Love Quote by Theodore Roethke

Roethke compresses an entire romantic theology into two tight sentences, then immediately undercuts its comfort. "Love begets love" sounds like a proverb you could stitch onto a pillow, all calm reciprocity and moral bookkeeping: give tenderness, receive it back. But Roethke was never a poet of simple balance. The line works because it’s both wish and spell, a statement that tries to make itself true by being said aloud. It’s the rhetoric of someone who needs love to be renewable, not scarce, because scarcity is the panic under the lyric.

Then comes the twist: "This torment is my joy". The demonstrative "this" makes the pain intimate and present-tense, as if he’s pointing to a wound while smiling through it. Roethke’s subtext is the trapdoor in desire: the same intensity that animates love also maims it. "Torment" isn’t incidental suffering; it’s the price of being emotionally awake, the fever that proves you’re alive. Calling it "my joy" isn’t masochism so much as realism from a poet who understood that longing and fulfillment often share a bloodstream.

Context matters. Roethke’s work frequently circles obsession, vulnerability, and mental volatility; his love poems don’t float above the body, they sweat. These lines land as a private credo from someone who recognizes that love doesn’t arrive as serenity. It arrives as a beautiful disturbance, and the disturbance becomes, perversely, the evidence.