On the luxury of sleeping in

I grew up in a rise-and-shine household. The coffee (on a timer) started percolating just before 6:00 a.m., when alarm clocks buzzed in everyone’s bedrooms. My parents, my younger brother, and I rolled out of bed every morning to the delicious aroma of fresh coffee brewing. Years before I ever drank it, I associated its smell with jumping to it.

When I was writing my doctoral dissertation, I didn’t let myself sit down until I was at my desk, with the computer booting up and a cup of coffee by my hand. (Otherwise, procrastination could extend until 10 a.m….) Later, when I was married, my stepkids had to be at the bus at 7:05, and my wheels needed to be crunching down the driveway towards Great Barrington by 7:15. There were showers, there was breakfast and chaos, and yet somehow we usually made it to the bus-stop and our jobs on time.

But now—ah, now, in my post-retirement days, I get up when I feel like getting up. I usually wake at dawn even now. However, after I gaze out at the pale blue of the early-morning sky and listen to the growing chorus of birdsong, I roll over and drop back asleep. If I have a reason to get up—a class to prep or an early-morning, beat-the-heat walk with a friend—I enjoy the surge of energy and purpose. Usually, though, I stretch and yawn, then slip out of bed and pad downstairs to make that first cup of espresso. I sip, read email, check the news…  It’s often 9:00 a.m. before I contemplate the schedule for the day. How luxurious it is to proceed at my own pace. How glorious.

This experience has taught me to appreciate in a new way one of the poems I often taught, Theodore Roethke’s often-anthologized “The Waking.” It starts,

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.

My students were hooked from the first line. They were high schoolers, working very hard to catch up academically and emotionally from years of spiraling down, so the idea of taking waking slowly made them sigh with yearning. They also loved the idea of learning from “going where [they needed] to go.” (They tended to interpret it as moving forward by learning from their own hard experiences, which seems to me a fine reading of the line.)

I suspect that for Roethke, too, the poem was more aspirational than descriptive. It’s from his fourth book of poems, The Waking, published in 1954—the book that won him a Pulitzer Prize for poetry and made him famous. By that time, he was an immensely popular professor of poetry at Michigan State University, with a reputation for lighting his students of poetry on fire. But by that time, he’d also had several breakdowns. He seems to have been manic, or bipolar, and went at life full-tilt, getting very little sleep for long periods.

In a review of his first book of poems (Open House, 1941), the critic Elizabeth Drew praised Roethke for a kind of “gnomic wisdom.” Certainly “The Waking,” a villanelle from fifteen years later, lures us in with the mysterious air of a Zen koan. Here’s the rest of the poem:

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.

 

Of those so close beside me, which are you?   

God bless the Ground!   I shall walk softly there,   

And learn by going where I have to go.

 

Light takes the Tree; but who can tell us how?   

The lowly worm climbs up a winding stair;   

I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.

 

Great Nature has another thing to do   

To you and me; so take the lively air,   

And, lovely, learn by going where to go.

 

This shaking keeps me steady. I should know.   

What falls away is always. And is near.   

I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.   

I learn by going where I have to go.

To me, it feels like a poem celebrating the body, Nature, and an intuitive approach to life. I love it when I feel “my being dance from ear to ear,” though I’m not sure I hear it. (Maybe poets do?) And when I run across places that feel blessed by some god or other, I, too, tend to walk softly on that ground. But do I think by feeling? (Sometimes.) What is the shaking that keeps him steady? And why is what falls away “always”? Or “near”?

I have no idea what much of the poem means, exactly. But I know that it’s a delight–as are the pleasures of times when I can “wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.” I hope Roethke managed to let himself do that sometimes, and I hope my readers do, too.