Sunday, February 01, 2009
Lines from Poem by Theodore Roethke
Some Lines from Roethke
A mind too active is no mind at all;
The deep eye sees the shimmer on the stone
The deep eye sees the shimmer on the stone
The eternal seeks, and finds, the temporal,
The change from dark to light of the slow moon,
Dead to myself, and all I hold most dear,
I move beyond the reach of wind and fire.
Deep in the greens of summer sing the lives
of all I've come to love. A vireo whets its bill.
The great day balances upon the leaves;
My ears still hear the bird when all is still;
My soul is still my soul, and still the Son,
And knowing this, I am not yet undone.
Things without hands take hands;--there is no choice--
Eternity's not easily come by.
When opposites come easily into place,
I teach my eyes to hear, my ears to see
How body from spirit slowly does unwind
Until we are pure spirit at the end.
Theodore Roethke
This is an excerpt from a longer poem by Theodore Roethke, one of the major poets of the last century. He is contemplating the final stage of his life, but from another perspective, this could be a poem about any "death" of the self which in turn leads to the birth of a new spirit within. One could almost see it as depicting the "death" of the prior "small" self which occurs when Kundalini comes and we are made anew.
When he refers to the uniting of opposites, he is alluding to a state common to almost all spiritual initiations--when we come grasp the unity of all things in the universe, a unity which appears to be broken when we exist in the common mortal state. This is also the doctrine of the One and the Many--a single divine reality which is shattered into disparate parts on this plane of existence.
