The Waking

Author: Theodore Roethke
Born: May 25, 1908; Saginaw, Michigan
Died: August 1, 1963; Bainbridge Island, Washington

Type of Poem: Meditation

The Poem

“The Waking” is the final poem in the collection The Waking (1953), for which Theodore Roethke received the Pulitzer Prize in poetry in 1954. In a departure from the free verse of much of his earlier work, this poem is composed in the form of a villanelle, a nineteen-line closed verse form consisting of five successive tercets rhyming aba followed by a closing quatrain rhyming abaa. Two key lines that contain the theme of the poem are repeated alternately at the end of each stanza and then again together in the last stanza. The title suggests the central idea of the poem: a discovery of the fundamental paradox of human life. The “waking” to which the poet refers involves the broad assertion that life leads to death. More precisely, the poet has grasped the insight that living (waking), which involves coming to new awarenesses, ultimately leads only to dying (sleep). By using several examples, the speaker reveals that this truth is not overwhelming or even essentially negative. Rather, “The Waking” describes the poet’s revelation of life as an organic and somewhat mysterious process; the poem portrays the refinement and gradual confirmation of this truth. Hence, for him life is a process in which individuals move unhurriedly (“waking slow”), trusting nature to take them through the seemingly contradictory processes of coming to life and moving toward death. The poem is written in the first person, and the poet speaks to readers directly about his own experience. In this way, Roethke makes use of a rich tradition in lyric poetry in which the poet speaks on his own authority and in his own voice directly to the reader. The poet also employs another tradition, an old American penchant for the slightly didactic voice of the “seer” or “visionary” who has seen, who now knows, and who wishes to impart his understanding.

In the first stanza, the poet speaks from within the darkness (as readers learn by the third stanza) as he chants his awareness that life leads to death: “I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.” He ventures to say (in lines 2 and 3) that this fact cannot make him afraid because he is aware these are the necessary processes of nature. In the second stanza, he amplifies the idea that abstract knowledge is not frightening but is even irrelevant because he, like the Metaphysical poets of the seventeenth century, would rather “think by feeling,” basing his life upon the stream of experience rather than abstract ideas. The third stanza presents a vivid example that illustrates why he is unafraid of the awareness that life leads to death: When he senses the presence of someone he cannot clearly see (perhaps, for Roethke, his dead father), he feels the holiness of nature and the rightness of nature’s plan.

Two more examples are offered in the fourth stanza: “Light takes the Tree” and “The lowly worm climbs up the winding stair.” Both examples depict the miraculous and wonderful growth in nature. These two examples of life processes are contrasted to the central idea in the fifth stanza that nature has “another thing” to do to human beings (death). Thus in stanzas 4 and 5 he exemplifies the two processes that he has set out in the first stanza—growth and decay, or living and dying—and challenges the listener with the carpe diem theme to “take the lively air,” to live fully in the time remaining. In the sixth and final stanza, the poet sets forth the justification for his trust in nature’s plan: Whatever seems to die still remains. He says, “What falls away is always,” and so the reader sees the poet’s vision: Life does indeed lead to death, but death does not entail a complete severance. Rather, everything (and everyone) abides.

Forms and Devices

The form of the poem is the villanelle, a verse form that can be traced back to Italian folk songs of the late fifteenth through the early seventeenth centuries. In the sixteenth century, French poet Jean Passerat gave the poem its current form. One distinctive quality of the Roethke villanelle is the contrast between the precision of this complex, closed form and the loose process of association that so clearly marks the poem.

The poem contains two central metaphors—waking and sleeping—and connotations hovering around these two metaphors express much of the ambiguity of the poem and the richness of the poet’s vision. In a narrow sense, the antithesis of waking/sleeping suggests gaining consciousness and losing it, growing and diminishing, and living and dying. The poem’s title itself suggests another meaning of “waking”: the dawning of the idea that the process of waking/sleeping does not involve a horrible reality. That is, the metaphors of waking and sleeping describe the life cycle, and the waking that the poet wants to describe for the reader is the new awareness that this life cycle is to be feelingly lived and loved rather than feared.

Every metaphor in the poem—the light, the tree, the air, the worm, and the winding stair—plays a part in clarifying the poet’s vision. The light taking the tree and the worm ascending the stair represent two images of growth. The suggestion to “take the lively air” presents a direct invitation to the reader to enjoy life, particularly the things that bring great pleasure and joy, while the time remains to enjoy them. A final, important image of things “falling away” contains the fundamental reason for the poet’s acceptance of and trust in life. He avows, “What falls away is always.” Hence, what dies only seems to pass away from human presence at times, for the poet senses the presence of absent things and people even though they cannot be clearly apprehended by the senses. The atmosphere of this poem is celebratory as the poet paints a backdrop of night, loss, and death only to lead readers to an awareness of the presence of departed friends and an ultimate acceptance and trust in nature.

Themes and Meanings

In simplest terms, the poem’s theme is acceptance of nature’s cyclical and seemingly contradictory plan for the living. Seen in this way, life is a natural, organic process of growth and decay, perhaps recalling for some William Cullen Bryant’s poem “Thanatopsis.” Related to this view of life is the invitation to enjoy life while one has it, to make use of the limited amount of time one has to grow. However, the poem suggests much more about the nature of the actual experience of this life. Human beings “think by feeling”; that is, their lives begin in feelings and senses, and all thought and knowledge naturally follow from and are intertwined with feeling. Armed with this awareness, the human being is free to “dance from ear to ear.” In other poems, Roethke centers on what he suggests here: the divine, mad dance of the person/poet who is in love with this brief, contradictory life.

Life, then, is not a problem to be solved or a process to endure; rather, it is a mystery, a paradox to which people must open their trust, for “What falls away is always. And is near.” In this poem, Roethke speaks from within the idealist American Romantic tradition of Bryant and Ralph Waldo Emerson and the English Romantic vein of William Blake, William Butler Yeats, and even William Wordsworth. This poem does not spiritualize the poet’s grounded experience; it does not take readers beyond the natural world. Rather, it describes the holiness of the “eternal now” as it teaches readers what Roethke himself declared during a panel talk on the poem “Identity” at Northwestern University in 1963: “‘We think by feeling. What is there to know?’ This…is a description of the metaphysical poet who thinks with his body…and it is one of the ways man at least approaches the divine…for there is a God, and He’s here, immediate, accessible.”

Essay by: Galle, Jeffery

Bibliography

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