The Waking (Masterplots II: Poetry, Revised Edition)
At a glance:
- Author: Theodore Roethke
- First Published: 1953
- Type of Work: Meditation
- Genres: Poetry, Meditation
- Subjects: Nature, Death or dying, Life and death, Sleep
The Poem
“The Waking” is the final poem in the collection The Waking (1953), for which Theodore Roethke received the Pulitzer Prize in poetry in 1954. In a departure from the free verse of much of his earlier work, this poem is composed in the form of a villanelle, a nineteen-line closed verse form consisting of five successive tercets rhyming aba followed by a closing quatrain rhyming abaa. Two key lines that contain the theme of the poem are repeated alternately at the end of each stanza and then again together in the last stanza. The title suggests...
[The entire page is 1364 words long]
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