I actively am sentient, quick, alive, in order that I may be unconscious, passive, dead, and purposefully take that quickening slowly. Taken literally, the line is almost enough to reconcile me to those poor souls who abuse the snooze button. There is more, yes, than that. Roethke invites the sense that “we are the stuff that dreams are made of, and our life is bounded by a sleep.” There are seeds of other worlds in Shakespeare’s lines; our life is but a dream, come from the great sleep that comes after life is over.
What is inevitable is intelligible to my senses, and I cannot fear it. Roethke sees his fate, death, but cannot fear it, because, at least in part, it is intelligible to him in the senses.
Beautiful ambiguity of grammar. The most beautiful line in the poem. Does the verb ‘learn’ have an object? This is enough to justify my spirit that traveling should be a wandering, without a direct object. Too often travelers are just tourists, who go from place to place, with their schedule marked out for them and every hour of their trip planned out for them. There is more than this, yes, of course. There is a lovely “slowness” (which the Czech proverb calls “gazing at God’s windows”) in this line, which relates to the central question of this poem, which I think is, ‘how do we reconcile ourselves to our inevitable death?’ We do so by lingering, meandering, wandering, learning our fate by the process of learning itself. As in Eudora Welty’s short story, “The Worn Path,” it not the object of that old lady’s journey that the story is built on; it is the journey itself that is important.
Read one way, this is a rhetorical question implying that there is nothing to know; all we can do is “feel.” Read another way, there is a kind of knowledge that comes from feeling; John Senior and James Taylor would call this knowledge poetic. To reinforce this latter reading, there are nineteen lines in the poem, and only one is not heavily end-stopped. The flow of the poem, especially after the three quiet sentences that precede this fourth line, demands that each line be considered a syntactical unit in itself (not to say by itself--the lines work with each other; I just mean that each line is a complete thought). Read as a complete grammatical unit, the object of “we think” is “what there is to know.” (Or, considering the ambiguity of the third line, ‘by feeling what there is to know, we think.’ Lovely.)
There is something real, being, that the poet feels between the ears, in the head, in the intellect. This suggests that there is something intelligible that can be grasped by feeling. This is my favorite line. I hear echoes of Milton’s profoundly sad and echoing line in Paradise Lost; “Senses return, but not to me return.” The echoing within Milton’s and Roethke’s lines reflects some kind of sense that means something, that is intelligible, through the senses, and not just knowable: also enjoyable, in Roethke’s line: there is dancing within his head.
