The Poetry of Plants and Transplants

Just 59 and suffering from his second kidney failure, my brother's love of nature sheds light on Theodore Roethke’s 'The Waking.'

David Judge (photo by Kate Judge)

By Michael Judge

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.

I’ve recited those first three lines from Theodore Roethke’s villanelle “The Waking” hundreds of times throughout my life. But only now, in the winter of my 55th year, do I truly understand them.

Roethke was born in 1908 and published the poem in 1953, in his mid-40s. The son of a greenhouse owner, he suffered from anxiety and depression, and learned to love the silent company of plants and books at a young age. The greenhouse, for Roethke, was a symbol “for the whole of life, a womb, a heaven-on-earth.”

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.

I first fell in love with Roethke’s poetry in college. Because he was a large man with many health issues, I used to refer to Roethke as the “sickly giant.” He died of a heart attack at 55—m…