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Theodore Roethke's Poetry, by popularity

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  • Root Cellar
    Nothing would sleep in that cellar, dank as a ditch,
    Bulbs broke out of boxes hunting for chinks in the dark,
    10 lines
  • The Saginaw Song
    In Saginaw, in Saginaw,
      The wind blows up your feet,
    82 lines
  • The Visitant

    A cloud moved close. The bulk of the wind shifted.
    49 lines
  • The Shape Of The Fire

          What’s this? A dish for fat lips.
    144 lines
  • Big Wind
    Where were the greenhouses going,
    Lunging into the lashing
    32 lines
  • Infirmity
    In purest song one plays the constant fool
    As changes shimmer in the inner eye.
    45 lines
  • The Voice
    One feather is a bird,
    I claim; one tree, a wood;
    27 lines
  • Epidermal Macabre
    Indelicate is he who loathes
    The aspect of his fleshy clothes, --
    16 lines, 1 comment
  • The Minimal
    I study the lives on a leaf: the little
    Sleepers, numb nudgers in cold dimensions,
    11 lines, 2 comments
  • She
    I think the dead are tender. Shall we kiss? --
    My lady laughs, delighting in what is.
    16 lines
  • Journey into the Interior
    In the long journey out of the self,
    There are many detours, washed-out interrupted raw places
    17 lines
  • The Far Field
    I
    I dream of journeys repeatedly:
    107 lines, 2 comments
  • The Storm
    Against the stone breakwater,
    Only an ominous lapping,
    46 lines, 3 comments
  • Pickle Belt
    The fruit rolled by all day.
    They prayed the cogs would creep;
    12 lines, 2 comments
  • Dolor
    I have known the inexorable sadness of pencils,
    Neat in their boxes, dolor of pad and paper weight,
    13 lines, 2 comments
  • Elegy For Jane
    I remember the neckcurls, limp and damp as tendrils;
    And her quick look, a sidelong pickerel smile;
    23 lines, 2 comments
  • Snake
    I saw a young snake glide
    Out of the mottled shade
    12 lines, 1 comment
  • In A Dark Time
    In a dark time, the eye begins to see,
    I meet my shadow in the deepening shade;
    24 lines, 1 comment
  • Cuttings
    This urge, wrestle, resurrection of dry sticks,
    Cut stems struggling to put down feet,
    11 lines, 2 comments
  • The Reckoning
    All profits disappear: the gain
    Of ease, the hoarded, secret sum;
    12 lines, 3 comments
  • The Geranium
    When I put her out, once, by the garbage pail,
    She looked so limp and bedraggled,
    26 lines
  • Open House
    My secrets cry aloud.
    I have no need for tongue.
    21 lines
  • Once More, the Round
    What's greater, Pebble or Pond?
    What can be known? The Unknown.
    14 lines
  • The Sloth
    In moving-slow he has no Peer.
    You ask him something in his Ear,
    12 lines, 1 comment
  • The Meadow Mouse
    1
    In a shoe box stuffed in an old nylon stocking
    32 lines, 1 comment
  • Night Journey
    Now as the train bears west,
    Its rhythm rocks the earth,
    27 lines
  • The Bat
    By day the bat is cousin to the mouse.
    He likes the attic of an aging house.
    11 lines, 4 comments
  • The Right Thing
    Let others probe the mystery if they can.
    Time-harried prisoners of Shall and Will--
    19 lines, 14 comments
  • Child on Top of a Greenhouse
    The wind billowing out the seat of my britches,
    My feet crackling splinters of glass and dried putty,
    7 lines, 16 comments
  • I Knew a Woman
    I knew a woman, lovely in her bones,
    When small birds sighed, she would sigh back at them;
    30 lines, 12 comments
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