Poetry Response #8

Merrell Pressley

Mrs. Jernigan

English Lit AP

21 March 2011

Poetry Response #8

            Theodore Roethke’s poem “The Waking” is a romantic villanelle. It is separated into five tercets and one quatrain, with the rhyme scheme of a villanelle as well. Roethke’s tone in this poem is extremely romantic, given that he exalts nature, “[thinking] by feeling,” and takes every day as it comes. The romanticist highly praises and almost worships nature, believing that god can be found within nature itself. Everything is worthy of worship in the romanticist’s world.

            Roethke repeats the line “I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow” in four of the six stanzas. He also constantly mentions that all humans learn as we go. I think that Roethke wants the readers of his poem to understand that the most important things have to be experienced and learned through life. He doesn’t want anyone (or himself) to take life too quickly and miss the important things and lessons in life. And these lessons cannot merely be taught, as he writes we “think by feeling.” He believes that only true thought is stimulated by emotions.

            Also, Roethke deals with the idea of fate in the second line of the poem; he writes, “I feel my fate in what I cannot fear.” Roethke is wise in knowing that he cannot control the fate that governs the universe. No matter what, fate has predetermined his life, and he is not going to waste time fretting over it. Roethke “[learns] by going where [he] has to go.” In other words, he continues on with life, no matter what, because he knows that experience and the things around him will teach him infinitely more than observation.

            In addition to experience producing knowledge, Roethke talks of struggle in life in his reference to the “lowly worm [climbing] up a winding stair.” Climbing stairs would be a nearly impossible act for a worm; his statement is that everyone should keep pushing onward, pursuing wisdom through life’s experiences, despite the closed doors and hard circumstances.

(As you said, its hard to write about villanelles without sounding trite or repetitive. Ha!)