This type of poetic knowledge through the senses is the type of slow appreciation of the conscious life that the rhyme in the repeated lines engenders. The waking is a type of learning, considered as a rise in consciousness. By taking that rise to consciousness slowly, the poet keeps on hearing the same senses echoed through his mind.
With this tercet, Roethke invites the scene of the graveyard. He build upon his theme, the knowledge of his fate, death, by suggesting that where he has to go is the grave. He blesses his resting place, he has respect for death, though no fear.
There is a receptiveness necessary to life; in order to learn, he must be taken by his senses, must allow unconsciousness to take him as the light takes the tree. A beautiful memory: standing near the Tibur River opposite the Aventine Hill in Rome, the morning after staying up all White Night, watching light take the trees at the top before taking me.
An odd line, without the images already given of light imbuing a tree with meaning, and the search for a grave. How does the light of understanding our fate take us? It takes us like the worm climbing out of the grave. Only by dying do we gain some kind of rebirth, resurrection; only by passive receptiveness to death do we put on the light of true life, of real life. But there is no immediate jump to the resurrection, no idea that life is something to be passed over as quickly as possible: “I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.”
This other thing that Nature has to do is a type of resurrection, but again, our knowledge of death and its waking into Life is not something to get to as quickly as possible. We only learn, come to know of death, by living. Because of the greatness of what naturally happens after death, we are to take the air, take life as it comes, be active in our unconsciousness, and are lovely because of it.
Another of my favorite lines. Again, there is that ambiguity of the line when considered not as two sentences, but as one. This shaking, this quivering, this quickening, this life, keeps us steady. We cannot think without feeling. We cannot have death without life. This poem doesn’t nail done some question and answer, isn’t dogmatic. “I should know.” The poem doesn’t force the resurrection, its knowledge of death upon us. It just presents it to our mind, and asks to stand by itself. The poem doesn’t need a creed or a dogma behind it in order for us to learn from it. “I should know.”
