"The Waking" by Theodore Roethke

In which I get the way I always get about a villanelle

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 the 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
From The Waking (Doubleday, 1953); reprinted in The Collected Poems of Theodore Roethke (Anchor, 1975).

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I first read this beguiling lyric as a sophomore in college. Like so many poems from that formative year, it’s been with me ever since. I have only half an idea what it means, the result of a lifelong effort towards comprehension begun that term with an essay I hazily remember as a comparison-contrast with, of all pairings, Frank O’Hara’s “Why I Am Not a Painter.”¹

I don’t think any great poem necessarily exists in order to be comprehended, but “The Waking” tips further east on the comprehension–apprehension spectrum than most of the poems that inhabit me. Etymology teases out the distinction between the two poles. They share prehendere: to catch hold of or to seize. Comprehend derives from comprehendere: com, meaning “with, together,” with a sense of “completely.” Apprehend, meanwhile, is from apprehenden, to grasp with the senses or mind, to grasp, or take hold of, physically. It’s the same action, a catching hold, with a difference of what I first want to describe as degree, though I think that impulse is merely the result of our old Cartesian wheelrut, the one that privileges the thinking mind over the sensing body, that doesn’t allow that the mind might feel, the body think, despite the plain fact that there is no mind without flesh, that the inarticulate gut is packed with neurons.

When “the mind” catches hold we say we understand, we comprehend; when “the body” does the catching, we have apprehended. And yet don’t we experience a third kind of grasping? Apprehension allows a mixed state, one in between: a knowing that precedes thought, a physical sensation of insight, a clicking-into-place as we proceed through a well-cast metaphor:

Life
Candle flame
Wind coming on

(from Asian Figures, trans. W.S. Merwin)

We comprehend the meaning before we can say it, and the sensation it engenders—the quiver in the chest, a chill on the nape of the neck—similarly precedes our own words. Think of walking on an icy sidewalk and seeing someone, even a stranger, slip: your own stomach lurches, and you reach for them before you can think I will help. There is something inside of us that calls to connect, that can’t help itself connecting. There is something that knows what to do. I want to call it presence, a moment of perfect awareness in the instant of apprehension. Not the awareness of having awakened, but an ongoingness, an eternity of the present²: a waking.

What’s to love about “The Waking”? Like “One Art,” it’s an exceptional enactment of content in form. (And is this the same duality? Tenor and vehicle, mind and body, idea and the means of its expression. For me, the poem that successfully fulfills its formal potential accesses both halves of these binaries simultaneously.) The villanelle³ is especially appropriate for the contemplation of agency and fate, tethered as it is to a structure that demands not only repeated patterns of sound—rhyme, metre—but the repetition of concepts as well, and so requires not only technical proficiency but what I think I want to call a tenacity of spirit, the way in which one responds to external restriction: knowing when to resist and when to yield.

I have always loved the form, as a writer, though as a reader I quickly grow weary of most. They can be painfully dull, servile to the point of tedium, and I find them most moving when they actively strain against their requirements rather than perfectly meet them.⁴ There are common techniques that enliven the form in this way. One is tied directly to the dictates of the structure: a liberal interpretation of the extent of or fidelity to the refrain, the substitution of a single word or phrase for a complete line.⁵ Or, even more liberally, wordplay in this truncated form, borrowing the old homonym, or something like it, trick from the sestina—David Wojahn’s timber / timbre is a favourite example of these—or swapping in a sonic or conceptual rhyme. And one is simply a matter of syntax: how those refrains relate, grammatically and conceptually, to the poem’s other sentences and clauses, employing enjambment to push through the refrain rather than leaving it endstopped,⁶ bound to its own expression and thus predictable, a repetition that evokes the Latin origin of refrain: refrenare, to bridle, check, keep down, control.

“The Waking” is more faithful than most of my favourites, an approach that begins with its prosody. Roethke employs a regular iambic pentameter with few exceptions. If you are determined to do so, you can hear the whole poem in perfect meter, but I’ll at least argue with you that “God bless” in line 8 is a spondee⁷ rather than an iamb, especially with that exclamation point inflecting tone. He’s looser on the rules when it comes to rhyme, employing shifts in vowel sounds: slow / go / know, but also you / how / do; fear / ear / near as well as there / stair / air.

The form’s defining feature, though, is the refrain, and here Roethke is on the side of strict. The A1 refrain, “I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow,” repeats perfectly, down to the end punctuation, the four times it appears. The only deviation pertains to syntax, when its third appearance, in stanza 4, is preceded by a semicolon, a grammatical hinge that indicates a relationship between the lowly worm on his upward quest and our speaker’s own endeavour:

The lowly worm climbs up the winding stair;
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.

The A2 refrain, “I learn by going where I have to go,” sees some slight variation in both fidelity to the original utterance and to syntactic function. In stanza 3, it’s a dependent clause yoked across a comma-softened line break to its first-person subject; the stanza 5 repetition uses the same complex structure, though the subject is now, notably, the second person “you”; the mood is imperative rather than declarative; and the clause acquires an editorial addition: “lovely.”

It’s no surprise that this is the heart of it for me, this moment when the poem—when the poet—resists stricture, self-chosen as it is. There’s another pattern in “The Waking,” one unrelated to its received form: an interrogative mode that opens stanzas 2, 3, and 4:

We think by feeling. What is there to know? . . .

Of those so close beside me, which are you? . . .

Light takes the Tree, but who can tell us how? . . .

In stanza 5, though, just as we make our biggest departure from the formal requirement of the refrain, we also shift out of the questioning mode and into something more like an answer:

Great Nature has another thing to do
To you and me; so take the lively air
And, lovely, learn by going where to go.

In a poem about interiority, about individual experience—there’s little lonelier than the contemplation of one’s individual fate, one’s individual agency—there’s something so moving about this staking of claim and its vision of common experience, shared abundance. It’s us against Great Nature—not that there’s any antagonism implied, really—and here is what to do about it. Take the lively air, learn by going where to go. Lovely? That in this way none of us is ever alone.

What does it mean? I’d offer some answers if held down and tickled, I guess, but I find the question of how it is meaning, the arc of its coming to terms, far more interesting. Maybe that’s because, these days, the long line of my life reveals more clearly its true shape, an arc bending beyond its cusp, a circle’s perimeter past the point at which its direction reverses. Some mornings I wake only as myself and then must remember what it is that’s happening to me. It is a kind of waking to sleep, if our literal sleep is a state in which we are removed from our purest selves, though I’m not sure that’s true, either. But it is a third space, a third state, another in betweenness: neither consciousness nor grasping but both at once and also neither.

Light takes a tree at Heaven Lake, the long misty line of Lake Huron to the south. (Killarney Provincial Park, September 2025.)

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Alternatively! There’s nothing I like more than hearing that a poem you read here did something for you, or that you forwarded it to a friend or read it out loud to someone you love: I can’t trade that for coffee, but it also keeps me going.

1. Honestly, I have no idea. The shared concern with learning, or acquiring insight/skill? The role of repetition? The divergent relationships to time? Only Past Vanessa Knows.

2. The brilliant Liz Harmer once remarked—with such casual offhandedness that I was momentarily stunned to imagine what it must be like to inhabit such a mind—as we lay under the stars on the deck of a sailboat on Lake St Clair, “When you think about it, the present is a kind of eternity.” I have never recovered.

3. A French received form featuring tercets and a quatrain, an enveloped rhyme scheme, and two refrains that repeat in a designated pattern: these are established by the first and last lines of the opening stanza—we’ll call them A1 and A2—and alternate as the last lines of the tercets that follow. The refrains finally comprise the poem’s closing lines, repeated once more in order. The first and last line of each stanza carries the a rhyme, the second the b rhyme, so the formal notation looks like this: A1bA2 abA1 abA2 abA1 abA2 abA1A2. And if that’s not enough to keep track of, it’s often metered, pentameter being a common choice.

4. At one point during my academic career I realized that every course I designed ended up being in some way about nonconformity, and I briefly fantasized that I would intentionally develop a course around this theme, and immediately I became incensed by the idea that anyone, I guess myself included, would place such an expectation upon me.

5. See: Bishop employing “disaster” in place of a complete line as her A2 refrain.

6. See: me, I guess; I had the idea that this was a common technique and now I can’t turn up a good example that doesn’t also play very fast and loose with the refrains as well.

7. Two syllables of equal stress: cat food, Big Gulp, dead weight.