Personal Choice 71

The Meadow Mouse

1

In a shoe box stuffed in an old nylon stocking

Sleeps the baby mouse I found in the meadow,

Where he trembled and shook beneath a stick

Till I caught him up by the tail and brought him in,

Cradled in my hand,

A little quaker, the whole body of him trembling,

His absurd whiskers sticking out like a cartoon-mouse,

His feet like small leaves,

Little lizard-feet,

Whitish and spread wide when he tried to struggle away,

Wriggling like a minuscule puppy.

Now he's eaten his three kinds of cheese and drunk from his

bottle-cap watering-trough—

So much he just lies in one corner,

His tail curled under him, his belly big

As his head; his bat-like ears

Twitching, tilting toward the least sound.

Do I imagine he no longer trembles

When I come close to him?

He seems no longer to tremble.

2

But this morning the shoe-box house on the back porch is empty.

Where has he gone, my meadow mouse,

My thumb of a child that nuzzled in my palm? —

To run under the hawk's wing,

Under the eye of the great owl watching from the elm-tree,

To live by courtesy of the shrike, the snake, the tom-cat.

I think of the nestling fallen into the deep grass,

The turtle gasping in the dusty rubble of the highway,

The paralytic stunned in the tub, and the water rising,—

All things innocent, hapless, forsaken.

Theodore Roethke

Theodore Roethke (1908 – 1963) was an American poet. He is regarded as one of the most accomplished and influential poets of his generation, having won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1954 for his book The Waking. His work was characterized by its introspection, rhythm and natural imagery. Roethke was praised by former U.S. Poet Laureate and author James Dickey as ‘in my opinion the greatest poet this country has yet produced.’

A poem that is hard to resist in its wonderful emotional element. And who could defy the superb movement to the poem’s resolution where the mouse becomes a powerful metaphor for ‘All things innocent, hapless, forsaken.’