Poetry and Waking

Though I like all of the linked poems (I love the villanelle as a form), Theodore Roethke's "The Waking" was my favorite. It made the most use of the villanelle's capacity for complexity in meaning and its circular nature. Roethke's main motif of waking only to sleep evokes a sense of cyclical obsession. He meditates on life's impenetrable paradoxes which vex him, yet he is paradoxically content to "learn by going where [he] has to go." The form of the villanelle is particularly useful for the sort of affective abstractedness that Roethke touches on. The repetition of the refrains emphasizes their strange and unexpected truth. He goes where he has to and learns, yet says that we think by feeling; Roethke accepts what little control he has on his fate and instead decides to experience life as it comes to him. In the end, "What is there to know?" He doesn't seek deep truths from the universe because he knows that sort of epistemology is fruitless. He doesn't fear fate; he feels it, knows it by letting it happen. He wakes to sleep, but along the way, takes his waking slow.