All That Slow Fire

I give the internet a lot of credit, and I am definitely hooked; nearly anything I want to know is available. Back in college I found myself plagued by a few lines that I could not place. I was sure it was by Theodore Roethke, and searched the old fashioned way - sitting on the library floor and flipping through collections of his work. I didn't find it.

After a few years, I imagined that perhaps I was mistaken, had never read said passage, and possibly even made it up myself. Even more time passed, and newly armed with a search engine, I found it: a passage from"The Sequel" in Roethke's "Sequence, Sometimes Metaphysical," the one that begins "Was nature kind? The heart's core tractable?"

Now I have it printed out and tucked under the blotter on my desk. I feel vindicated. I was not delusional all this time. My last statement is open for debate.

Nevertheless, it is my favorite piece out of his collected works. A lot of his poetry is so heavily focused on nature that I don't really appreciate it, yet this piece has such a stronger tie between nature and the individual. I don't mean to discredit his other work; certainly he has much of merit, but here I'm discussiong what pieces I latch onto. "In a Dark Time" likewise pulls together the pastoral and the internal, but this, I think, is on another level. I'd love to print the piece here, but that would probably be infringing on a copyright, so, go out and get the book.