, but invariably cite storm and
> tempest that destroys human existence.

                  we
Find also in the sound a thought,
Hearing it by this distant northern sea.
The Sea of Faith
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth's shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furl'd.
But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
Retreating, to the breath
Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world.

> I interpret the ebbing of the Sea of Faith as
> a poetic conceit expressive of the Romantic affection for the past.
> I don't know enough about Matthew Arnold to venture even a guess
> to what extent, if any, the Sea of Faith is symbolic of the secure
> tranquillity of the poet's childhood. The description of the ocean
> as a bright girdle "round earth's shores" is, I think, a rather
> distracting academic contrivance.

Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;

> A deliberate dismantling, it seems to me, of the idealistic
> illusions that make marriage tolerable and perhaps even possible.

And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.

> These lines are said to allude to a description by Thucydides
> of an event referred to as the battle of Epipolae.
> The references to the Sea of Faith, to Sophocles and to Thucydides
> I interpret as invocations of the scholarly, academic ambience
> in which I suspect Matthew Arnold felt at home, where he might
> find refuge from the new, spiritually uncertain existence that
> stretches before him.

                      * * * * *
Copyright 2006, Ernst Jochen Meyer
