“The Waking” by Theodore Roethke
While attending the University of North Carolina Greensboro, I took Advanced Poetry and one of the things I has to do was annotate some poetry. Here is one of those poems. Enjoy.
This poem is a villanelle. The way this poem operates is to take the first and third lines of the first stanza and repeat it throughout the poem as the last line of stanzas two through five and be used as a couplet in the last stanza. This works well to reiterate a theme or idea to the reader with only slight repetition but not total redundancy.
Another thing I would say about the stanzas is that the first two lines rhyme and the second lines all rhyme with each other. The second lines help break up the flow of the first and third lines so that poem does not sound repetitive. Even though the lines are not repeated verbatim, the sounds and stresses are heard the same and thus the poem in itself would sound redundant. If all the second lines were to be taken out, the poem would not only sound really repetitive but the main idea or theme would sound like a broken record as well. The second lines give the poem a certain pause or breaks in between repeating sounds and ideas, thus giving the reader time to break away from one idea before he/she hears it again and notice a pattern. At least that is how I took it.
Also, I took the liberty of removing all the second lines and reading them as a separate poem and noticed that they all seemed to flow well and still make sense with the general theme of the poem! I do not know if this is just a villanelle at work, or if this was the author’s intent or whatever but it does work. It is as if there is a poem within a poem thus giving the reader an even deeper message hidden beneath the surface. I just think that is a clever way of hiding the true meaning of a poem.
Something else I noticed about this poem is that each line has syllables of ten. Now normally I never check to see if there is an equal amount of syllables in a line but syllables do help shape the flow of a poem and if there are one too many or not enough, it can make or break a line and thus make or break a poem. So I think by doing this, the author is trying to keep an even and steady flow. And the fact that the syllables are short and contained within one word except for maybe one word in each line that hold two syllables, this tells the reader where the stresses and pauses or breathes are within the poem so that they know how to read it without relying heavily on punctuation. A lot of readers don’t read punctuation in a poem well because often times it is not written in a standard format like prose but everyone can, or should at least know, how to read the syllables within a word. Like I stated, this is a smart way to get the reader to read the poem the way the author wanted it read.
