The Waking (1953). Content and Description

This poem, one of Roethke’s greatest, deals with the conflict between thinking and feeling, the way we abstract the world in an effort to make sense out of it versus the way we respond to the world as it actually presents itself. Thus, the poem is filled with the sort of paradoxes our reasoning minds yearn to resolve but continue to find irresolvable: the paradox of waking to sleep, living to die, shaking to keep steady, or falling away to stay near.

Such conflicts occur throughout human history and, at least for the speaker of this poem, are interconnected with our fascination with reason, the Enlightenment principle for understanding the world and making it a better place to inhabit. While we use reason to sort out our lives, to make sense of them and find meaning and purpose, we also encounter many things that lie beyond reason’s hold.

Literally, we and the speaker of the poem desire to understand but ultimately confront things outside our mind’s ability to comprehend. In this sense, the poem is a deeply metaphysical poem concerned with how we know things, how we come to understand things, and how we may be part of something greater than we can think or articulate.

The poem is a variation of a villanelle, a strict form in which lines or phrases are repeated at the end of stanzas as a kind of refrain. The poem contrasts waking and sleeping, metaphors for not only the pattern we follow day to day, but also the pattern of our lives. As in the opening words of the requiem, the mass for the dead, “in the midst of life we are in death”: Our lives are transient; no matter how hard we seek to create a better world, to reason out the purpose of our lives, and to sustain human life, we die. To see this process as “waking” is to entertain paradox, which for the speaker of the poem means confronting death.

For Discussion or Writing:
1. “The Waking” and “Four for John Davies” are both famous Roethke poems in the form of vil- lanelles, six-stanza poems built on two rhymes, with two lines repeated alternately as the final lines of each of the first five stanzas and used together in the final stanza, which has four lines. First, mark the repeated lines in both poems. After doing so, consider why Roethke chose to highlight these sets of lines in the two poems. Other than their form, do the poems share any thematic concerns? With these questions in mind, write a well-developed essay that compares the two villanelles, seeking to explain why Roethke may have chosen identical forms for two different poems.

2. Read Roethke’s “In Evening Air,” another poem in which the poet speaks of the desire to wake. After considering how Roethke describes waking in both “In Evening Air” and “The Waking,” write a well-developed essay that contrasts the two and is focused on the image of waking.