Thursday's Poem and Poet

Theodore Roethke's poem, The Waking, is open to a variety of interpretations. I see it as positive, a hint, good advice: take things calmly, whatever events are before you, take each day as it comes, and keep on keeping on...just keep putting one foot in front of the other, learning by mistakes and from nature.

The poem, in villanelle pattern, has a kind of musical rhythm. In fact jazz singer Kurt Elling has recorded it - here it is at YouTube.

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, Pulitzer Prize-winning American poet, was born on 25 May, 1908 in Saginaw, Michigan. The death of his father and suicide of his uncle when Theodore was just 15 must have been engraved in memory and triggered a dark melancholy reflected in some of his poems. He suffered from manic depression (bi-polar disorder). His poetry must have acted as an escape valve. He was also an alcoholic - a less productive escape valve!

 12 noon chart

A glimpse of the man himself comes through from this piece: Stanley Kunitz on Theodore Roethke

For all his six-foot-three, two-hundred-plus pound build and his lumbering gait, he was amazingly nimble on his feet and ruthless at the kill, with a smashing service and a thunderous forehand drive. The daemon in him played the game [tennis] just as it wrote the poems. Whatever he did was an aspect of the same insatiable will to conquer self and art and others. He could not bear to lose. If you managed to beat him by cunning and luck, you could not expect to be congratulated; he was more likely to smash his racket across his knees. After the steady deterioration of his body had forced him to abandon the game—his knees in particular gave out—he retreated into croquet and badminton, which he played with the same rapture and schrecklichkeit [= "terror" or "frightfulness"].

As a young man he felt humiliated and disgraced by the periodic mental breakdowns that were to afflict him all his life. There were outbreaks and absences and silences that he had to cover up, partly because he realized what a threat they offered to his survival in the academic world

His Gemini Sun with Moon, almost certainly in Aries whatever time he was born, reflect an ease of communication and a driving determination to overcome difficulties (and, it appears, to beat opponents in games of sport). It's Pluto exactly conjunct natal Mercury, also in Gemini, which I suspect relates to the darker side of his poetry, and his nature. Mars, Neptune and Venus in Cancer reflect a deep sensitivity which must have made the tragedies in his young years even harder to cope with. I don't have a time of birth for him, but it's possible that Moon and serious Saturn were conjoined as well as Mercury/Pluto. The uncomfortable square aspects from Uranus and Mars to Saturn must be reflections of the emotional difficulties brought on by his life history's saddest moments.
(Click on chart image for a better view.)

UPDATE
A more detailed chart: