Theodore Roethke – Being Not Doing
From Wiki: “His father, Otto, was a German immigrant, a market-gardener who owned a large local 25 acre greenhouse, along with his brother. Much of Theodore’s childhood was spent in this greenhouse, as reflected by the use of natural images in his poetry.
The poet’s adolescent years were jarred, however, by his uncle’s suicide and by the death of his father from cancer, both in early 1923, when Theodore was only 14. These deaths shaped Roethke’s psyche and creative life.
Roethke responded powerfully to the confinement of nature, he later even wrote, “They were to me both heaven and hell, a kind of tropics created in the savage climate of Michigan, where austere German Americans turned their love of order and their terrifying efficiency into something beautiful.”
Theodore Roethke (1908–1963) wrote of his poetry: The greenhouse “is my symbol for the whole of life, a womb, a heaven-on-earth.””
I receive! I have been received!
I hear the flowers drinking in their light,
I have taken counsel of the crab and the sea-urchin,
I recall the falling of small waters,
The streams slipping between the mossy logs,
Winding down to the stretch of irregular sand,
The great logs piled like matchsticks.
The Lord God has taken my heaviness away:
I have merged, like the bird, with the bright air,
And my thought flies to the place by the bo-tree.