THE PRODUCTIONS OF TIME THEMES AND ‘
IMAGES IN THE 9OETRY OF THEODORE ROETHKE

Thesis four the Dogm of Ph. D.
MICHIGAN STATE UNIVERSITY
George A. Wolff

1966

7.7: - . mz'fifi‘

 

4‘ *..m+- “4'—

 

This is to certify that the

thesis entitled

THE PRODUCTIONS OF TIME
THEMES AND IMAGES IN THE POETRY
OF THEODORE ROETHKE

presented by

George A. Wolff

has been accepted towards fulfillment
of the requirements for

Ph.D. degree in English

Date August 15,

 

 

 

 

OCT 25 295W“
Sum, I0~3I-67 v

 

 

 

ABSTRACT
THE PRODUCTIONS OF TIME:

THEMES AND IMAGES IN THE POETRY
OF THEODORE ROETHKE

by George A. Wolff

Although individual poems of Theodore Roethke's have been
analyzed in detail, no sustained reading of his work as a whole has
yet been published. This dissertation, through a close study of the
poet's handling of themes and images, traces the development of his
work.

The concept that gives order to this study is described by the
phrase "the productions of time," which refers to objects and conditions
that characterize life in the flux of mortal existence. Critics and
scholars have emphasized the mystical and otherworldly elements in
Roethke's poetry without pointing out the cause, which lies in his
fear and loathing of his "fleshly clothes," sexuality, isolation, and
death. A more important snortcoming in the criticism is the failure
to stress Roethke's continual attempts to conquer his loathing and
fear. This dissertation follows the changing relationship between
otherworldliness and worldliness as it appears in the themes and images
of Roethke's poems.

The discussion of Open House_focuses on the imagery of the

 

inner-outer dichotomy, which is usually related to the conflict between
flesh and spirit. Several themes present in this first book and later

to be developed more fully are (l) the concept of the life-force as an

George A. Wolff

irritant, (2) inherited mental (or Spiritual) illness, and (3) the
creative process. I discuss the "Greenhouse Poems” both in terms

of its imagery which distorts Spatial and temporal relationships and of
a theme which I call "the implied human presence." I also examine in
some detail here and in my discussion of the later poems Roethke's

use of metaphors which blur the distinctions between the animate

and inanimate and between plants and animals. My treatment of the
"Greenhouse Poems" follows the generally accepted interpretation of the
growing plants as symbols for the maturing human identity. In the very
complex imagery of the fourteen long narratives, I find certain recurring
clusters, an eSpecially important one being an extensive group of
container images, which tend to group themselves around the poles
represented by grave and nest. The important themes here are (l) the
conflicting views of idealism and materialism, (2) evolution, and (3)
reincarnation, each of which participates in the protagonist's

struggle with his awareness of sexuality, isolation, and death. The
poems of the 1950's introduce no important new themes, though they do,
in a mechanical way, develop the somewhat over-used images of dancing
and burning. These poems clearly fail to carry Roethke forward in his
struggle "to embrace the world."

The poems of The Far Field, certainly the best that Roethke

 

wrote, bring the basic conflict in his work to its highest pitch.
Returning to many of his earlier themes, Roethke clothes them in new
images and invests them with a startling energy. The "North American

Sequence" employs beautifully handled landscape images to symbolize

George A. Wolff

the moment of change between two quite different psychic states and
to depict the theme of the desire to embrace the extremes of ex-
perience. The "Love Poems," the weakest of the book, return to the
theme of isolation. In the "Mixed Sequence," Roethke eXplores the
"theme of victimization," the relationship between victor and victim,
where death is the apparent universal victor and all living things the
\ictim. Finally, the "Sequence, Sometimes Metaphysical" is, as Roethke
called it, "a drive toward God," but it is also a corrosive vision of
the way in which the Speaker's fear of death alters his perceptions
and perhaps even creates his God.

DeSpite the evidence in Roethke's work that he was out of love
with the world, the overall development is toward an affirmation of

"The productions of time."

THE PRODUCTIONS OF TIME
THEMES AND IMAGES IN THE POETRY

OP THEODORE ROETHKE

By

‘ It I :1
George A.‘ Wolff

A THESIS
Submitted to
Michigan State University
in partial fulfillment of the requirements
for the degree of
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY ‘
Department of English

1966

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I wish to thank Professors A. J. M. Smith of Michigan State
University and Jo DeWeese of Pennsylvania State University, who made
many helpful suggestions and shared with me their insights into
Roethke's poems. Professors Herbert Weisinger, Sam Baskett, and
Russel B. Nye are responsible for many improvements in style and
thought. Thanks are also due to my brother, William T. Wolff, Jr.,

who helped by typing.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

CHAPTER
I INTRODUCTION: ROETHKE AND THE
II SENTIENT TO SHOCK . . . . .
III SPROUTS OE IDENTITY . . . . .
IV THE SHANE OF CIRCULARITY . .

Where Knock Is Open Wide .
I Need, I Need . . . . .
Bring the Day! . . . . .
Give Way, Ye Gates . . . .
Sensibility! 0 La! . . . .
O Lull Me, Lull Me . . . .
The Lost Son . . . . . . .
The Long Alley . . . . . .
The Field of Light . . . .
The Shape of the Fire . . .
Praise to the End! . . . .
Unfold! UnfOld! . . . . . .
I Cry, Love! Love! . . . .
0, Thou Opening, 0 . . . .

V ANGEL IN THE VOID . . . . . .
VI IN THE FACE OF DEATH . . . .
North American Sequence . .

Love Poems . . . . . . . .
Mixed Sequence . . . . . .

REVIEWERS

Sequence, Sometimes Metaphysical . .
Conclusion: Poetry at a Discount . .

BIBLIOGRAPHY . . . . . . . . . . .

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27k

CHAPTER I

ROETHKE AND THE REVIEWERS

Thus far the criticism on Theodore Roethke has succeeded in
defining a number of problems which require extended analysis. For
instance, does his ability increase with time, or does compulsive ex-
perimentation lead him into obscurity? When imitating other poets,
does he master their effects or echo them hollowly? How does his
highly conscious handling of meter, line length, and sound patterns
contribute to his poems? And so on. But certainly the most pressing
problem is that many poems still have not been given long and hard
readings. For that reason, this dissertation offers relatively detailed
explications of most of the poems that Roethke thought of as part of
his canon. Since he, like Yeats, felt that the order in whichhis poems
stood was important, I have followed his arrangement throughout.

I have tried to maintain a balance between treating each poem
as an autonomous unit and treating each as a step in Roethke's overall
development. When I erred, it is in the direction of the fermer. For
the most part, I limit my discussions to matters of imagery and theme,
taking imagery to include metaphors and symbols, and theme to mean any
paraphrasable eXpository statement. When discussing either of these,

I will generally move from the details of a particular poem to a higher
level of abstraction, where the similarities between a number of poems
can be noted. Indeed, if*we look at Roethke's apparently diverse images

on a high level of abstraction (e.g., regard grave and nest as containers),

we shall see that they are not so diverse after all. Stanley Kunitz
observes this same truth when he writes: "Roethke belongs to that superior
order of poets who will not let us rest in any one of their poems, who

keep driving us back through the whole body of their work to that live
cluster of images, ideas, memories, and obsessions that constitutes the

individuating source of the creative personality, the nib of art, the

very selfhood 0f the imagination."1 This statement, of course, verges

on the fallacy of reducing the work of art to a set of data about the
artist's personality. But, as the following pages will show, with Roethke
this fallacy is especially tempting, fer not only do his images "cluster"
tightly, his themes almost without exception originate in that "do—it-
yourself" branch of psychology, introspection.

Although the critics and reviewers have not yet read Roethke's
poetry as closely as it deserves, they have praised it. He felt, as he
expressed it in the last year of his life, that he had received un—
expected ". . . intensity and love from [his] contemporaries."2 From
the time of his earliest publications, he was awarded encouragement and
applause, being given the Pulitzer Prize in 1953 for The Waking and the
National Book Award in 1958 and again in 196“ (posthumously) fer

Words fer the Wind and The Far Field. When he was twenty-seven years

 

lThe Contemporary_Poet as Artist and Critic, Eight Symposia, ed.
Anthony Ostroff (Boston, 196u), p. #1. Hereafter cited as Ostroff.
Babette Deutsch, John Crowe Ransom, Stanley Kunitz and Roethke teak part
in a symposium on Roethke's "In a Dark Time."

2Ostroff, p. u9. At this same time he said that he felt he had
also received ". . . close, acute, . . . and devoted reading . . ." from

the others, but his reply to their readings qualifies this almost out
of existence.

old, six.years befere the publication of his first book, Miss Louise Began
paid him an important critical recognition. She selected seven of his
poems to include in an anthology of new verse and wrote several pages
introducing the young poet. Miss Began outlined three tests for
recognizing "a young writer who will write," and asserted that Roethke
passed every one: "One immediately feels [she continues], the
strength of his determination to yield in no way to the poorer tricks of
style. His effects, fer the most part, are purely prosodic: they depend
cm the shape of his sentences and on their order throughout the poem.

We can say that he has a gift for form."1 Miss Began also refers to
Roethke's gift for epithet and his keen powers of perception.

Roethke's first book, Open House, published in 19u1, earned

 

him some very important praise. W. H. Auden gave it a penetrating

and highly favorable review, one passage of which runs as follows:

"Many people have the experience of feeling physically soiled and
humiliated by life; some quickly put it out of their mind, others gloat
narcissistically on its unimportant details; but both to remember and to
transferm the humiliation into something beautiful, as Mr. Roethke does,
is rare. Every one of'the lyrics in the book, whether serious or light,

shares the same kind of ordered sensibility: Open House is completely

 

successful."2

1"Stitched on Bone," Trial Balances, ed. Ann Winslow, a pseudonym
for verna Elizabeth Grubbs. (New York, l935), pp. 138-39.

 

2
"Verse and the Times," SetRL, XXIII (April 5, 19u1), 31.

1 Iii-III.

Although more insightful than most, Auden's review is typical in that
it attempts to provide the key to a number of poems with one critical
utterance, usually this key being simply part of the reviewer's
definition of poetry if he likes the works being reviewed and not much
help at all in reading any particular poem.

Lewis Foster, Jr., who also reviewed Open House quite favorably,

 

praised Roethke for his "simplicity of approach," his "natural and

distinct" language, and, repeating Miss Began's words, his "exactness

1

of epithet." Like Auden, Mr. Foster was fortunate enough to make a

comment that would apply not only to Open House but to all the sub-

 

sequent poetry that Reethke was to write: "...Reethke ... has a mysticism
of his own, of the senses rather than the Spirit. He finds poetry in
Yeat's "things uncomely and broken"--a bat, weeds, the "antic grace" of

a heron. He is, in the best sense, a realist."2 Foster censured

Roethke fer only one thing: "...his technical range is rather limited."

But he lightened this judgment by adding that "One trusts that his future
technique will show greater boldness."3 This stricture was repeated
by two other reviewers. Rolfe Humphries declares that: "What saves

Roethke from producing sentimental, ordinary or painful results . . . is

the blunt and ebdurate honesty of statement, even at the cost of

1"A Lyric Realist," Poetgz, LVIII (July 19M), 223.

2Foster, 223.

3
Foster, 22“.

flexibility of technique . . . ."1

And Stephen Baldanza, who
apparently also feels the poet lacks flexibility of a sort, locates the
trouble in a deeper source: ". . .Despite the promise of the intro-
ductory poem, his revelation [of himself] is not complete; it embodies

2 When Baldanza

a caution which is at the core of his poetic impulse."
points out the read to improvement, he introduces a question that
several critics are to respond to later: "That Roethke is blessed with
a noble gift there can be no doubt; but one is certain that the poet

has tapped only a vein of his talents. Once he shows more willingness
to expose his true self more courageously in form and content he will
attain a great stature."3 More than twenty years later Professor Louis
Hertz similarly defines the nature of Roethke's "poetic impulse":

"The celebration of the naked bone, the bare spirit, and the sealed core
is not the central mode of Roethke; it is indeed the very opposite of his
true motion, which is to unseal, to let flow forth, to nourish into

n I shall return to this question later; right now it is

. growth. . . ."
sufficient to point out that both Baldanza and Hertz fail to relate
their discussions to such highly relevant poems as "The Adamant" and

"After Disaster."

1
"Inside Story," The New Republic, CV (July 1n, lQul), 62.

 

2"Poetry," Commonweal, xxxrv (June 13, 19n1), 188.

 

3Baldanza, 188.

u"A Greenhouse Eden," Theodore Roethkg: Bssgys on the Poetry, ed.
Arnold Stein (Seattle, 1965), p. 20. Hereafter cited as Stein.

The Lost Sen and Other Poems, published in 19%, was boldly ex-
perimental, particularly in the poems of two of its four sections, these
later to be called the "Greenhouse Poems" and the four long narratives.
These surprising and difficult poems were immediately praised. Miss
Began continued to champion Roethke, comparing him favorably with
Randall Jarrell: "Where Jarrell frequently only describes,

Roethke relives. The Lost Son is written with complete conscious

 

control....Throughout, true emotion gives the chosen style coloration
and shape."1
A frequent question in reviews of the "Greenhouse Poems" is whether
they are simply poems of natural description or are symbolic. Eugene
Davidson, for instance, maintains that Roethke uses "flowers, wind, water,
etc." symbolically: "These serve him as images often presented with
the clear sharp colors . of the objects and then are transformed into
symols of human struggle or contemplation."2 Another review, by
Hugh Gibb, illustrates in relation to this question the way in which a
perceptive critic can "fix" a group of poems with a "formulated phrase"
(which rapidly becomes a cliche) without ever having to support his
pronouncements with details of the poems: "But the poems never remain

just brilliant descriptions. Effortlessly they assume a wider

significance. The nudging shoot, the rapacious weeds and the proud tulip

1
"Verse," Ni, XXIV (May 15, 19158), 118.

2
"Poet's Shelf," 11:, n.s. XXXVII (Sumner 191:8), 7M.

heads dramatize the eternal processes of nature to which all life
conforms, including the Spiritual life of man."1 When discussing the
"Greenhouse Poems," I deal with the question of how the reader knows
that they are in fact "symbols of growth."

It is surprising that more charges of obscurity weren't leveled
against the long poems. Peter Viereck was the only critic to make
this objection and even he quickly backed off from his position:
"Roethke's The Lost Son...is too obscure (it is time for a frontal assault
on obscurity as inartistic...). But Roethke's original imagery and
stark emotion-charged vocabulary outweigh all objections."2

In Stanley Kunitz's mind, there were no objections to be out-

weighed. He begins his review by saying: "With The Lost Sop,_

 

Theodore Roethke confirms what some of us have long suspected: that

he stands among the original and powerful contemporary poets."3
And he concludes by comparing Roethke's second book with his first:

"Roethke's first volume, Open House (19u1), was praised, deservedly, for
its lyric resourcefulness,“ its technical proficiency, its ordered
sensibility. The present collection, by virtue of its indomitable

creativeness and audacity, includes much more chaos in its cosmos; it is

1"Symbols of Spiritual Growth," The New. York Times Book Review.
1 August 19u8, p. in.

2"Five Good Poets in a Bad Year," The Atlantic Monthly, CLXXXII
(November 19n8), 95.

3"News of the Root," Poetgz, LXXIII (January 19fl9), 222.

“Most of the reviews which touched this point chided Roethke for
lacking flexibility of technique.

it is difficult, heroic, moving, and profoundly disquieting."1

Certainly the battles fought in the 1920's over the works of Eliot and
Joyce made possible this ready reception of poems as difficult as
"The Lost Son."

In 1950 Kenneth Burke gave an additional impetus to Roethke's
career by publishing a ferty-page study, "The Vegetal Radicalism of
Theodore Roethke." Although Burke was more concerned with interpre-
tation than evaluation, he did imply that he thought more highly of the
"Greenhouse Poems" than of the long narratives. Like Davidson, he
considers the greenhouse poems symbolic: "Clearly the imagistic figuring
Of a human situation...."2 Speaking of perhaps the best of the "Green-
house Poems," "Big Wind," he says: "It reveals most clearly how Roethke
can endow his brief lyrics with intensity of'ggtiggy...No matter how

"3 After

brief the poems are, they progress from stage to stage.
analyzing the poem in detail, he concludes: "...though you'd never
look to Roethke for the rationalistic, the expository steps are here
ticked off as strictly as the successive steps of a well-formed
argument. And thanks to the developmental structure of such poems, one

never thinks of them sheerly as descriptive: they have the vigor, and the

u
poetic morality, of action, of form unfolding."

1"News of the Root," 225.

2
SR, LVIII (January 1950), 68.

aBurke, 69.

u

In contrast to these conmendatory words for the "Greenhouse Poems,"
Burke offers the following somewhat disapproving remarks on the
narratives: "The long poems are...engrossed with problems of welfare
(_S_a_1_l_l_s;), though of a kind attainable rather by persistent dreamlike
yielding than by moralistic "guidance of the will."...The infantile motif
serves here, perhaps, like the persuasive gestures of sorrow or help-
lessness, asq>peal to childless girls vaguely diSposed toward nursing.
The lost son's bid for a return to the womb may thus become transformed
into a doting on the erotic imagery of the 'sheath-wet' and its 'slip-
ooze.'"1 But even this mild censure is considerably tempered when
Burke goes on to Spend thirty pages discussing the long poems.

Roethke's third book, Praise to the BndI, published in 1951,

 

contained the four narratives from The Lost Son and added to than ten

 

similar poems. Again, the reception was overwhelmingly favorable.
Peter Viereck repeats his earlier two-sided judgment: Roethke is
"...obsure but felicitous...."2 Two other critics also straddle the
fence. Selden Rodman introduces the matter of "sense," which appears
in many discussions of these poems, but he feels that: "Roethke at his
best does not make 'sense'--he isn't trying to. He is trying, and

succeeding as well as any poet can to write a poetry of pure intuition."3

lBurke, 81-82.

2
"Technique and Inspiration, a Year of Poetry," The Atlantic
Monthly, CLXXlX (January 1952), 81.

 

a"Intuitive Poet," The New York Herald Tribune Book Week,
2 December 1951, p. 32.

10

Rodman displays his anti-intellectualism -- one cause of cursory reading--
again later in the review: "In its present form, at least, Roethke's
verse commicates nothing except to the reader who is willing to
surrender himself to the music of suggestive incantation and join the

"1 As with Burke's

poet on his somnambulistic return to the nursery.

cements, one perhaps feels that a slight condemnation is implied. 0n

the other hand, Rodman compares the poems with the flower poems of

D. H. Lawrence and calls them "...whelly original and mysteriously

beautiful evocation[s] of the sexual awakening of an unhappy child":2
Rolfe Humphries once more has something to say both for and

against the new book. Roethke, he says, "...is more convincing," than

most poets who attempt to "plumb the depths of...[their] own

unconscious...."3 But he also finds that one difficulty, "...which

the terminology of the unconscious offers, [is] its censorship, its

disguise through vagueness...."u This difficulty he feels Roethke

has "removed." But there remains another danger that he feels

Roethke has not guarded against, that is "the danger...that the rhythms

themselves will seem a little obsessed, and they are also astonishingly

easy to imitate. . . ."5

l.
Rodman, 32.

2Rodman , 32 .

3
"Verse Chronicle," The Nation, CLXXIV (March 22, 1952), 281;.

 

“Humphries , 2 8n .

5
Humphries , 2 8H .

11

Both Rodman and Humphries express or imply reservations about
the "sense" of these poems. .One of the men who find these the peak
of Roethke's achievement states the issue quite clearly. W. D. Snodgrass,
writing about thirteen years after'the book's publication, calls it
"...a plunge into the wildest and most experimental poetry of the whole
period."1 Then as he comes to the matter of "sense," he falters and
takes two paths at once: "Even after the wildest surrealists, that
voice [in "Give Way, Ye Gates"] sounds new and astonishing; it could
be no one but Roethke. It is an achieved style, carrying much meaning,

and touching only tangentially other voices we have heard in poetry."2

That is path number one; we come to path number’twe after’Snedgrass has
quoted ten lines of "The Shape of the Fire": "Even now, more than
twelve years since these poems appeared, I do not feel that I really

understand them, or feel certain how ultimately successful they are."3

Snodgrass feels that the poems "carry much meaning," but he also feels
that he does not "really understand them." During his life Roethke was
fortunate enough to be admired if not understood. As I shall show in
a later discussion, these poems are not "pure intuitions." They can

be understood.

1
"'That Anguish of Concreteness'--Theodore Roethke's Carrer,"
Theodore Roethke: Essays on the Poetry, ed. Arnold Stein (Seattle,
, p. . erea er cited as Stein.

 

2
Stein, p. 80.

3
Stein, p. 81.

12

Let me return for one moment to Snodgrass's interesting essay.
Inmediately after the contradiction displayed above he reaches the main
point of his argument: "Yet that [that the poems are difficult or
impossible to understand] is not the point. The point, I think, is that
Roethke had opened out before himself an incredible landscape. He had
regressed into areas of the psyche where the powerful thoughts and
feelings of the child-the raw materials and driving power of our later
lives--remain under the layers of rational and of civilized.purpose.

The explorations made possible by this book alone could have engaged a

lifetime. Yet Roethke never seriously entered the area again."1

Snodgrass feels that the poetry fellowing Praise to the End! is a

 

falling off. He is practically alone in this opinion.

The Waking, Roethke's fourth book, won the 1953 Pulitzer Prize.
It was a selection made up almost entirely of poems published in the
first three books. Roethke added one poem, "Frau Bauman, Frau Schmidt,
and Frau Schwartze," to the greenhouse sequence, and introduced six new
poems, written between 1951 and 1953. Many of the reviewers of this
book look back at the earlier books and re-evaluate them quite casually.
Howard Nemerov, for instance, writes: "Roethke recognizes his own
territory quite early, in his first volume, as 'Hy narrow vegetable
:realm,‘ but does not take it over fully until the second and third,
where, through a disorganization and formlessness which are in some
sense superficial, a precondition and a clearing-away, the narrow
vegetable realm is seen to be quite inclusive after all, and not without

adept arrangement in its riotousness...."2

1Stein, p. 81. Snodgrass here approaches a.point of disagreement
among critics: had Roethke read Freud and Jung when he wrote these poems?
See my discussion of the poems in the following pages.

2
"Three in One," 55, XVI (Winter 195“), lus.

13

Hayden Carruth provides a similar sweeping reappraisal: "He [Roethke] has
turned, after a long apprenticeship in the techniques of standard
English verse, to a personal idiom and a compressed, exclamatory line.
He does not always avoid the pitfall of obscurity, but his writing is
certainly more interesting and more provocative than any other current
poetry."1

The only two men to comment on the new poems make diametrically
opposed judgments. Nemerov, who finds them inferior to the narratives,
writes: "It is a little disturbing to find this poet, in some of his
new poems, such as the 'Four For Sir John Davies,‘ returning to the
'world,' to a conventional stanza and syntax, a more conventional kind
of statement."2 On the other side we have the judgment made by Hilton
Kramaer, not in a review but in an article, "The Poetry of Theodore
Roethke," where he points out weaknesses in most of Roethke's earlier
verse. His main criticism (he does not specify which poems he is
referring to) is that in Roethke's "pm-historical" poetry, the language
is "...the loose diction of a point of view which has not yet learned
to recognize human moral history as anything separate from life as a
primodial "11016-"3 He explains this limitation by asserting that:
"Pro-history is a single episode in, the human drama; whereas history,

however motley or schematic its content, is a spectacle of great variety.”

I
"The Idiom Is Personal," The New York Times Book Review,

13 September 1953, p. 1n.
2
Nemerov, 152.

3Western Review, XVIII (Winter 1951+), 132.

”Kranner, 132 .

1'4

Later Kramer charges Roethke with "abStraction" and "primitivism," both
of which "...suppress history, and thereby suppress the human image

in which our values subsist."l

But then Kramer goes on to maintain
that Roethke "...abandons some of his tendency toward abstraction....":
"...in his latest poems Roethke affirms the human image by means which
are largely denied in Praise to the Endl—alyricism of adult emotions,
and a humor which is nothing if not social."2 Kramer is not alone in
finding fault with Roethke for writing asocial poetry. John Wain writes:
"What is wrong with Roethke's poetry is not that it doesn't mentim the

New Deal, Pearl Harbor, Little Rock, and socialized medicine, but that
it doesn't enter the ordinary human world where these things have their
effect."3 Wain explains this by saying that there are "areas": "--of
memory, of history, of personal relationships, of opinion, of custom--
which we ordinarily inhabit, and which Roethke's poetry does not allow
us, while we are under its sway, to revisit.“ I find it difficult to
agree or disagree on this point. The criticism, however, does sound

as if Kramer and Wain were asking, "Why wasn't Roethke, Yeats?" Perhaps,
as an antidote to the stricture, we should return to Kramer's high
valuation of the new poems in The Waking and cite in support James G.

Southworth: "The new poems in The Waking (195a) are song the most

JKramer, 1%.

2

Kramer, 1&6.

3

"The Monocle of My Sea-Faced Uncle," in Stein, p. 75.

u
Stein, p. 75.

15

sensitive and.beautifu1 poems that Roethke has written, and among the
most sensitive of contemporary poetry."1

Roethke's next book, Words for the Wind, has the subtitle The

 

Collected Verse of Theodore Roethke, and was published in England in

 

1957 and in this country in 1958, where it won the National Book Award
for that year. It is divided into two parts, the first being The Waking
in its entirety (the "New Poems" become "Shorter Poems, 1951-1953"),

and the second comprising thirty-nine new poems, in five groups. As
with The Waking, many of the reviews pass judgment on all of Roethke's
favor, there is a growing body of adverse opinions. At this point,

we come to the problem of Roethke's emulation of Yeats, which is perhaps
the point most sharply contested among those who have published comments
on Roethke. In my opinion, Roethke's echoing of Yeats does damage

his poetry, and I believe that on this point the balance of Opinion

is against Roethke.

Babett Deutsch, one of the first to comment on this matter,
defends him; in fact, she entitles her review "Roethke's Clear Signature":
"Evidence of his devotion to Yeats is not limited to the pages written
in his memory ["The Dying Man, In Nemoriam: W. B. Yeats"], but there is
no subservience here."2 John Berryman, in a review full of high praise,
sets apart the work from 1951 on: "Since 1951 his jokes have become

less sinister and desolate; and although he has written delightful poems,

l
"The Poetry of Theodore Roethke," 9E, XXl, (March 1960), 329.

2The New York Herald Tribune Book Week, 7 December 1958, p. 3.

16

one has a sense of a marking of time in relation to the giant steps
earlier. Surprisingly, much of his work has become "literary"; he

has submitted gleefully to the influences-mostly disastmus--of Yeats,
even Eliot, and others."1 Thom Gunn, more censorious than Berryman,
writes that: "Somewhere around the end of the 'forties the verse turns
more rational, but at the same time it starts showing the influence

of Yeats. . . . It is, quite simply, pernicious. In the later poems
of the collection, it is the ghost of Yeats Speaking, or the ghost

of Roethke, or a merging of the two ghosts--it is anything but the
living Roethke."2 W. D. Snodgrass, who like Berryman considered the
"New Poems" of The Waking a marking time, is as decided in his con-

demnation of the "New Poems" of Words for the Wind as Gunn. He writes:

 

"In Words for the Wind, Roethke's collected poems, the new direction

 

appeared. It was a shock. There had been hints that Roethke was
interested in Yeats's voice, hints that he might follow the general shift
in mentieth-century verse by following wild experimentation with a new

inrmalism. No one could have expected that Words for the Wind would

 

contain a series of sixteen "Love Poems" and a sequence, "The Dying Man,"
all in a voice almost indistinguishable fr~our--Yeats's.":3 Snodgrass

believes that after this Roethke never again found his own voice. In

1
"From the Middle and Senior Generations," ASch, XXVIII
(Sumner 1959), 381;.

2"Poets English and American," :5, n.s. XLVIII (June 1959). 52"-

3
Stein, p. 82.

l7

speaking of Roethke's last book, he says that the "...language has
become strangely decayed...,"l owing to Roethke’s acceptance of a
religious orthodoxy. Snodgrass writes that: "The desire to lose one's
own form has taken on a religious rationale to support itself. Where
Roethke's earlier free-verse poems were neasiy always pure explorations,
his most ambitious free-verse poems now try more and more to incorporate
a fixed and predetermined religious and irrational certainty."2 His
explanation of this statement--which at last returns us to Roethke's
use of Yeats and Eliot--appears twa pages later, couched in scientific,
especially psychoanalytic, terms: "Eliot's ideas and Yeat's cadences
rushed in to fill the vacuum of the father~model which could have made
this world bearable, yet which Roethke either could not find or could
not accept."3 Although these quotations, taken from widely separated
parts of Snodgrass's argument, may appear somewhat unrelated, they are
in fact, the high-points of a cogent line of reasoning. I do not share
Snodgrass's preference of the long narratives to the last poems, nor do
I accept his "diagnosis" of Roethke's problems; I do, however, think
that his argument is interesting, ingenious and often insightful.

Many others, among them W. T. Scott, Stephen Spender, Edwin Muir

and Delmore Schwartz, reviewed Words for the Wind, lining up on one side

 

or the other in the argument about Roethke's growth or decline. The

argument, of course, continues. After Words for the Wind, Roethke

1Stein, p. 91.

2Stein, p. 89.

3
Stein, p. 91.

18

published, in 1961, a book entitled I Am! Says the Lamb, containing the

 

"Greenhouse Poems" and twenty-two "Nonsense Poems," five of which had

appeared as "New Poems" in Words for the Wind. It was reviewed in only

 

two places, The New Yorker and Poetry. Both reviews were favorable.

 

On August 1, 1963, Roethke died, several weeks after completing

preparations for his next volume, The Far Field.‘1 If the "New Poems"

 

in Words for the Wind evoked more adverse criticism than the earlier

 

work, The Far Field restored the balance.

 

I share the opinion of the majority of the reviewers that it is
Roethke's best book. Stanley Kunitz, for instance, regards it as:

"...unquestinnably one of the landmarks of the American imagination...."2

X. J. Kennedy writes in his review of The Far Field: "At times, reading

 

his collection Praise to the End! (1951), I have suspected him of

 

saving up his lucky phrases in notebooks, then yoking them with Roman

numerals into a continuity. I feel this about none of these beautiful
poems. And the shade of Yeats that haunted his work a few years ago,

while still visible in the finely chiseled poems, has been absorbed

successfully." William Jay Smith also finds these poems the peak of

1The only evidence that Roethke did make these preparations is a
statement by Stanley Kunitz: "A few weeks before his death Roethke com-
pleted his arrangement of some fifty new poem, published last July under
the title, The Far Field. "Roethke: Poet of Transformations," The New
Re ublic, CLII (January 23, 1965), 26. Kunitz does not indicate the source
of his information.

 

2
"Roethke: Poet of Transformations," 26.

3"Joys, Griefs and 'All Things Innocent, Hapless, Forsaken',"
The New York Times Book Review, 23 August 1961:, p. 5.

19

Roethke's achievement: "Never...has his musical sense seemed more
apparent than in these last poems....Nor his technical mastery seemed
surer."1 Certainly the most extreme praise given Roethke at this time
comes from James Dickey (who is not, incidentally, commenting on

The Far Field): "Theodore Roethke seems to me the finest poet now
writing in English. I reiterate this with a certain fierceness, knowing
that I have put him up against Eliot, Pound, Graves, and a good many
others of deservedly high rank.... The best of Roethke's poems are

very nearly as frightening and necessary as 'darkness was upon the face

of the deep,‘ and as simple and awesome as 'let there be light.'"2

In a review of Sequence, Sometimes Metaphysical, a section of The Far

 

Field.published separately, Dickey does not repeat the judgment just
quoted, but does refer to "Roethke's marvelous sensous apprehension of
the natural world--finer in its way than Rilke's because more immediate,

less withdrawn and contemplative...."3 This 13 high praise, indeed.

On the other hand, several reviewers join Snodgrass in seeing
the last poems as something less than Roethke's best work. Hayden Carruth
gives a detailed statement: "Some of these poems, perhaps fifteen of the
whole forty-eight, seem to be unfinished work. At least they contain
errors in composition that Roethke almost certainly would have corrected,
though since we aren't told how or'by whom the book was assembled, con-
jecture is useless. It is best to disregard these poems. Ten or

twelve-of the rest are very good Roethke indeed, the equal, or nearly,

1
"Verse: Two Posthumous Volumes," Herpers, CCXXIX (October l96u), law.

2The Suspect in Poetry (Madison, Minnesota, 196h), p. 58.

 

3"Theodore Roethke," Poetry, cv (November 196k), 120.

20

of anything in his previous work. On every page one finds, as expected,
something quite brilliant, even if only a line or a word."1 Carruth

2 And

goes on to say of the book as a whole that "These poems fail."
he attributes this failure to Roethke's fear of dying, which "deepens
into a terrible malady."3 William Meredith makes a similar judgment,

which he buttresses by recalling a conversation that he had had with

the late R. P. Blackmur, who was to have reviewed The Far Field:

 

"When I talked with him [Blackmur] about the book he expresses misgivings

(which I share) about some of the poems and particularly about the six

longer'poems gathered at the front...tmder the title "North American

Sequence." The sure voice and images of some of Roethke's earlier

poems in the free form are undercut here by occasional diffuseness and

mannerism. ... I think Blackmur meant simply that he usually wrote

better." In my opinion, the poems of the "North American Sequence".

are not diffuse. They appear'to be prose-like natural descriptions,

but in actuality they are highly organized and concise poems. They

seem to me to be freer of mannerisms than most of Roethke's other poetry.
By way of concluding this survey of the critical reception of

Roethke's verse, we may look at the ‘one full-length volume so far

published on Roethke, Theodore Roethke: Essays on the Poetry, edited by

Arnold Stein and published in 1965. In addition to an introduction by

 

1
"Requiem for God's Gardener," The Nation, CLXXXXIX (September 28,
196%), 168. . .

2
Carruth, 169.

3Carruth, 159.

“floogitating with his Finger Tips," The New York Herald Tribme
Book Week, 18 July 1965, p. M.

 

21

the editor, it contains nine essays by men of established reputation.
We find here the same diversity of judgments that was noticeable
throughout the preceding survey. I shall simply quote a sampling.
Stephen Spender, for instance, writes that: "There is this
Yeats-obsessed side of Roethke..., one is impressed by this; but what
one loves is the poet of Beatrix Potter details, not the rhapsodic bard.”-L
Louis L. Martz agrees with this view. He writes of the "Greenhouse
Poems": "The sequence is one of the permanent achievements of modern
poetry: its poems deserve to cling to future anthologies like Marvell's
"Garden" or Wordsworth's poems about daffodils."2 Later Martz states

that "Roethke never surpasses the achievement of The Lost Son, though

 

many of his later poems are filled to the same brim."3 Opposed to this
we have John Wain's statement that "...there is a stylistic development
that goes onward from the beginning of his career to the end."u On

the matter of Roethke's use of other poets, Wain writes: "...his
emergence into the foreground of an individual utterance is habitually
in the shadows of one or other of his grand masters. This disadvantage,
which made Roethke so easy a target for the disapproval of reviewers...
almost to the end. But not quite to the end. His last, posthumous

collection, The Far Field, brings in the harvest of those years of

 

1
"The Objective Ego," Stein, p. 6.

2
"A Greenhouse Eden," Stein, p. 27.

3Stein, p. 35.

u
"The Monocle of My Sea-Faced Uncle," Stein, p. 69.

22

single-minded dedication to poetry."1 Finally, let me quote from

Ralph J. Mills, Jr., who more than anyone else has concerned himself
with explicating Roethke's poetry: "Theodore Roethke, it seems to me,
is one of our great American poets; and in 'North American Sequence'
and 'Sequence, Sometimes Metaphysical' he has left us not only some of
his finest work but a number of the most astonishing mystical poems

in the language."2

Although, as we have seen, the reviewers praised Roethke highly
throughout his career, these same reviewers disagree among themselves
about which portion of his work is the best. It is, of course,
difficult to prophesy intelligently about the resolution of this
disagreement. If I were to attempt to do so, however, I should say that
eventually Roethke's reputation will benefit from the disagreement. We
shall come to feel that we are not forced to chose between the "Greenhouse
Poems" and the "North American Sequence." The notion that the style
is the man and that a "sincere" writer should.perfect only one style is
patently romantic. It is a notion that even the writings of James Joyce
have not been able to overcome. But I feel that slowly this concept of

,literature is changing. Thom Gunn believes that, "Words fer the Wind...

 

is a disconcerting book, for it is written in several completely different
styles, which appear to derive from several completely different

attitudes toward poetry." If I am right, in the long we will praise

I
Stein, p. 71.

2"In the Way of Becoming, Roethke's Last Poem," Stein, p. 135.

23

Roethke for his versatility rather than condemn him for hypocrisy or
inconsistency .

The preceding survey covers only statements of an evaluative
nature made by the reviewers. The remainder of this dissertation will
in a sense survey the interpretative statements made by the same writers.
Most of the explications that are at all detailed (and few of them are)
approach the poetry in terms of psychoanalytic criticism, eSpecially
Jungian, or Western mysticism. This dissertation follows neither of
these paths, though one cannot deny their usefulness. The purpose of
this dissertation is to demonstrate that despite the different styles
with which Roethke experimented, throughout his career he expressed
only a few themes in terms of remarkably few clusters of images.

In other words, the apparent multiplicity of both themes and images can

be traced to only two or three main roots.

The title of this dissertation refers to what I consider one of
the most important roots of Roethke's poetry. It alludes to one of
the "Proverbs of Hell" in Blake's "The Marriage of Heaven and Hell":
"Eternity is in love with the productions of time."1 More than any-
thing else, Roethke's poetry is a vivid presentation of reasons for
both loving and despising "the productions of time." He moved,
tlroughout his life, between idealism and materialism, and between

renunciation and sensualism, usually not attaining the extremes. One

1
The Poetry_ and Prose of William Blake, ed. David V. Erdman with
commentary by Harold Bloom (New York, 1965), p. 35.

214

of the main sources of difficulty in understanding his poetry (as is
‘true also of Yeats' work) is his lack of a clearly defined idea of what
he considers to be the alternative to life in time. In other words,

he did not adhere to a philosophical or religious orthodoxy, as did
Eliot and.Stevens.- He attempted, though, to understand why he loved
what he did and why he loathed and feared what he did, and in large
part, the strength of his poetry lies in the honesty and perspicacity of
his attempt. In the following chapters, I shall employ the term "the
productions of time" in discussing groups of Roethke's poems. The
term's meaning will change slightly when applied to different groups,
though its basic denotation will remain constant. Fundamentally, it refers
to whatever in the world of time and Space excites the love or loathing
of the speaker of the poems. This will usually be something tangible,
but not always: the human personality and.death, for instance, though
intangible, are "productions of time." 'A few of the changes in the

term's meaning are as follows: in Qpen House it refers to the personality

 

and the body; in the "Greenhouse Poems" it refers to the environment
as it affects the plants' growth; in the long narratives, to the parents'
effect on a child and to the origins and evolution of life; in the poems

of the early 1950's,to sexual desire and death; and in The Far Field

 

it refers to the abstractions "human experience" and death.

CHAPTER II

SBNTIBNT T0 SHOCK

Throughout his poetry Roethke employs the ancient, widely
accepted idea that reality is dualistic, that everything can be subsumed
under the terms "mind" and "matter." For Roethke the dualism appears
in a form with a slightly different focus, for the words he most

frequently uses to express it are "flesh" and "spirit." Many of his

 

images, eSpecially in gen House, are traditional symbols for one or
both parts of this dichotomy. He speaks, for instance, of the flesh as a
"house," a "garment," and a "cage," and of the spirit as "marrow," a
"core," and a "heart." He does, however, depart from the usual treat-
ment of these terms by at times giving them meanings associated with cer-
tain concepts of modern psychology: the spirit becomes the individual
personality (perhaps, more narrowly, the id), and the flesh becomes

the acquired customs by which the individual adapts himself to society
(resembling the super-ego; the voice of the speaker mediates between the
two, playing the role of the ego).

Frequently in Open House, the speaker accepts the traditional

 

attitudes that regard the Spirit as good and the body as evil. In a
number of poems, however, the Speaker declares that his spirit is diseased
or is wild (resembling the id). He explores various means of curing or
taming his spirit, of achieving peace, but on the whole the book presents

no particular therapy. The theme of the diseased spirit takes on wider

25

26

significance in many poems through being transformed into the conception
that all life is a "disease" of inanimate matter. It is this emphasis
on the painfulness of being alive (and of being conscious) that gives
me the title for this chapter.
gen House contains thirty-five poems, divided into five roughly
equivalent groups. The principle governing the grouping is the relation-
ship between the Speaker and the themes. In Section I the speaker feels
threatened by the matter at hand. He is discussing the failure of a
direct assault of reason or consciousness on the deeper parts of his
psyche; the tone often suggests that he is almost overwhelmed by fear
and despair. He is, in fact, very close to being the "spiritual coward"
"whose guard was lowered" in "Prognosis" (91, p. 7). The poems of
Section II may be seen as an extreme form of withdrawal from the pains
discussed in the preceding group. Almost none of these poems of natural
description mentions anything that pertains directly to human existence.
When they do refer to mankind, it is with ironic mockery:
A man's head is an eminence upon
A field of barley spread beneath the sun.
("In Praise of Prairie," 92, p. 23.)
And,
...something is amiss or out of place
When mice with wings can wear a human face.
("The Bat," O_H_, p. 29.)
These poems, in their studied avoidance of human reference and of
abstractions, take their place as forerunners of the "Greenhouse Poems."
In Section III the speaker returns to the themes of Section I, but

replaces the direct assault with the indirection of humor and bravado.

Rather than being overwhelmed, he now has the strength to assert himself,

27

even while recognizing his own limitations:

The rough, the wicked, and the wild

That keep the Spirit undefiled.

With these I match my little wit

And earn the right to stand or sit....

("Long Live the Weeds," 9H, p. 35)

The "spiritual coward" of Section I has now grown brave enough to say:

This flat land has become a pit

Wherein I am beset by harm,

The heart must rally to my wit

And rout the specter of alarm.

("Against Disaster," 95, p. 38.)
Section IV also contains poems whose themes could become painful

for the Speaker, but here he takes the offensive and turns his humor
against other people, as in "Academic":

The stethoscope tells what everyone fears:

You're likely to go on living for years,

Hith a nurse-mide waddle and a shop-girl simper,

And the style of your prose growing limper and limper.

(9H, p. #5)

The "you" in this poem does not mean "one," that is, does not include
the Speaker as part of the reference. On the contrary, the speaker,
throughout Section IV, is forming the boundary line of his identity by
ridiculing (separating himself from) people who are similar to him in
certain respects. He has placed himself in the genus "intellectual,"

or, perhaps, "author" or "poet," and in these poems he emphasizes the

differentiae that distinguish him from other members of the class. In

 

Section V the Speaker attains his greatest success in delivering himself,
to use his words (9H, p. #9), "from all / Activity centripetal."

These poems treat subjects that are of interest not to the Speaker
personally, but to another person, to society, or to mankind at large.

Rolfe Humphries observes that "Toward the end of the book, the 'Lull,’

28

for instance, or 'Highway: Michigan,‘ [both in Section V] the consciousness

al-

is social as well as personal.... The two poems of Section V in

which the "I" is present, "The Reminder" and "Night Journey," both

establish the Speaker's detachment.2
I do not maintain that the preceding definitions of the five

sections are so accurate that they account for the placing of every

poem. They do, however, fairly well describe the differences between

the various groups, and, more importantly, they drm: attention to

Roethke's experimentation with theme, point of view, and tone. Anyone

who follows the preceding discussion while at the same time examining

the poems will also acknowledge the truth of Miss Louise Bogan's

statement that "One immediately feels.... . the strength of . . . [Roethke's]

determination to yield in no way to the poorer tricks of’style."3

The title of this chapter is a variation upon a line from one

of the poems in Section I, "Death Piece":

His thought is tied, the curving prow

Of motion moored to rock;

And minutes burst upon a brow

Insentient to shock.

(9!, p. 6.)

These lines touch on three concerns that are important throughout
Roethke's poetry, the landscape of the mind, time, and the "shocks" to

which the flesh and spirit are heir. The third of these informs most of

1"Inside Story," The New Republic, CV (July 1“: 19"1): 52-

 

2The application of this statement to "Night Journey" will be
explained in the discussion of that poem to follow.

3
"Stitched on Bone," Trial Balances (New York, 1935). p. 138.

29

the poems in this volume, working primarily through the imagery of
flesh and spirit, through the pervasive theme of the diseased Spirit,
and through explorations of various ways of finding peace. Before
discussing particular poems, I should say‘that I do not generally dis-
tinguish between an image and a metaphor or Simile. Wellek and Warren

in The Theory of Literature do not find it necessary to make such a

 

distinction: "Is there any important sense [they write] in which
'symbol' differs from 'image' and 'metaphor'? Primarily, we think,

in the recurrence and persistence of the 'symbol." And 'image'

may be invoked once as a metaphor, but if it persistently recurs,

both as presentation and representation, it becomes a symbol, may even
become part of a symbolic (or mythic) system."1 Most of the images in
this book are, in fact, metaphors, and if we ignore certain individuating
details in various occurrences (i.e., if we abstract them), we can
justifiably call them "symbols."

The poems in Open House as a group contain more abstractions than

 

any other group of poem that Roethke was to write. Only the pieces in
Sections II and V are descriptive to any considerable degree. Host of the
poems do not contain fully sketched pictures or other detailed sensory
descriptions, but however do contain a large number of metaphors (again,
more than any other poems by Roethke). Let us look at the metaphors in
the title poem, "Open House." They are as follows: "secrets g1,"

"heart keeps gen house," "doors are widely swung," "love [is] an epic

 

of the eyes," "love [has] no disguise," "naked to the bone," "nakedness
[is] my shield," "myself is what I .wear," "the Spirit [is] spare

[meaning 'lean'J," "the deed will speak," "stop the lying mouth,"

1(New York), 1956, p. 178.

30

"rage may ... cry," and "witless agony," (9H, p. 3; my italics).
From the figures dealing with the house, disguise, nakedness and the
shield, one can gather that the poem employs a distinction between
something inner and true and something outer and concealing or protective.
Roethke has consented on this poem at some length:

The human problem is to find out what one really _i_§_: whether
one exists, whether existence is possible. But how? "Am I but
nothing, leaning toward a thing?" I think of what I wrote and felt
nearly thirty years ago in a period of ill-health and economic
terror—the first poem of my first book. [Here Roethke quotes
the second and third stanzas.] All of this has been said before,
in Thoreau, in Rilke.

I was going through, though I didn't realize it at the

time, a stage that all contemplative men must go through.

This poem is a clumsy, innocent, deeperate asseveration. I

am not Speaking of the eupirical self, the flesh-bound ego;

it's a single word: myself, the aggregate of the several

selves, if you will. The spirit or soul--should we say the

self, once perceived becomes the soul?--this I was keeping

"spare" in my desire for the essential. But the spirit need

not be Spare: it can grow gracefully and beautifully likela

tendril, like a flower. I did not know this at the time.
In this prose statement-written thirty years after the poem-~Roethke
changes his point of emhasis (perhaps in a way designed to protect
himself). The poem tells us that the speaker's spirit is not living
in its "house" in the dignified manner expected of it. Rather it has
wrested control from some other agency and is now making a spectacle
of itself: that which it should hide for its own protection, it is pro-
claiming aloud. If one includes evidence from other poems in the book,
one can say that the Spirit is troubled or even diseased and is seeking

peace through a Whitmanesque laying-bare. Perhaps this is what Roethke

l"cu 'Identity,'" in On the Poet and His Craft: Selected Prose
of Theodore Roethke, ed. Ralph J. Hills, Jr. (Seattle, 1965), pp. 20-21.
Hereafter cited as Poet and Craft.

 

 

31

means when he calls the poem "a clumsy, innocent, desperate
asseveration." On the other hand, when he maintains that the poem
is about the schooling of the Spirit, he believes this early attempt
at a Straightforward statement of his spiritual pain.
It would be impossible to deny the presence of such a statement

in "Feud" (9H, pp. u—S), the second stanza of which runs:

Exhausted fathers thinned the blood,

You curse the legacy of pain;

Darling of an infected brood,

You feel disaster climb the vein.
Although the imagery employs the distinction between inner and outer,
it seriously confuses the two. The "disaster" climbing the vein surely
represents inherited mental or Spiritual illness, and as such should

be inner, which it is in the lines of stanza three:

There's a canker at the root, your seed
Denies the blessing of the sun. . .

But in stanzas four and five the illness is separated from the Spirit.
The uncontaminated Spirit is represented as the defender of a walled
city, and the illness is embodied in the image of the attackers. The
poem describes the attackers as being in the city and as having been
let in by "Spies." These last two stanzas perhaps dramatize the
speaker's effort to believe that his disease can be amputated, that it
is not part of the Spirit's identity. The confusion between inner and
outer reflects the difficulty the speaker has in believing this. These
last two stanzas read:

The dead leap at the throat, destroy

The meaning of the day; dark forms

Have scaled your walls, and spies betray
Old secrets to amorphous swarms.

32

You meditate upon the nerves,

Inflame with hate. This ancient feud

Is seldom won. The spirit starves

Until the dead have been subdued.
The dead, of course, represent the past, or more Specifically the
ancestors who have passed on the illness to the Speaker. As in "Open
House" the Spirit's "secrets" are being revealed. The defense of the
inner from the outer breaks down: the individual's psychological
defenses fail and he is betrayed to others, to "the amorphous swarms."
This poem indicates that the complete Openness, treated as something

of a virtue in the preceding poem, is actually an enfbrced suffering.

The poem in Open House that most fully employs the dualistic

 

imagery of flesh and Spirit is "Epidermal Macabre" (Qfl, p. 37).

Although the Speaker makes it perfectly clear that he loathes his own
physicality, he does not make it clear whether his Spirit is healthy

or ill. The implications are that the spirit is troubled, but troubled
because it is in the flesh, and that it could find peace if it could
"dispense I With [the] false accoutrements of sense." Since

virtually every image in the poem pertains to the inner-outer dichotomy,

I shall quote the poem in full:

Indelicate is he who loathes

The aspect of his fleshly clothes--
The flying fabric stitched on bone,
The vesture of the skeleton.

The garment neither fur not Vair,
The cloak of evil and despair,

The veil long violated by

Caresses of the hand and eye.

Yet such is my unseemliness:

I hate my epidermal dress,

The savage blood's obscenity,

The rags of my anatomy,

And willingly would I diSpense
With false accoutrements of sense,
To sleep immodestly, a most
Incarnadine and carnal ghost.

33

When the speaker calls his body "the cloak of evil and despair," he
may be saying that it conceals and protects an evil and deSperate soul.
Of course, he might also be saying again in this line that the cloak
is evil, but I think not. In any case, the poem is certainly an ex-
pression of the theme that life is painful. And if we emphasize the
references to sentences and to the unconsciousness of sleep, we can
say further that consciousness is an irritant, perhaps a disease, in
nature. If this reading is accurate, and I believe that it is, then
there is a very deep-seated ambivalence in Roethke's poetry. 0n the
one hand, he expresses the traditional Platonic and Judao-Christian belief
that the spirit is good and is, during mortal life, entangled in the
evil world of physical existence. On the other hand, he sometimes ex-
presses the belief that the life-force itself, eSpecially that extreme
development of it that we call "consciousness," is an irritation in
inanimate nature. The escape from the pain of life and consciousness is
insentience or oblivion, as described in the last no lines of
"Epidermal Macabre" and in "Death Piece" (91, p. 6). The ambivalence
is essentially a vacillating between philosophical idealism and
materialism. As the poems in this first book Show, Roethke found many
reasons to loathe and fear life amid the "productions of time," but
the overall direction that his work takesis. toward an acceptance of
physicality and death; not, it must. be- added,.at-the menseof his
idealism but through a change and intensification of it. He comes to

. . . 1
see, as Blake and Whitman saw, that "All finite things reveal infinitude."

l
"The Far Field," The Far Field (New York, 196“), p. 28.

 

31}

The clearest statement in Qpen House of many of the seminal

 

ideas of Roethke's poetry can be found in "Genesis" (95, p. 36). The
poem describes man as an outgrowth of inanimate nature, as a victim of
"wisdom," probably awareness of his own mortality, and as the creator
of a protective covering of "meaning," which may be the comforting
illusions of art:

This elemental force

Was wrested from the sun;

A river's leaping source

Is locked in narrow bone.

This wisdom floods the mind,

Invades quiescent blood;

A seed that swells the rind

To burst the fruit of good.

A pearl within the brain,

Secretion of the sense;

Around a central grain

New meaning grows immense.
The wisdom seems to be the knowledge that man (or all life) arose out
of inanimate nature and shall return to it; in other words, it is
knowledge of mortality. The imagery of inner and outer appears in the
last two lines of stanza two and in stanza three. The lines in stanza
two do not follow the pattern of the flesh-spirit dichotomy as they at
first may appear to do. The "seed" is not the Spirit or the life-force,
'but the awareness of one's genesis and one's end. This awareness may
on a higher level of abstraction stand for all consciousness, and the
swelling of the rind and the bursting of the fruit may represent the
cycle that moves from insentience to awareness, to oblivion. In the
last stanza the image of a piece of fruit is replaced by the image of

a pearl. We no longer have a seed as the initiator of development but

an adventitious irritant. The image curiously resembles Freud's

35

description in "Beyond the Pleasure Principle" of the origin of an
internalized seat of consciousness. Since some of his remarks clarify
many of Roethke's poems, I will quote at length:

Let us picture a living organism in its most simplified
possible form as an undifferentiated vesicle of a substance
that is susceptible to stimulation. Then the surface turned
towards the external world will from its very situation be
differentiated and will serve as an organ for receiving
stimuli. Indeed embryology, in its capacity as a
recapitulation of developmental history, actually Shows us
that the central nervous system originates from the ectoderm;
the grey matter of the cortex remains a derivative of the
primitive superficial layer of the organism and may have in-
herited some of its essential preperties. It would be easy
to suppose, then, that as a result of the ceaseless impact of
external stimuli on the surface of the vesicle, its substance
to a certain depth may have permanently modified, so that
excitatory processes run a different course in it from what
they run in the deeper layers. A crust would thus be formed
which would at least have been so thoroughly "baked through" by
stimulation that it would present the most favorable possible
condition for the reception of stimuli and become incapable of any
further modification. [In other words, sense organs would be formed.
Freud continues in the next paragraph:

But we have more to say of the living vesicle with its receptive
cortical layer. This little gragment of living substance is
suSpended in the middle of an external world charged with the most
powerful energies; and it would be killed by the stimulation
emanating from these if it were not provided with a protective
shield against stimuli. It acquires the shield in this way: its
outermost surface ceases to have the structure proper to living
matter, becomes to some degree inorganic and thenceforward functions
as a Special envelope or membrane resistant to stimuli. . . . By
its death, the outer layer has saved all the deeper ones from a
similar fate . . . . In highly developed organisms the receptive
cortical layer of the former vesicle has long been withdrawn into
the depths of the interior of the body, though portions of it have
been left behind on the surface immediately beneath the general
shield against stimuli. These are the sense organs. . . .1

Although Freud describes a sensitive layer that withdraws to the

organism's interior and protects itself with a "shield" and Roethke

1

The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of
Si und Freud, trans. James Stracheyiin collaboration with Anna Freud.
Vol. XVIII ZLongon, 1955), pp. 27-28.

36

describes a "grain" that surrounds itself with a "secretion of the
sense," there is a great similarity between the two statements. Freud's
account is based on the philosophical doctrine of materialism, which
Roethke explores in many poems. "Genesis" can be read as a depiction
from the point of view of materialism of the origins of life and con-
sciousness. Also, both Freud and Roethke picture the consciousness as
‘the home of pain, as something in need of protection and concealment.
Roethke's conception of the Spirit bears a resemblance not only

to Freud's description of the brain and sense organs but also to his
model of the psyche: the deeper into the mind you delve, the farther
into the past you go. The second and third stanzas of "The Unextinguished"
(QE, p. 3H) use fire to symbolize the consciousness or perhaps psychic
energy, an image which conveys the previously discussed association
of awareness and pain:

The fire of heaven dies; a fire unseen

Wanes to the febrile smoldering of sleep;

Deep-hidden embers, smothered by the screen

0f flesh, burn backward to a blackened heap.

But morning light comes tapping at the lid,

Breaks up the crust of cinders that remain,

And pokes the crumbled coal the ashes hid,

Until thought crackles white across the brain.
The word "unseen" suggests the intangible and Spiritual nature of the
"fire." The "screen of flesh" is not so much a shield as a prison,
within which the ebbing vital energy regresses to earlier and earlier
fans of existence. Roethke apparently pictures the glowing heat as
burying itself deeper and deeper in the substance and uses this action

to symbolize the penetration of awareness into the unconscious mind

during sleep, a return to early experiences, perhaps to the origin.

37

The last stanza brings us to the progressive part of the cycle and the

painful crackling of thought, which accompanies awakening and the
turning of awareness to external reality.

"The Unextinguished" is the earliest occurrence in Roethke's
poetry of an exploration below the surface of the psyche. Writing an
introduction to his poetry to accompany a group of poems in Mr. John
Ciardi's Mid-Century American Poet_S_ (1950), Roethke defines this

important element of his work:

I believe that to go forward as a Spiritual man it is necessary first
to go back. Any history of the psyche (or allegorical journey)
is bound to be a succession of experiences, similar yet
dissimilar. There is a perpetual Slipping-back, then a going-
forward; but there is some "progress." Are not some experiences
so powerful and so profound (I am not Speaking of the merely
compulsive) that they repeat themselves, thrust themselves upon
us, again and again, with variation and change, each time
bringing us closer to our own most particular (and thus most
universal) reality? We go, as Yeats said, from ex-

haustion to exhaustion. To begin from the depths and come out--
that is difficult; for few know where the depths are or can
recognize them; or, if they do, are afraid.

Although the device of the allegorical journey does not come
into full use until The Lost Son and Other Poems (19%), at least one

Other poem in Open House reveals it in germinal form. The explicit

treatment of the journey may appear to carry no psychological Significance
in the poem "Night Journey" (9!, pp. 69-70), but if one examines the
POGIII'S metaphors such significance becomes apparent. I quote the poem

in full and italicize the metaphors and puns:

Now as the train bears west,
Its rhythm rocks the earth,
And from. my Pullman berth.

I stare into the night

While others take their rest.
Bridges of iron lace,

A suddenness of trees,

1"Open Letter," reprinted in Poet and Craft, pp. 39-"0-

 

me facilitj
poem With u;
VOlume: and

he was able

equal merit
"thm&r’u F

suggeStive

g-
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38

A lap_of mountain mist

All cross my line of sight,
Then a bleak wasted place,
And a lake below my knees.
Full on my neck I feel

The straining at a curve;

My muscles move with steel,

I wake in every nerve.

I watch a beacon swing

From dark to blazing bright;
We thunder through ravines
And gullies washed with light.
Beyond the mountain pass

Hist deepens on the pane;

We rush into a rain

That rattles double glass.
Wheels shake the roadbed Stone,
The pistons jerk and.§h3ve,

I stay up half the night

To see the land I love.

The facility with which Roethke invests the natural description in this
poem with unobtrusive symbolic values makes it the best poem in the
volume, and fortunately Roethke was learning his craft well enough that
he was able to follow this performance with a whole series of works of
equal merit. The metaphors of "Night Journey," with the exception of
"tflrunder," refer to the realm of womanhood.and are particularly
Suggestive of care for an infant. Several puns reinforce this
metaphorical reference. The word "bears" in line one carries in light
Of the rest of the poem overtones of the meaning "give birth."
"Pullman berth" is actually two puns, "berth" suggesting "birth" and
"Pullman" suggesting an obstetrician. The presence of these covert
mefillings also may rest on the associations in traditional symbolism
b“Ween mountains and night with woman.

But what is the Significance of these buried references? It is,
t° r'e‘tmrn to Roethke's statement of 1950, to describe one of those

"° - . experiences so powerful and so profound . . . that they repeat

39

themselves. . ., each time bringing us closer to our own most
particular (and thus most universal reality.".1 The experience

described is birth. The poem's development is from repose into harsh-
nes s. The repose begins to end with the description of a strain that may
well resemble in part the strain an infant feels during birth:
Full on my neck I feel
The straining at a curve;
My muscles move with steel,
I wake in every nerve.
"Wake," an important word in Roethke's poetry, in later poems carries
the meaning of birth. Immediately following these lines, in the burst
of light and the sudden thunder, the imagery depicts a flood of sensory
impressions, such as impinge on the senses of a baby at birth. Then the
poem moves on into suggestions of having passed through something, of
an increased harshness (compared to the initial state), and of slightly
subdued sensory experience now that the first rush is past. These
last lines also seem to convey a sense that something has been left

behind forever and that one has entered a new and relatively lasting state:

Beyond the mountain pass

Hist deepens on the pane;

We rush into a rain

That rattles double glass.
Wheels shake the roadbed stone,
The pistons jerk and shove,

I stay up half the night

To see the land I love.

1
Poet and Craft, p. 39.

2 .

Possibly the mist deepening on the pane (pain) represents the
gradual lessening of the intensity of sensory experience after the
mitial trauma.

‘40

One sees the subtle craftsmanship of which Roethke was capable by
comparing two lines, a regular iambic trimeter, describing the repose,
and an irregular four—beat line, describing the harshness:
Its rhythm rocks the earth,
and,
Wheels shake the roadbed stone.
The last two lines, in their expression of curiosity and love, and in
the ambivilanoe that must be in them since the love follows immediately
upon the pain, are fitting emotions for a poem describing the impressions
of a new-born child.
If "Night Journey" dramatizes the mental traveler's attainment of

one of the psyche's most deeply buried memories, "The Gentle" (95, p. 60)
presents the Sprititual coward who has declined the trip:

The son of misfortune long, long has been waiting

The visit of vision, luck years overdue,

His laughter reduced to the sing-song of prating,

A hutch by the EXIT his room with a view.
The "depths" that Roethke Spoke of in his "Open Letter" of 1950 are
the symbolic container that is the womb, the nest (home) and the grave.
The gentle is one of those people who are too terrified to move, and who
consequently cannot make the return trip, the homecoming, which Roethke
megards as Spiritual progress.

What does Roethke think is gained by making this journey?

fin House does not give us the answer, but it does introduce some ideas
that are relevant to the answer. It tells us that reason is a worse than
useless faculty, and that peace is an imaginable but probably un-
attainable ideal. "Pregnosis" (2H, p. 7), employing some obvious imagery
0f the inner-outer dichotomy, pictures reason as a helpless cow,

Victimized by the forces of the unconscious mind:

The last n

burning Hi?

Again the ‘
here the f«
"depths" i

Ir.

failure of

The firm
that thou;
rather, t'
discover

a bEtter

 

 

Seats "tr
"depths"

1+1

Flesh behind steel and glass is unprotected

From enemies that whiSper to the blood;

The scratch forgotten is the Scratch infected;

The ruminant, reason, chews a poisoned cud.
Tire last two lines of this poem recall the image of psychic energy
trunning within a.coat of ashes during sleep ("The Unextinguished"):

I Chill depths of the Spirit are flushed to a fever,
The nightmare Silence is broken. We are not lost.

Again the Spirit is pictured as something to be journied into, and
here the fever, which is psychic energy or the life-force, in the
'hdepths" is responsible for a rebirth.
In "The Adamant" (9H, p. 16) we see a fuller description of the

fadJmme of reason. I quote the entire poem:

Thought does not crush to stone.

The great sledge drops in vain.

Truth never is undone;

Its Shafts remain.

The teeth of knitted gears

Turn slowly through the night,

But the true substance bears

The hammer's weight.

Compression cannot break

A center so congealed:

The tool can chip no flake;

The core lies sealed.
The first line of the poem is distractingly ambiguous. It could mean
then: thought cannot be crushed or pulverized, but it does not. It means,
I"a‘ther, that thought--which is reason or consciousness-«fails to
discover truth. (The "gears" turning "through the night" make "awareness"
a better gloss for "thought" than "reason" is.) Because the poem repre-
sents "truth" as the "core" of a boulder, we can equate it with the

"depths" of the Spirit. In a sense, the poem dramatizes the strain of '

a false or misguided attempt to journey to the depths.

I s
peaCE, an 1
enies that
is a worth”?
Open House.

form in "T

"Compressb
brutal for
may be tha

tell us th

lat alone
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Kir

142

I said earlier that the goal of the journey might be to achieve
peace, an idea made eSpecially plausible by the fact that Roethke
(buies that rational understanding, one of the few possible incentives,
is a worthy goal. One method of obtaining this peace is explored in

Qpen House, but not unequivocally accepted. We see it in abbreviated

 

f orm in "The Adamant":

Compression cannot break
A center so congealed.. . .

"Compression" here equals thought, "the great sledge." If the direct,
brutal force of "compression" doesn't uncover the truth, the implication
may be that something indirect and subtle will. But the last two lines
tell us that this is not the correct implication:

The tool can chip no flake;
The core lies sealed.

Let alone crack the boulder in two, this tool cannot even chip a flake.
The only implication possible is that the "congealed" center, which
does not react to "compression," may of its own accord expand or fly
outward.

How is this dispersal related to a journey inward? The answer
is a paradox Similar to Heraclitus' "The way up and the way down is one
and the same."1 The diSpersal that is at the same time an inward ex-
Ploration is artistic creation, at least by some romantic definitions of
that term. (This conception also resembles Freud's definition of
artistic creation, in which the artist, like the neurotic, indulges his

fanta sy-life, but unlike the neurotic gives it outward expression.)

1
Kirk and Raven, p. 189.

as

"Open House," we will remember, describes the speaker's disorderly
spirit doing everything but lying sealed in the core.
Several details are overt references to the realm of art:

An epic of the eyes
My love, with no disguise.

And,

The deed will Speak the truth
In language strict and pure.

Contrary to "The Adamant," this poem pictures the inner exploding into
the outer, and if the "tool" in that poem partakes of the will, here

the revelation is almost entirely unwilled. The last line of "Prognosis"
presents a Similar revelation in terms of a recovery or rebirth:

"The nightmare silence is broken. We are not lost" (_C_)H_, p. 7).

The entire poem "Prayer Before Study" ((11, p. ‘19), which needs no
gloss, bears on this theme:

Constricted by my tortured thought,
I am too centered on this Spot.

So caged and cadged, so close within
A coat of unessential Skin,

I would put off myself and flee
My inaccessibility.

A fool can play at being solemn
Revolving on his spinal column.

Deliver me, O Lord, from all
Activity centripetal.

But I have said that Roethke, at the time of gen House, was
ambivanelt about this self-revelation. I have shown that in "Feud"
(Qfl. pp. l$05) he likened the exposure, which was compulsive, not

"illed, to the betrayal of "old secrets to amorphous swarms." In

am

"Reply to Censure" ((21, p. 39), the Spirit is not pictured as the obsessed
victim of hereditary illness, and consequently is not in need of the
peace sought in other poems. Instead of advocating the open-door
policy, this poem implies that that is a symptom of Spiritual cowardice:

The brave keep undelfiled
A wisdom of their own.

The bold wear toughened Skin

That keeps sufficient store

Of dignity within,

And quite at the core.
Immediately following this poem is one, "Against Disaster" (O_H_, p. 38),
that employs the imagery of dispersal to illustrate an extreme, self-
destructive- anxiety:

Now I am out of element

And far from anything my own,

My sources drained of all content,

The pieces of my spirit strewn.

All random, wasted, and diSpersed,

The particles of being lie;

My Special heaven is reversed,

I move beneath an evil sky,

This flat land has become a pit

Wherein I am beset by harm,

The heart must rally to my wit

And rout the Specter of alarm.
I regret quoting the whole of this poem, which I consider one of
ROethke's worst, but it does clarify some of the better ones. For
insalience, the imagery of diSpersal corroborates my reading of the last
Sta112a of "The Adamant." The heaven's being "reversed" and the land's
becoming "a pit" return us to the concept of the depths as a form of

syntholic container, and what we are being told here is that the womb

(mireversed sky) has become a grave.

45

Finally, in one poem the Speaker declares the exact converse of
the statement made in "Open House." His Spirit is not dignified and
quiet as was that of the brave man in "Reply to Censure." It is,
rather, the diseased spirit of so many of these poems, but it firmly
resists the dispersal of the inner into the outer, the activity
centrifugal. The poem describes at length the diseased Spirit, so I
quote it in full:

There is a noise within the brow
That pulses undiminished now

In accents measured by the blood.
It breaks upon my solitude--

A hammer on the crystal walls

Of sense at rapid intervals.

It is the unmelodic ring

Before the breaking of a string,
The wheels of circumstance that grind
So terribly within the mind,

The spirit crying in a cage

To build a complement to rage,
Confusion's core set deep within
A furious, dissembling din.

If I should ever seek relief

From that monotony of grief,

The tight nerves leading to the throat

Would not release one riven note:

What shakes my skull to disrepair

Shall never touch another ear.
This poem, like "Feud" (931, pp. u-s), separates the disease from the
8[beaker's identity. It is within, yet it "breaks upon . . . [his] solitude."
This poem uses the same images of mechanical strain that we saw in
"The Adamant" (91, p. 16), but here, in contrast, the "core" is
ChaOtic. And last, the "I," in a strangely clinical manner, maintains

that he is imprisoned with his rampaging disease and that, through no

"5-11 of his own, the secret of this disease will never be divulged.

In '
than those
in understa
perimentati
The images
of them bei
0f the fort
eight. I a
(h, p. 8),
volume deal

question in l

with the b:

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1+6

In my opinion the poems in Open House are appreciably poorer
than those in Roethke's other volumes, but are none the less important
in understanding the later works. They reveal highly conscious ex-
perimentation in point of view, tone, imagery, and rhyme and meter.
The images and themes are for the most part traditional, the handling
of them being sometimes prosaic and trite, and at other times original.
Of the forty-five poems in the book, Roethke chose not to reprint twenty-
eight. I agree with his selection, excepting only "To My Sister"

(OH, p. 8), which I would also exclude. Most of the poems in this
*volume deal with the nature of the Spirit, especially as it interacts
with the body and with the external world. Roethke begins here a
questioning that is to last throughout his life: does the Spirit have

an existence independent of the body? In Open House we learn no more

 

than that reason cannot help discover the truth and that perhaps

artistic creation Can. The next book continues the examination of

this problem.

I. Greenho

 

 

 

They contin

cons ciousne'

The

connotation
Stanley Kur.
"The sub-1m
Coming aliv
clearly ref
beth fascin
I Will mt
discuss the
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my f0? one

else: “Sual

W

H]

"1
1965, p. 2.

CHAPTER THREE

THE SPROUTS OF IDENTITY

I. Greenhouse Poems: Description or Symbol?

 

The "Greenhouse Poems" are not merely natural description.

They continue from gen House the idea that life and more especially

 

consciousness are an irritant, but whereas in the earlier book the
connotations of this idea were negative, here they are ambivalent.
Stanley Kunitz in 19% pointed out this ambivalence when he wrote:
"The sub-human is given tongue; and the tongue proclaims the agony of

coming alive, the painful miracle of growth."1 In 1965 Kunitz more

clearly refers to the speaker's ambivalence: "The boy of the poems is

both fascinated and repelled by the avidity of the life-principle . . ."2

I will return to this notion of ambivalence in the speaker when I
discuss the individual poems.

One of the most striking things about these poems is the
subtle way in which they avoid being merely descriptive. It is very
easy for one to say that a given description is an analogue to something
else, usually to something spiritual. Most of the reviewers of

The Lost Son and Other Poems did not hesitate to make this assertion.

 

1"News of the Root," oetgz, LXXIII (January 19%), 225-

2"Roethke: Poet of Transformations," The New Republic, 23 January
1965, p. 23.

 

H7

1+8

For instance, Eugene Davidson wrote of Roethke's images' being

". . . transformed into symbols of human struggle or contemplation."l

And Hugh Gibb explained more elaborately: ". . . the poems never
tremain just brilliant descriptions. Effortlessly they assume a wider
significance. The nudging shoots, the rapacious weeds and the proud
tulip heads dramatize the eternal process of nature to which all life

conforms, including the Spiritual life of man."2

But these reviewers do
not tell their readers that finding the preper ground in the poems for this
analogical leap is a most difficult and interesting matter.

One suggestion fer moving from literal description into symbolic

meanings is found in John Middleton Murray's The Problem of Style,

 

where he defines "the-discovery of the symbol" as: ". . . the discovery
of some analogy or similitude for the writer's emotion or thought which
would exercise a kind of compulsion upon the mind of the reader, so that,
given an ordinary sensibility, he must share the emotion or the ex-
perience that the writer intended him to share."3 In developing this
idea, he introduces the term "crystallization": "The crystallization is,
as it were, automatically accomplished; for the only way he [the poet]
can communicate his emotion is by describing the objects which aroused

It. If his emotion was a true one, the vividness and.particularity of

his description will carry over to us."u

¥Z§ (Summer 19n8), p. 787.

2
The New York Times Book Review, 1 August 19n8, p. in.

3(London: Oxford Paperbacks, 1960), pp. 86-87. Hereafter cited
as Hurray.

u
Murray, p. 89.

99

Most readers who have published their impressions of the "Greenhouse
Poems" have maintained that the poems are extremely accurate
descriptions and are emotionally moving. According to Murray's views,
they would then merit the term "symbolic." As an example of this type
of poetry, Murray quotes the following lines from a poet much admired
by Roethke:

To note on hedgerow baulks in moisture sprent

The jetty snail creep from the mossy thorn

With earnest heed and tremulous intend.

Frail brother of the morn,

That from the tiny bents and misted leaves

Withdraws his timid horn

And fearful vision weaves.
This is the second stanza of John Clare's "Summer Images," and it
cleamdy resembles Roethke's "Greenhouse Poems." Murray's comment on these
' lines is that "Only a man who loved the snail could possibly have such
a delicate knowledge of it. Thus, quite simply, the cause of the emotion
becomes the symbol."1 James Reeves, who has edited Clare's poems, makes
two statements that parallel those of Murray and that serve to reveal
the similarity between the two poets. He writes: "One might read
pages and pages of Clare's poems and suppose them to be 'merely
descriptive.‘ If that heppens, one is deceived."2 Then he restates the

connection Murray has seen between "true emotional reaction to objects

1Murray, p. 90.

2
"Introduction" to Selected Poems of John Clare, ed. James Reeves
(New York, 1957), p. xiii. The introduction was written in 1953.

50

of the external world" and "keen sensous perception":l PC1are's

minute observation, his lingering over the details of a country

scene, his intense interest in the plainest and most homely manifes-

tations of life on the land, could arise only from a disinterested

and self-forgetful love."2
Although Roethke does not make the connection for us between

his "lovely dimunitives" and his precise descriptions, he does fifteen

years after the publication of these poems, Speak of his love for the

lowest forms of life: "He [God] is . . . accessible . . . in the lowest

forms of life. . . . Nobody has killed off the snails. Is this a new

thought? Hardly. But it needs some practicing in Western society.

Could Reinhold Niebuhr love a.worm? I doubt it. But I—-‘we----can."3

If Professor Murry is correct, such an emotion is sufficient to raise the

poems above the level of simple nature poetry. So far I have mentioned

two possible grounds for regarding the poems as something other than

pure natural description, the theme of life and consciousness as

irritant, and Murray's connection between symbolized emotion and

description. I want to mention one more ground that has been suggested

by commentators and then define three that have not been.

1
Murray, p. 90.

2Reeves, p. xiv. Another statement of Reeves's denies that
Clare's emotion was "self-fergetful," but not that it was love: "When
Clare writes from his sympathy with small and helpless creatures, he is
really thinking of himself," p. xx.

3 .
"0n 'Ident1ty,'" a statement made at a Northwestern University
panel on "Identity" in February, 1963, printed in Poet and Craft, p. 27.

 

51

James G. Southworth, in an article on Roethke's entire output
prior to 1960, makes the following statement, which seems to apply to
the "Greenhouse Poem," though he does not specify the application of
his remark: ". . . he [Roethke] has looked so steadily and perceptively
at the minutiae of nature that his symbol-free early descriptions in the
light of his later work assume a symbolic quality."1 However, like
the reviewers, Southworth does not back up his word "symbolic" by
relating to the details of the poem. He begins his discussion of the
poem with one paragraph on gen House and then turns to the
"Greenhouse Poem," irmnediately stating that they are ". . . a conscious
attempt of the poet to examine his early life . . . and the purgative
effect achieved by such an investigation. The struggle is a painful one,
symbolized in the opening lines of 'Cuttings' (late version)."
Southworth then quotes the following lines to prove that the poem are
symbolic:

This urge, wrestle, resurrection of dry sticks,

Cut stems struggling to put down feet,

What saint strained so much,

Rose on such lapped limbs to a new life?
His cement is: "In the earlier version [of 'Cuttings'] there is no
sense of the poet's association of his personal problem with that of

the cuttings."2 In other words, a description is symbolic if it convinces

1"The Poetry of Theodore Roethke," XXI (March 1950). 327- Here-
after cited as Southworth.

2
Southworth , 32 7 .

   

the reader
Tnis is 885
Southworth
earlier (188

The

the Subje
thirteen
reveal th

between t‘

52

the reader that the object describee evoked an emotion in the poet.
This is essentially a restatement of Murray's argument. Unfortunately,
Southworth does not amplify his own idea that the later poems transform
earlier descriptions into symbols.

The three characteristics of the "Greenhouse Poems" that I
‘wish-to bring out are: (1) the implied human presence, (2) the temporal
and spatial distortions, and (3) the syntactic distortions. All three,
I feel, represent conscious design in the poems and life them to the
level of symbolic significance.

Roethke's concern for the differences between writing in the

first, second, or third person can be seen in Open House, where he

 

attempts all three. In fact, as I have pointed out, the grouping of
poems in that volume depends on the relation between the speaker and
the subject. In this series of poems, only five of the original
thirteen contain a first person pronoun, and these five themselves
reveal the "1's" presence only grudgingly. 'Southworth's contrast
between the earlier and later versions of "Cuttings" turns on this
point. The explicit presence or absence of the "I" is, however, only
one aSpect of what I have called "the implied human presence."

The other two characteristics, distortion of spatial and
temporal relations, and syntactic distortion, are perhaps in a means-
end relationship, the second being a means of showing the first. But
I have separated them because the spatial-temporal distortions are at
times presented thematically, rather than grammatically. Usually,
though, the effect of the syntactic distortions is a blurring or a

transformation of space-time relationships. An interesting and unnoticed

53

fact about the "Greenhouse Poems" is that they are arranged in an order
jparalleling the growth of a plant, beginning with the abrupt and
Ibrumal creation of a new plant (a cutting), and continuing with its
taking root, passing through a period of intense growth, of cultivation
by the "weed puller," of blossoming, of reproduction and maturity, and
finally of its coming to the "flower-dump" and the intimations of "the
‘weather of'eternity." My discussion fellows this arrangement of the

poems.

II. A Reading of the "Greenhouse Poems"

I mentioned that the "I" in "Cuttings (later)" (£§, p. 10)
is an explicit statement of human presence; however, the title of
"Cuttings" itself (E§, p. 9) implies that presence, since "cuttings"
are made by men. As I hope to show in my subsequent treatment of
this idea, the "human presence" has the significance to the Speaker of
parental care for a child. The plants themselves are frequently
associated with or identified with (I will not say symbolic of) the
child. The word "slip" in the line,

But still the delicate slips keep coaxing up water,

is a common metaphor for a slim boy (usually "a slip of a boy").1
Other metaphors in the poem reinforce this reading by describing the
child's world as well as the plants: "22g3£1_loam," "coazing," and perhaps
"nudge" and "horn." "Sugar" and "coaxing" work together very effectively

to suggest the plant-child analogy.

‘ The two meanings of "slip" are also joined in "scion." See
The Concise Oxford Dictionary.

5H

"Cuttings (later)" differs from the preceding poem in that it
makes an explicit comparison between plant and man, and by introducing
the "I." The linking of the "resurrection" of the cuttings with the
martyrdom of a saint is a superb figure. Moreover, the connotations
of cruelty and pain that are involved in beginning the series of poem
with "cuttings" rather than bulbs or seeds possibly hark back to
"Night Journey" and the theme of life-force as irritant, which was seen

throughout Open House .

 

Is the "I" of the poem a boy, or a man recalling his early

life? The question cannot be answered with certainty because of what I
have called "syntactic and temporal distortion." "Cuttings" is
written as a declarative sentence, comprising six independent clauses,
all in the present tense.. The syntactic distortion begins in the first
section of "Cuttings (later)" with an anacoluthon:

This urge, wrestle, resurrection of dry sticks,

Cut stems struggling to put down feet,

What saint strained so much,

Rose on such lapped limbs to a new life?
Not only is there a syntactic break at the end of the second line, but
there is also an apparent shift in tense. "Struggling" is a present
participle, but "strained" and "rose" are finite verbs in the preterite.
The second section continues this refusal to locate the experience in
time. The tense-marking verbs here are in the present, but they are the
historical present and the present of general truth. The use of the
word "beginnings" contributes to this "temporal distortion," by renaming

Part of the plant in such a way as to focus attention on its place in

a temporal scheme .

55

What is the significance of this type of distortion? Con-
ceivably, the grammatical details that I have mentioned parallel or
even reveal the theme of the miraculous "temporal distortion" of a
saint's resurrection to a new life. There is a further significance,
which at this point may be only tentatively advanced, and that is that
the use of the historical present or the present of general truth blurs
the distinction between the individual and the Species. For instance,
the lines,

When sprouts break out,

Slippery as fish,

I quail, lean to beginnings, sheath-wet,
do not describe a unique experience but a recurring one. One may
easily see this device as an incipient form of the search-for-identity
theme, the principal theme of The LastSon.

In "Cuttings (later)" the "I" feels some sense of human guilt
for forcing the plants to reproduce in a painful way. This is shown
by the reversal of two faded metaphors, once taken from the realm of
plants and applied to men, "lapped " and "nub," but now reversed in
order to describe the sufferings of the "cuttings." It is also shown
by the Speaker's assertion that,

I can hear, underground, that sucking and sobbing,
In my veins, in my bones I feel it. . . .

"Root Cellar" (E, p. 11) continues this sense of human guilt, but here
again the human presence is only implied. The primary aim of the poem
is to create the picture of an environment that is at once a goad to
life and a stifling enclosure. This ambiguity is found in the title,

Where "cellar" brings to mind "cell," the basic unit of living sub-

stances , a
revealed i‘:
sentences
attention

declaratiw
and,

The first
aims of t
sentence
for old In
clause is
live and E
implying I
"cellar,'
made Oij
a pictun

(princip

t° be to

t0 the 1

 

by the

33 if it
“With?
aCtion.

56

stances, and the meaning "underground room." More importantly, it is
revealed in the envelop-type structure of the poem, two declarative
sentences with an exclamatory sentence between them. The poet draws
attention to this structure by making the first clauses of the
declarative sentences nearly identical:
Nothing would sleep in that cellar . . .
and,
Nothing would give up live. . . .
The first of these lines achieves additional force in establishing the
aims of the poem by rhythmically and thematically echoing the first
sentence of a famous poem with a similar intention: "That is no country
for old men," from Yeat's "Sailing to Byzantium." While this first
clause is saying that everything in the cellar that had1 potential to
live and grow was forced by the environment to do so, it is also
implying human presence (and ultimately guilt) through such words as
"cellar," "ditch," "boxes" and "crates." Notice that all of these man-
made objects are forms of enclosure. This first sentence also conveys
a picture of sinister sexuality, through implicit and explicit means
(principally, of course, through the words "lolling obscenely").
The exclamatory sentence has no verb, and its main purpose seems

to be to introduce the noun "stinks." This word gives a Special force
1: o the last sentence:

Nothing would give up life:
Even the dirt kept breathing a small breath.

lln discussing, the poem, I shall remove the ambiguity created
by the main verbs being either past or future and treat the action
as if it were in the past. "Would sleep," although called "future
Conditional," can describe either an habitual past action or a future
action.

57

"Breath" here naturally suggests the old meaning of Spirit, and, as in

Open House, the Spirit is suffering almost as if in hell. A tenuous

 

reading might identify the Speaker (in his boyhood?) with the plant life,
and the (negligent?) greenhouse owner with a parent. Such a reading
would be an example of Southworth's previously cited theory that the later
poems transform the earlier ones from description into symbol.

I said, in discussing "Root Cellar," that everything with the
potential for life and growth was forced by the environment to live
and grow. But the last line of the poem confuses the living things and
the environment. Dirt is not living, but even it "kept breathing a
small breath." The strategy of the next poem, "Forcing House,"
(LS, p. 12)'is to create the effect of an intensification of life
through this confusion of organism and environment. The title relates
the poem to my reading of "Root Cellar," but whereas in that poem the
human presence is essentially one of negligence, here it is a "forceful"
domination. The beginning of the blending (or confusion of organism
and environment) comes with the picture of all the plants, which are
catalogued in lines one through four, pulsing "with the knocking
pipes." It is advanced with the two parallel participial phrases:

Swelling the roots with steam and stench,
Shooting up lime and dung and ground bones. . . .

To say that the "knocking pipes" swell the roots and shoot up lime,
etc., is to abridge a complex, causal sequence. Although that the
pipes cause the rootsto do such and such may be the principal meaning
of the lines, the moment of hesitation. caused by the difficult
abridgement allows the reader time to suspect that the pipes are

inside the plants, in other words, are the capillaries of the plants.

 

And it
that ar

of the

Here, 1
as does
sense 1
this p<
"Root I

flOFlS‘

enviro'

indica

This 1
the re
growth
"campy
Sun-me
diffic
time a
theEn

Cannot

at Ohm

58

And it is the capillaries of the plants rather than the heating pipes
that are likely to carry "lime and dung and ground bones." The last line
of the poem adds to this impression:

As the live heat billows from pipes and pots.
Here, the metaphoric use of "live" explicitly fuses the two realms,
as does the linking of "pipes" and "pots." This fusion creates a
sense of the life processes being intensified many times over, although
this poem lacks an accompanying sense of loathing that one sees in
"Root Cellar." Possibly, this lack is related to the care of the
florist that is manifested in the "live heat" as opposed to the
negligence implied in the preceding poem.

"Farcing Hsuse" not only employs a confusion of organism and
environment but also one of Space and time. The distortion here is
indicated thematically, not grammatically:

Fifty summers in motion at once. . . .
This line is set in apposition to the participial phrases, "Swelling
the roots . . ." and "Shooting up lime . . .," so that the accelerated
growth is equated with a compression of time. Of course, the notion of
"compressing" time treats time as a Spatial quantity. Furthermore,
"summer" is a noun, but is the name of a duration of time. It is
difficult to conceive of a duration of time "in motion": to do so treats
time as an object in a Spatial framework. The normal distinctions be-
tween space and time are further blurred by the fact that one summer
cannot occur simultaneously with another, and here we are given fifty

at once.

59

"Weed Puller" (ES, p. 13) uses syntactic distortion to avoid
locating the experience in time. Since there is not a finite verb
in the entire poem, the action could have been completed in the past,
he continual, or be occurring in the present. CorreSponding to this
lalurring is the oblique treatment of human presence. Although the
title names a human agent, that agent does not act as the subject of
any of the verbals in the poem. We are given a series of participles
idiose subject we infer to be the weed puller. His presence is mentioned
in only two lines:
With everything blooming above me,
and
Me down in that fetor of weeds. . . .
Since the intention of the poem seems to be to create a sense of this
speaker's identification with, and perhaps over-reaction to, the
plants, these lines are crucial. We gain some notion of the speaker's
very different but equally strong identifications with the weeds and
the flowers through some evaluative words and through the use of names.
Three lines of the poem have honorific connotations, those describing
the flowers above the benches:
With everything blooming, above me,
Lilies, pale-pink cyclamen, roses,
Whole fields lovely and invialate. . . .
The word "invialate" indicates that the Speaker does not associate these
flowers with their own "black hairy roots,"
Those lewd monkey-tails hanging from drainholes. . . .
On the other hand, he feels himself somehow sullied by his job of

Tugging all day at perverse life:
The indignity of it!

60

If the flowers, which are specifically named, retain their identities,
"invialate," the weed puller himself is in danger of losing his, for
the weeds do not have the individuality that the flowers do. Instead
of being named, they are referred to as merely "fern-shapes," or as
"weeds," or "perverse life." The threat to the speaker's identity

is seen in the lack of a grammatical subject for the verbals, and seen
thematically in his animal-like posture and his similarity to the
living-dead:

Crawling on all fours,
Alive in a slippery grave.

By calling himself a "weed puller" rather than a gardener or a young
florist, the Speaker also suggests that he feels his identity is un-
established, associated with the nameless weeds.

"Orchids" (£§, p. 1n) extends this theme of identity, focusing
on the orchids alone. They differ from the lilies, cyclamen and roses,
which seem to represent normally established identities. The orchids
are over-develOped identities or else pampered ones that consider
themselves "necessary angels." Whereas the other flowers sit on
concrete benches, these hang in "mossy cradles." They are feared
rather than admired. The theme of human care is suggested.by the
references to the heat, the whitewashed glass, and the "mossy cradles."
But the effect of this care is pictured in the line:

So many devouring infants!

An excess of care has turned them into monsters:

61

Adde r-mouthe d ,
Swaying close to the face,
Coming out, soft and deceptive,

Lips neither dead nor alive,
Loose ghostly mouths
Breathing.

After "Orchids" we come to perhaps the weakest poem of the
sequence, "Moss-Gathering" (_L_S_, p. 15) which rewords the theme of man's
guilt acquired through his "desecration" of "the whole scheme of life."
Unlike "Root Cellar" and "Cuttings (later) ," where the Speaker's guilt
was presented more or less dramatically, "Moss-Gathering" simply

declares :

. . . Something always went out of me when I
dug loose those carpets,

. . . afterwards I always felt mean. . . .

I cannot see how this piece differs from expository prose.

"Big Wind" (I_S_, pp. 16-17) I feel is the best poem in the series.
Its principal aim is to create a sense of ideal human care, anaim it
achieves by employing subtle handling of the human presence and the
distortion of the spatial and temporal relationships.

Although the human presence in the poem is very important, it
is only made explicit twice:

So we drained the manure-machine . . .,

We stayed’all night. . . .
In the poem, human care preserves the flowers during a bad storm.

T'his care exhibits three remarkable qualities: ingeniousness,

62

endurance, and selflessness. The first describes the idea and action
of running liquid manure through the steam pipes when the water was
cut off by a storm. The second is seen in the workers' staying all
night,

Stuffing the holes with burlap. . . .
And the third is illustrated by the emphasis that the Speaker places
on the rose-house itself rather than on her human caretakers:

But she rode it out,
That Old Pose-house. e e e

Thistenphasis runs through the last thirteen lines of the poem.

Kenneth Burke has pointed out that the poem moves in four
rhetorical steps: definition of the situation (lines l-S), description
of an appropriate action (lines 6-20), restatement of the action in
figurative terms (lines 21-31), and a "gesture of assertion" (lines 32-33).1
Steps one, three, and four each employ several metaphors, but step two
employs only one, "life heat". The effect of the metaphors is a
spatial and temporal distortion, such as we have already seen in
"Cuttings (later)" and "Forcing House." How does it work here?

The poem. describes (or narrates), primarily in Spatial terns,
an ordeal that was endured (all the finite verbs are preterite)
Over a period of time. It begins by asking,

Where were the greenhouses going . . . ?

The question gives a stationary object Spatial motion. The motion

Of the buildings is described as a "Lunging into the lashing Wind. ,. . ."

1
"The Veggtal Radicalism of Theodore Roethke," SR, LVIII
(January 1950), 70.

 

63

During the literal narration of the human action (Burke's step 2),
attention shifts from the greenhouses to one rose-house. Steps 3

and It are an extended trope ". . . that likens the hothouse [rose-house]
to a ship riding a gale."1 But Burke moves too fast. He does not
point out the striking fact that the "ship" actively battles the storm
rather than passively rides it out. The emphasis is on the motion of the
"ship," when in reality the men on such a vessel would try to prevent
its moving. Literally it is the storm that moves-~not the rose-house

or the ship. The final lines of the poem beautifully blur the dis-

t inctions between spatial and temporal frameworks:

She sailed into the calm morning ,2

Carrying her full cargo of roses.

These lines cap a poem which has given a stationary object motion in
order to describe that object enduring something over a period of time;
here the attributed motion carries the unmoving building into a period
Of time. In "Cuttings (later)" and "Forcing House," where Space and
time are also translated one in terms of another, the effect created

is one of a miraculous intensification of life. In "Big Wind," it is
the man-made environment, not living things, that is the central concern.

Here, as in "Cuttings (later) ," the poet reapplies terms of

Plant life that were once borrowed from that realm to be used as

l
Burke, 70.

2

A printer's error that escaped the proofreader in I Am! Says
the Lamb suggests the unconventionality of this type of distortion.
There the line reads: "She sailed until the calm morning. . . ."
(I Am, p. 59.)

61+

metaphoric descriptions of other things. In "Cuttings (later) ," he
made "lopped" and "limbs" describe both saints being martyred and
slips being cut from plants. In "Big Wind," the "ship" (metaphor for
rose-house) and the storm (literal) are described in plant and

animal metaphors. The storm is said to have "teeth," a "core," and
"pith." The "wind-waves," a term that is a meeting point for the
literal and figurative elements, are "flailing" and "wearing themselves
out." The metaphoric ship is "ploughing" and "bucking," and roses are
spoken of as the "cargo." I have compared this poem with "Cuttings
(later)," but it can also be compared with "Forcing House," for, as
in that poem, there is a blurring of the distinction between organism
and environment, between the living and the non-living.

"Old Florist" (£S_, p. 18) develops the comment made on human
presence in "Big Wind." It also recalls "Root Cellar" in that it is
the first poem after that one to avoid making any declarative statement.
The significance of this is increased when one notices that the four
following poems, which conclude the "Greenhouse Poems," do not contain
a single declarative sentence. The principal function of this refusal
to write in conventionally grammatical sentences, what I have called
"syntactic distortion," is to present the Special nature of the temporal
and Spatial relations already indicated. Sometimes the Special nature
Of these relations is a translation of one into the other, of spatial
i nto temporal or 14.9.9. m. At other times, the purpose seems to be
tO make location of the experience in time impossible. This, in
turn, lends the described experience an air of universality, of time-

lessness, and also blurs the distinction between the individual and

65

the Species.

"Old Florist" may be considered wither a series of parallel
absolute constructions or an exclamatory sentence of many clauses, all
built around the core:

How he could flick and pick
Rotten leaves or yellow petals. . . .

In either case, there is only one indication of tense, that is, one
marker of the location of the experience in time, the verb "could" in
the lines just quoted. The poem admiringly states that there exists a
human whose attributes are those depicted in "Big Wind": inventiveness,
endurance, and selflessness. The selflessness is seen in the Speaker's
refusal to describe the man himself, or to name him. His only
characteristics are the actions he performs in carying for the plants.
(Possibly, he is related to the identityless Speaker of "Weed Puller."
Like the weeds, he is not named but referred to by his shape: "That
hump of a man. . . .") His inventiveness is almost miraculous in its
power over life and death:

He could drown a bug in one Spit of tobacco juice,
0r fan life into wilted sweet—peas with his hat. . . .

And, as in "Big Wind," his endurance is shown by his caring for the
plants throughout a difficult night:

He could stand all night watering roses, his feet
blue in rubber boots.

A poem that Sheds some light on "Old Florist" is "Frau Bauman,
Frau Schmidt, and Frau Schwartze," which Roethke added to the sequence

When it was published in The Waking.l Although it is not non-

1
The Wakingz (New York, 1953), pp. us-uu.

66

declarative like the last five poems in the original sequence, it
presents as they do the Spatial-temporal distortion in thematic terms.
The poem comprises three main parts, perhaps corresponding to the

names in the title, a reminiscence of the women caring for the plants,
a description of one of the women playing with the Speaker when he was
young, and a comment on the presence of the women in the present life of
the Speaker. These women are themselves described much more fully than
the implied figures in the other poems, more fully than the old florist,
and more fully than the Speaker himself. They, too, however, are mainly
characterized by the actions they perform in caring for the plants

and the boy. Here, certain sexual undertones, which may also be present
in "Old Florist," add an interesting aSpect to the description.

What are the important qualities of the three women? One is
that they represent a kind of order for the speaker. The description
of their work makes it sound as if they are imposing a grind on some-
thing structureless. They wind the growing tendrils and Stems
around guide strings, so that the growth does not follow the accidents
of the non-human environment. They straighten, tie, and tuck. The
last line of the first part of the poem smarizes it and makes the
symbolic nature of the description explicit: .

They trellised the sun; they plotted for more
than themselves.

A trellis is essentially a grid, a means of imposing order, and to
trellis the sun suggests the imposing of a temporal order. The word
"plotted" has several possible meanings here. The most literal is a

Statement about the selflessness of the three: they worked and planned

67

("plotted" in an almost conspiratorial way) in greenhouses that they
did.not own. This word, like the phrase "trellised the sun," fuses the
'temporal and spatial, for its other possible meanings are that they
planned.what the future would bring and that they dug a plot for the
florist. The following less literal meanings should also be noted:
a grave "plot" and to "plot" graph. The Speaker's reaction to this
ordering (perhaps related to the German name "Bauman"--builder)l
is ambivalent. On one hand, he Speaks of the women as,

These nurses of nobody else . . .,
and describes their work as,

Keeping creation at east. . . .
On the other hand, he likens them to witches, and the description of
their bringing of order might recall the line in "Prognosis":

The ruminant, reason, chews a poisoned cud. . . .

This ambivalence is even clearer when one looks at the sexual
undertones in this poem. These begin in the first line where the
speaker refers to the "ancient ladies." It continues in his des-
cription of their tying and tucking the stiff, jointed stems, like
nurses. He says

They stood astride pipes,
Their Skirts billowing out wide into tents. . . .

And then the fine line, with the rich undertones of "teased" and "seed":

1"Bau," in German, means 1) "building, erection, construction;
edifice structure; 2) build, frame, form; 3) burrow and den; cultivation,
culture, agriculture." These meanings are similar to those of the
English word "plot."

68

They teased out the seed that the cold kept asleep. . . .

The Speaker's memory of the women's treatment of him obviously links
him with the plants:

I remember how they picked me up, a Spindly kid,

Pinching and poking my thin ribs

Till I lay in their laps, laughing,

Weak as a whiffet. . . .
And then the concluding Six lines, in which the sexual undertones are
eSpecially noticeable:

Now, when I'm alone and cold in my bed,

They still hover over me,

These ancient leathery cranes,

With their bandannas stiffened with sweat,

And their thorn-bitten wrists,

And their snuff—laden breath blowing lightly

over me in my first sleep.

Throughout the poem, one is constantly forced to think of the three
women as women, but at the same time reminded that they cannot be
objects of desire. The terms "nurse" and "witch" both give the women
the air of mysterious attractive power combined with a negative charge.
The significance of these women for the Speaker is best seen by com-
paring this poem with "Weed Puller." In that piece, the Speaker's
"violable" identity was likened to the nameless weeds, and contrasted
“to that of the specifically named flowers. In this poem, the women's
personal names are given, so we may assume that they in some way represent
One or several established identities, possibly the three fates. Their
effect on the speaker has been profound and outside of his control.
The description of the boy lying in their laps, "laughing / Weak as a

Whiffet," unites the two strands mentioned earlier: his pleasure and

lack of control. The last six lines continue the notion of his lack

69

(of control. The last six lines continue the notion of his lack of
cmntrol, but do not continue the pleasurable portrait of the "crones."
The tone of these lines is ambivalent and possibly even negative. In

a sense, the women or fates have violated his identity. This is the
'meaning of their ordering, their plotting, and their trellising the sun,
and it is also one meaning of the temporal distortion: the Speaker's
present cannot be severed from his past. The women shape his present
existence and identity just as they shaped the growth of the plants

that they "sewed" to the guide strings.

The last four poems of the series only once enploy a finite
verb. Their most obvious grammatical technique is the use of paratactic
chains of absolute constructions, the effect of which is to place the
events outside of time. The absolute constructions could be converted
into independent clauses by adding was, i§_or will_be_befbre the
participles (which are all present participles).

"TranSplanting" (_L_S_, p. 19) is in two sections, the first
describing human action, the second, the growth of the plants, the
first being a cause or condition of the second. The human action is
presented entirely in favorable terms, though not the ones distinguished
in "Big Wind." Here the qualities emphasized are delicacy and speed.
Attention is focused on the action, which is as thoroughly as possible
separated from the performer. Possibly this separation is meant to
indicate the selflessness of the human character and the universal
quality of the action performed. The first line is ambiguous, so that
the relation between the Speaker of the poem and the person trans-

planting is indefinable:

70

Watching hands transplanting. . . .

The Speaker may be watching another person, or "watching" may be an
attributive adjective modifying "hands." "Hands" then becomes the
subject for the nine present participles in the first section. The
last two lines, however, turn attention to the plant itself,1 and
it is here that the Single finite verb in these four poems occurs:

Into the flat-box it goes,

Ready for the long days under the

sloped glass. . . .

This poem works with the same contrast between freedom and
enclosure that "Root Cellar" does. The action of part one, though
performed with delicacy and Speed, is still one of burying, tamping,
shaking down, and putting in boxes "fer the long days under the Sloped
glass." In contrast, part two describes the plants' growth as release:

. . . the smallest buds

Breaking into nakedness,

The blossoms extending

Out into the sweet air,

The whole flower extending outward,

Stretching and reaching.
In "Root Cellar," the humanly created environment is cramped and dark,
but it is conducive to the growth of obscene roots. In "Transplanting,"
the humanly created environment is light and open, and the sexual
undertones (as in "nakedness") are innocent rather than obscene.

"Child on Top of a Greenhouse" (L§, p. 20) is more interesting
when read in the light of the preceding poems than when read alone.

By itself, it is too sketchy to bring out the full significance of its

own lines. It is primarily about the human presence in the greenhouse

1

Possibly the vacillation between describing one plant and
several symbolizes the blurring of the distinction between individual and
species, obviously contributing to the development of the identity theme.

.
-\i we IH ‘ - I

71

vworld, but it contrasts the actions of the Speaker, a child, with those

(of adults described in other poems. Unlike the "selfless" workers,

O O C l
‘the child is showing-off. He is not enduring a difficult time but

indulging in a momentary burst of playfulness. The relation, however,
Zbetween his "performance" and the inventiveness, delicacy, and swiftness
of the adults is not one of mere contrast, but a subtle commentary of
each on the other. Perhaps this poem and "The Gentle" in Open House
are portraits of the artist as a child, suggesting that the ingeniousness
of the artist appears childish and useless to certain kinds of adult
eyes.

This reading accounts for two other elements of the poem.
liere, as in "Moss-Gathering," the Speaker presents himself as a child and
lacknowledges his own guilt before "the natural order of things":

The half-grown Chrysanthemums staring
up like accusers. . ._.

(One is reminded of the sense of guilt Hawthorne mentions in the
‘Preface to The House of Seven Gables, where he imagines not the natural
order’but his own ancestors disapproving of his being an artist.)

The second element is the peculiar nature of the actions mentioned in
this poem, which are considerably more violent than those of any other
poem in the group, with the exception of "Big Wind." In that poem the
violent actions were ascribed to the rose-house and the storm, the two

figurative combatants in purposeful.re1ationship with each other. In

He may be related to the orchids, though he is certainly not
as sinister.

72

"Child on Top of a Greenhouse" each agitation has a different actor,
and there is no purposeful accord or opposition among them. The main
intention of the poem is to create a sense of the speaker's ability
to draw to himself a certain amount of attention from the welter of
undirected agitation:

The wind billowing out the seat of my britches,

My feet crackling splinters of glass and dried putty,

The half-grown crysanthemums staring up like accusers,

Up through the streaked glass, flashing with sunlight,

A few white clouds all rushing eastward,

A line of elms plunging and tossing like horses,

And everyone, everyone pointing up and shouting!

"Flower Dump" (§§, p. 21) returns to the mode of implying human
presence. The title itself names a man-made thing, and at the same
time begins to set up a tension between the living and the dead. The
human presence is implied by four words. The first is "Slag," which
of course might refer to volcanic scoria rather than the man-made
dress from the smelting process, but in both instances its connotations
are coldness,use1essness, and death. "Pile" also does not necessarily
indicate human action, though in the line,

Whole beds of bloom pitched on a pile,

it certainly does. "Twined," in the lines,

With bleached veins
Twined like fine hair,

does not literally name the result of a human action, but figuratively
it does. Only human beings twine hair. The last word, "pot," in the
line,

Each-clump in the shape of a pot,

73

is the clearest of the four, naming as it does an artifact, a product
of human workmanship. But what is the significance of this implied
human presence? The main intention of the poem answers this question.
In the plant world, man, in godlike manner, controls life and death.
The adage, "Man proposes; God disposes," provides an interesting
insight here. Substitute the "plang," "growth," or "organic processes"
fer "man," and "man" for "God," and the meaning of the human presence
becomes clearer. Also the word "diSposes," when the rewritten adage is
applied to this poem, becomes an illuminating pun. But this relation-
ship between man and plant reverberates even more, if it is read as a
parallel to the adult-child relationship. The godlike human being
(or adult) carelessly disposes of things that are of life-and-death im-
portance in the plant world (or child‘s world). The last lines of the
poem assert some sort of triumph of life over death, of individual
identity over obliteration, and perhaps of the child over the adult:

Everything limp

But one tulip on top,

One swaggering head

Over the dying, the newly dead.
The last line explicitly describes the jumbling together-the failure
to treat with distinction-~the living and the dead. The "swaggering"
tulip on top resembles the child on top of the greenhouse, and con-
sequently suggests the artist as Opposed to the careless, conventional
adult. It is impossible and harmful to limit the significance of the
poem to any one of these meanings: they are all present. And it is
equally impossible and harmful to resolve the "contradiction" in the

Speaker's (child's) attitudes toward adults. Every important relation-

ship between human beings, when examined honestly, reveals deep

 

71!

ambivalences within each individual concerned. The Speaker in these
poems both admires the adults who work in the greenhouses and hates
them, fearing their power over his own potential identity.

"Carnations" (§§, p. 22), the last poem in the greenhouse
sequence, develOps a new kind of grammatical distortion and thematically
presents a temporal distortion. The first two lines may be read as
two paratactic independent clauses in the preterite or as two absolute
constructions:

Pale blossoms, each balanced on a single jointed stem,
The leaves curled back in elaborate Corinthian scrolls. . . .

Nothing indicates whether "balanced" and "curled" are finite verbs
or participles. The remaining five lines do not remove the ambiguity,
and the poem stands as a temporal illusion. Looked at one way, it is
a description of past action; looked at another, it is present.
And the air cool, as if drifting down from wet hemlocks,
Or rising out of ferns not far from water,
A criSp hyacinthine coolness,
Like that clear autumnal weather of eternity,
The windless perpetual morning above a September cloud.
The last two lines thematically present the temporal dis-

tortion, which of course correSponds to the grammatical one. Speaking

of the "weather of eternity" is a slight distortion, since weather is

 

usually changeable, and, as defined by The Concise Oxford Dictionary of

Current English (1951), is firmly rooted in time and Space:

 

"Atmospheric conditions prevailing at a place and time." The word
"autumnal" deepens this distortion, for change is the ssence of seasons
and is usually excluded from the conception of unchanging eternity.

"Windless perpetual morning" is another of Roethke's beautiful temporal

75

paradoxes, recalling "Fifty summers in motion at once" and "Sailed
into morning."

The "Greenhouse Poems," then, continue development of the
identity theme that began in Open House. Earlier facets, such as the
diseased Spirit and the journey inward, disappear to be replaced by new
ones, such as the effects of human (parental) care and of the environ-
ment on a growing personality. Exploring new imagistic devices,
subtle effects of point of view, and the uses of lightly stressed but
unmuddied rhythms, these poems justifiably advanced Roethke's reputa-
tion. If they have a flaw, it lies in their working too effectively as
natural description and in not providing clear enough signs of their

symbolic intent.

III. Other Short Poems

 

Sections II and III of The Lost Son and Other Poems demonstrates

 

further Roethke's handling of the human presence. The seven poems in
Section II deal with human characters, actions, and situations; the

five poems in Section III avoid human references almost entirely,
allowing only a few hints of the Speaker's humanity. Other, less im-
portant, differences between the two groups are as follows: Section II
is more sombre, abstract, and remote (that is, the Speaker is a detached
observer, though this is not true of "The Return"). Section III

celebrates non-human nature and the Speaker‘s sense of union with the

"not-'1” e "

 

76

"My Papa's Waltz" (£§, p. 25) again presents the Speaker as

clxild and emphasizes his ambivalent feelings toward his father.
The lines,

But I hung on like death,
and,

Still clinging to your shirt,
Show the relationship between the two. In Spite of his father's
drunkeness, the noise, the smell, and the pain, the boy hangs on.
Reducing this poem to the baldest paraphrase, I would say its point is
that one's identity is rooted in one's family and that unpleasantness
must be accepted. One cannot strike out alone too early, but must receive
the support offered, almost regardless of pain and entanglements. The
poem recalls the family poems of Open House, especially "The Gentle,"
and "Weed Puller," "Root Cellar" and "Frau.Bauman, Frau Schmidt, and
Frau Schwartze" of the greenhouse series.

"Pickle Belt" (§§, p. 26) explores the possibilities of a
shifting point of view. The first stanza looks from a remote point at
some unidentified factory workers:

The fruit rolled by all day.

They prayed the cogs would creep;

They thought about Saturday pay,

And Sunday Sleep.
The second stanza narrows to an individual worker and enters his mind;
the speaker is inside a boy, looking out:

Whatever he smelled was good:

The fruit and flesh smells mixed.

There beside him she stood,--
And he, perplexed;

77

The boy apparently feels a contrast between his own vivid sensations
and the vapid praying and thinking of the other workers. The third
line suggests his adolescent over-dramatization. Then the third
stanza suddenly places the Speaker at a very remote vantage point,
from which he sees the boy not as an individual but as an expendable
tool used for the moment by nature for the propagation of the species.
He has no identity other than his prickling lust:

He, in his shrunken britches,

Eyes rimmed with pickle dust,

Prickling with all the itches

Of Sixteen-year-old lust.

"Dolour" (LS, p. 27) presents a picture of the tedium of a

life devoid of emotion and imagination, and consequently it comments
on the theme of identity. Thoreau exclaims in Walden: "How many a

poor immortal soul have I met well nigh crushed and smothered under. . .

[the] load [for material possessions]!"1 and H, , .Hen have become the

tools of their tools."2

Roethke's poem repeats this same observation,
referring to the

Endless duplication of lives and objects,
and,

. . . the duplicate grey standard faces.
Roethke, himself, commented on the poems in a talk "On 'Identity'"
delivered in 1963. Speaking of Americans' failure of desire for
"purity, a final innocence," he said: "Yet we [Americans] continue to

1

Walden: Or, Life in the Woods, ed. Bradford Torrey (Boston, 1897),
I, 10-11.

2
Thoreau, I , 61.

78

make a fetish of 'thing-hood,‘ we surround ourselves with junk, ugly
objects endlessly repeated in an economy dedicated to waste. [Roethke
then quotes the first two and last five lines of "Dolour" and continues]
This poem is an exposition of one of the modern hells: the institution
that overwhelms the individual man. The 'order,‘ the trivia of the

institution, is, in human terms, a disorder, and as such, must be

resisted."1 A little later in this same piece Roethke admits that "All

this has been said before, in Thoreau, in Rilke."2

"Double Feature" (LS, p. 28) works with the sudden shift in
vision, much as "Pickle Belt" does, though here the view point remains
inside the first-person Speaker. The "I" sees the last moment of a
serialized motion picture "thriller," then the house lights come on,
and the speaker leaves the theater. Throughout this development there
is perhaps a slight opposition suggested between the excitement of the
hero's adventure and the speaker's boring life:

I dawdle with groups near the rickety

pop-corn stand;

Dally at Shop windows, etc.
But the third, and last, stanza suddenly reveals a deeper vision of
the Speaker's: "I notice. . . the slow"

Wheel of the stars, the Great Bear glittering

colder than snow,
And remember there was something else I
was haping for.

The unSpecified "something else" is the second "feature"; the morass of

"thing-hood," represented by the tawdry theater and the stupified

audience, contrasts with this. In his talk "On 'Identity'," Roethke

l
Poet and Craft, pp. 19-20.

2
Poet and Craft, p. 21.

79

spoke of "a real hunger for a reality more than the immediate: a
desire not only for a finality, for a consciousness beyond the
mundane, but a desire for quietude, a desire for joy."1 Again
Roethke is very close to Thoreau.

"The Return" (§§3 p. 29) introduces the figure of "all haunted
and harried men,"2 which is to occupy Roethke's mind throughout the
poems of the late 19u0's and early 1950's. This figure is foreshadowed
in earlier poems, such as "Feud" and "Prognosis ," and in "Greenhouse
Poems," such as "Root Cellar," "Weed Puller" and "Frau Bauman, Frau
Schmidt, and Frau Schwartze," In this poem the Speaker likens himself
to a beast being hunted down that has returned to its lair, knowing it
will be found. Two interesting qualities of the poem are the subtle
balance between the human and bestial characteristics of the Speaker,
and, secondly, the way in which the poem strongly but indirectly
suggests the question, why has he returned to this unpleasant place?

I circled on leather paws

In the darkening corridor,
Crouched closer to the floor,
Then bristled like a dog.

As I turned for a backward look,
The muscles in one thigh

Sagged like a frightened lip.

A cold key let me in

That selfeinfected lair;

And I lay down with my life,
With the rags and rotting clothes,

With a stump of scraggy fang
Bared for a hunter's boot.

1
Poet and Craft, p. 19.

 

2
Poet and Craft, p. 10.

 

80

The balance of human and bestial needs no explanation other than the
drawing of attention to the Speaker's self-disgust. The poem implies
that he is being hunted down by dogs fellowing his scent, and he
pictures himself as a furtive and cowardly animal, not as a noble stag
or lion.

Why has he returned to this "self-infected lair"? Not because
it protects or hides him, for he expects the "hunter's boot" at any
moment. The answer lies in the child's ambivalent attitude toward its
parents and its home. The Speaker's returning to his "lair" resembles
the boy's clinging "like death" to his father's shirt in "My
Father's Waltz." More abstractly, this represents the difficulty of an
individual's finding or making his identity. Regardless of the un-
pleasantness of one's early environment (even if it was a "root cellar")
and of the faults of one's parents, if one is to develop an individual
identity it must be rooted in these. When he wrote these lines, Roethke
may have been remembering another poem about animals, in which the poet
accepts the unpleasantness that reality ferces on him, Yeat's "The
Circus Animals' Desertion":

Nowthat my ladder's gone,

I must lie down where all the ladders start1
In the feul rag-and-bone Shep of the heart.

The next poem, "Last Words" (§§, p. 30), returns to the contrast
between excitement and tedium dealt with in "Double Feature" and

"Dolour." The first six lines convey the sense both of being encumbered

1The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats (New York, 1957), p. 336.
Professor Roy Harvey Pearce instructs usIflt'. . to use. . .[Roethke's
poem] as a means of defining our own return to the mental hOSpitals—-
if such are meant here--which we perforce make out of our lives,"
"The Power of Sympathy," Stein, p. 171. I believe this reading is
possible and fruitful.

 

M—s

 

81

by objects and of the adolescent vagueness and self-consciousness
of the Speaker's longing for something beyond
That fine fuming stink of particular kettles. . . .
The Speaker's selfemockery grows sharper in the absurd exclamations:
O worm of duty! 0 Spiral knowledge!
The second section continues in this vein:
Kiss me, kiss me quick, mistress of lost wisdom,
Come out of a cloud, angel with several faces,
Bring me my hat, my umbrella and rubbers,
Enshroud me in Light! 0 Whirling! O Terrible Love!
The strange invocation begins with a scrap of child's verse and moves
into a parody of Blake, but the last line fails to sustain this parody,
and in my opinion the poem is unsuccessful.

The last poem of section II, "Judge Not" (LS, p. 31), also fails
either through inconsistency or obscurity. The Speaker assumes the
role, previously assigned to the greenhouse workers and adults,
of arbiter of life and death; however, his bases of judgment are
not clear. Perhaps, as the title suggests, one human being is never
clear sighted enough to pass such judgments on other human beings.

In the first section, the Speaker is "haunted by images," which means
he is not confronting others directly. This detached observer (or
dreamer) calls down "the blessings of life":
Faces greying faster than loam-crumbs
on a harrow;
Children, their bellies swollen like
blown-up paper bags,
Their’eyes, rich as plumbs, staring from

newSprint,--
These images haunted me noon and midnight.

82

I imagined the unborn, starving in wombs, curling;
I asked: May the blessings of life, 0 Lord, descend
descend on the living.
But in the second section, he is not "haunted by images," not looking
at newSpaper photographs, not "imagining the unborn," but seeing
human degradation and suffering at first-hand:
Yet when I heard the drunkards howling,
Smelled the carrion at the entrances,
Saw women, their eyelids like little rags,
I said: On all these, Death, with gentleness,
come down.
One explanation of this last line is that the speaker has seen the
destruction of human identities and feels the volnerability of his own,
and therefore calls down Death on the "lost souls."

The five poems of Section III, in contrast to the preceding ones,
do not deal with human figures other than the Speaker. The first of
these poems, "Night Crow" (LS, p. 35), in a sense presents a spatial
distcution. An experience that takes place in the external spatial
world is translated into an "inner" event that conveys a sense of a
great spatial capacity in the Speaker's mind. This duality of inner
and outer resembles the traditional mystic doctrine of correspondence.

When I saw that clumsy crow

Flap from a wasted tree,

A shape in the mind rose up:

Over the gulfs of dream

'Flew a tremendous bird

Further and further away

Into a moonless black,

Deep in the brain, far back.
This poems achieves its effect through its own inexplicableness much
the same way Stevens' "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird" does.
Not much in the poem offers grounds for eXplanation, beyond the fact

‘that the "clumsy" and familiar crow in the external world evokes

or'correSponds to a terrifying image in the mind.

83

"River Incident" (SS, p. 36) similarly treats the subject of

the bonds between the speaker-observer and non-human nature.

A shall arched under my toes,

Stirred up a whirl of Silt

That riffled around my knees.

Whatever I owed to time

Sowed in my human form;

Sea water stood in my veins,

The elements I kept warm

Crumbled and floated away,

And I knew I had been there before,

In that cold, granitic slime,

In the dark, in the rolling water.
The ambiguity of "arched" is an example of Spatial distortion.
Ordinarily, that word would describe the shape of a shell, not the
Shell's motion; but here an arching motion is meant, Since it is this
movement that stirs up "a whirl of silt." The Speaker then feels the
similarity between his own life in time and the slowing of the silt's
movement and its settling after the agitation subsides. This perception
itself translates the spatial into the temporal. And again this
translation accompanies a breaking down of the distinction between
the individual and the species, or, more accurately, between an individual
man and the life process itself. The speaker feels that he has evolved
out of the Sline and that he retains his bond with it. Clearly implying
‘metempsychosis, the last lines provide an early statement of what is to
become a major theme in Roethke's work, one I Shall call the theme
of "reincarnation."

"The Minimal" (SS, p. 37) works with the same correspondence

between the human and non-human worlds, but in a subtler and more

suggestive way than the preceding two poems. It, too, emphasizes

the Speaker's role as observer, the foundation of the poem being the

at:

single independent clause: "I study the lives. . ., the sleepers,
etc. . . ." The correspondence is stated in terms of the two worlds
the Speaker studies, first the fauna living in a bog, secondly,
bacteria in wounds on human beings. The correSpondences between a
hog and a wound, and between both of these and the human unconscious,
become important in "The Lost Son" and the poems that follow it. I
quote the poem in full:

I study the lives on a leaf: the little

Sleepers, numb nudgers in cold dimensions,

Beetles in caves, newts, stone-deaf fishes,

Lice tethered to long limp subterranean weeds,

Squirmers in bogs,

And bacterial creepers

Wriggling through wounds

Like elvers in ponds,

Their wan mouths kissing the warm sutures,

Cleaning and caressing,

Creeping and healing.
The bog and the wound are not merely identical, of course. The one is
cold and supports life forms that are somehow trapped ("in caves" and
"tethered") or deadened ("sleepers," "numb" and "stone-deaf"). The
other is warm and conducive to benevolent life forms ("kissing,"
"cleaning," "caressing" and "healing"). The significance of these
differences seems to be that the bog ferces life to struggle and
evolve, (resembling "Forcing House"), and consequently gives rise to
greater and greater degrees of individuality. Life in the human
wound, like life for the foetus in the womb, is a deceptive repose,
one that lulls life away from the painful struggle toward individuality
and consciousness. Taken alone, this poem cannot perhaps support such

a reading, but read in light of "The Lost Son" it can. Even if the bacteria

are "cleaning and healing," the connotations of "wan" and of the

85

picture of them as young eels are decidedly pejorative.
"The Cycle" (SS, p. 38) describes the water cycle in terms

that suggest it represents the life cycle or, as in traditional
neoplatonic symbolism, the journey of an immortal soul into, through,
and out of, the mortal state. The salient details are:

The fine rain coiled in a cloud,
which brings to mind the serpent in the Garden of Eden, symbolizing the
immediate cause of the fall into moral existence. The climaz of the
poem is reached in the line:

The air grew loose and loud,
conceivably suggesting the wrath of God. And, finally, the weighted
word "lapsing" in the line:

Tunnelled with lapsing sound. . . .
The Fall of man is called the "lapse." Such details, though, are
meagre evidence for this reading, and the poem must be charged with
the same fault of many of Roethke's early pieces--insufficient develop-
ment, lack of symbolic depth.

The last poem in section III, "The Waking" (SS, pp. 39-u0),

is quite clear in itself and is an appropriate introduction to
"The Lost Son." It, too, presents the spea;er as observer of non-human
nature and records his awareness of his relationships with it. The
main intention of the poem is to convey the Speaker's ecstasy in
discovering that he is not isolated, not shut out from the non-human

world:

I wan't alone
In a grove of apples.

 

86

The last four lines touch on the reincarnation theme already noted in
"River Incident":l

And all the waters

Of all the streams

Sang in my veins

That summer day.
Mr. Burke justly describes the poem when he says that it "risks a simple

Post--Wordsworthian account of pure qu,"2

The short lyrics in Sections I through III maintain an objective
form, being organized legically, chronologically, or spatially. With
the poems of Section IV, Roethke begins a series of pieces exhibiting
radical experiments in form, ones that were to incur the frequently
repeated charge of "fallacy of imitative form." He published four

poems of this group in The Lost Son, then expanded it to fourteen in

 

Praise to the End! (1951). Although these poems deal with themes

 

introduced in the earlier works, they explore them much more fully.
At this point in his career, what Roethke needed to do most was to
write long poems that would allow him to develop at length themes and

patterns of images. Fortunately, that is just what he did.

1
Here a more accurate term fer the theme would be "pantheism,"

but as I Show in the next chapter the two themes are closely allied.

2
Burke, p. 86.

CHAPTER FOUR

THE SHAME OF CIRCULARITY

The series of long narratives published under the title

Praise to the End! begins with an attitude prevalent in Roethke's

 

earlier work--1ife in time is painful. By the end of the sequence,
however, the protagonist has conquered his weltschmerz and learned

to make certain affirmations, albeit sometimes in a shrill voice.

Most important to his spiritual progress is facing down the Specter

of death, and the discovery that enables him to do this is a com-
tination of doctrines: pantheism, Darwinian evolution, transmigration
of the soul, and mysticism. A passage in Yvor Winters's essay

"The Experimental School in American Poetry," although not dealing
with Roethke, brings together several of the important themes in these
poems and relates them to another, the journey inward or introspection:

The Emersonian and allied doctrines differ in their moral
implications very little from any form of Quietism or even

from the more respectable and Catholic forms of mysticism. If
we add to the doctrine the belief in pantheism--that is, the
belief that the Over-Soul is the Universe, that body and soul
are one--we have the basis for the more or less Freudian
mysticism of the surrealists . . .; we have also-~probab1y--a
rough notion of Hart Crane's mysticism. . . .The pantheistic mystic
. . . is more interested in the promptings of the "subconscious"
mind than of the conscious, in the half-graSped intention,

in the fleeting relationship, than in that which is wholly
understood. He is interested in getting just as far off in

the direction of the uncoltrolled, the meaningless, as he

can possibly get and still have the pleasure of talking about
it. He is frequently more interested in the psychology of
sleeping than in the psychology of waking; he would if he could
devote himself to exploring that realm of experience which he
shares with sea-anemones, cabbages, and onions, in preference

to exploring the realm shared Specifically with men.

1
In Defense of Reason (New York, 1997), pp. 55-56.
87

 

88

This may stand as a more than adequate though brief summary of the
ideas underlying these poems. Although Winters neglects to eXplain
the relation between pantheism and receptivity to subconscious
stirrings, both are certainly relevant to these narratives. More
important than pantheism, however, is the theme of reincarnation or
metempsychosis. The title of this chapter, in fact, alludes to an
occurrence of this theme in "I Cry, Love! Love!," where the protagonist
asks:

Is circularity such a shame?
"Circularity" refers to the doctrine that souls return to earth until
they have perfected themselves.

If Roethke, as it appears, accepted this doctrine in order to
allay an unbearable fear of death, he (or his protagonist) closely
resembles Whitman. Leslie Fiedler, without referring to metempsychosis,
observes this similarity: "He [Roethke] can never cease to travel the
road to Woodlawn, for him the archetypal cemetery, but thinking of it
he asserts his ego with Special passion. . . . Nowhere else does he remind
us so strongly of Whitman, of 'Song of Myself.”1 Frederick William
Conner has pointed out that Whitman's attitude toward (he does not say
"fear of") death led him to a belief in evolution and transmigration of
the soul.2 Beyond Whitman, one cannot locate with certainty the other
sources for these ideas in Roethke's poems. Conner rapidly sketches

what might be a geneology of Roethke's themes, beginning with the

1
Waiting for the End (New York, 196%), p. 228.

 

2 . . . . .
Cosmic Optimism (Ga1nesv1lle, Florida, 19u9), pp. 111-116.

89

evolutionary form of reincarnation seen in the Pythagorean ". . .idea
of the cyclical transmigration of soul. . . ." He then leaps over
Plato and Plotinus to the English poet James Thomson and his ". . .
conception of the ascent of the soul through a rising series of
incarnations, [which] foreshadowed an interpretation of evolution that
was to have great appeal for several of our poets. Readers of Emerson
and.Whitman will be aware that Emerson's 'worm striving to be man' mounted
through all the Spires of form, and that Whitman described evolution
as the 'long journey' of his own soul."2 And, we may add, Theodore
Roethke saw his father's face "deep in the belly of a thing to be"
(2!, p. 107) and affirmed that: "By snails, by leaps of frog, I

came here, Spirit," (HE, p. 101).

Returning to the Winters passage, we see that it comments not
only on several themes but also on what Winters considers an objection-
able mode of composition. In a statement on Roethke's poetic technique,
Leslie Fiedler provides an illuminating counterbalance to Winters's
declamation against surrealism:

Particularly strong in his [Roethke's] work are evidences or
surrealism, which elsewhere our tradition so strongly resists.
[Fiedler continues in the next paragraph:] Eliot and Pound
themselves . . . as well as Crane and Cummings (and Poe befbre
them all), have been finally too involved with culture to make

the final plunge into the abyss of the unconscious; their
madhouses are inhabited by the ghosts of books rather than

those of unconfessed or unfulfilled desires. Roethke, on the
other hand, has been willing, in his flight from the platitude

of meaning, not only to work on the very edge of psychic disaster,

but also to seek in the absolute privacy of his own dreams, 3
rather than in the decaying culture, his ultimate images and myths.

Conner, p. 9.

2Conner, p. 10

3
Fiedler, pp. 226-227.

90

The crucial difference between the Fiedler and the Winters passages,

in so far as the both comment on the artistic employment of the
unconscious, is that Winters regards a verbal "raid of the inarticulate"
as a betrayal of the intelligence to nonsense, whereas Fiedler regards
it as a rejuvenation of language. Since several of Roethke's early
poems reveal a marked distrust of reason, he obviously would not share
Winters's judgment.

Roethke, of course, may be allowed to Speak for himself on the
matter of his technique and philos0phy of composition. Writing admiringly
of the work of Louise Bogan, he furnishes some insight into his own
conception of the creative process: "One definition of a serious
lyric-~it may come from Stanley Kunitz--would call it a revelation of
a tragie personality. [And, then, more of our immediate pointz]

Behind the Bogan poems is a woman . . . who never writes a serious
poem until there is a genuine 'up-welling' from the unconscious; who

shapes emotion into an inevitable-seeming, an endurable, form."l

Of course, writing out of such an "up—welling" when it is consciously
understood and shaped is not practising surrealism. And, indeed, in

his "Open Letter," where he explains more fully what he is about,
Roethke does not sound like a surrealist. The first comment I quote
picks up the idea of tragedy which we just saw as part of the definition
of a serious lyric: "To keep the rhythms, the language 'right," i.e.,

consistent with what a child would say or at least to create the 'as if'

1
Poet and Craft, p. luO.

 

91

of the child's world, was very difficult technically. I don't believe

anyone else has been foiish enough to attempt a tragedy in this particular

way."1 In other words, Roethke apparently feels there is a "tragic

1>ersonality" standing beyond these poems. Whether it is his own or the
protagonist's, it is one that has known a beautiful and innocent world
and seen that world invaded by death, sexuality, and self-loathing.
But to return to the problem of technique, Roethke writes a length:

A word or two about the habits of mind or technical effects
peculiar to this sequence. ("Peculiar" is not used in the sense
of odd, for they are traditional poems. Their ancestors: German
and English folk literature, particularly Mother Goose;
Elizabethan and Jacobean drama, especially the songs and rants;
the Bible; Blake and Traherne; Durer.) Much of the action is
implied or, particularly in the case of erotic experience, rendered
obliquely. The revelation of the identity of the Speaker may
itself be a part of the drama; or, in some instances, in a dream
sequence, his identity may merge with someone else's, or be
deliberately blurred.

Rhythmically, it's the Spring and rush of the child I'm after--
Gammer Gurton's concision: mutterkin's wisdom. . . . I believe that,
in this kind of poem, the poet, in order to be true to what is most
universal in himself, Should not rely on allusion; should not
comment or employ many judgment words; Should not meditate (or
maunder). He must scorn being "mysterious" or loosely oracular,
but be willing to face up to genuine mystery. . . . He must be able
to telescope image and symbol, if necessary, without relying on
the obvious connectives: to speak in a kind of psychic shorthand
when his protagonist is under great stress. . . . If intensity
has compressed the language so it seems, on early reading, obscure,
this obscurity should break open suddenly for the serious reader
who can hear the language: the "meaning" itself should come as a
dramatic revelation, an excitement. The clues will be scattered
richly--as life scatters them; the symbols ill mean that they
usually mean-~and sometimes something more.

 

1
Poet and Craft, pp. u1-u2.

 

2
Poet and Craft,_pp. 91-82.

 

92

Where Knock Is Open Wide (PE, pp. 15-18)

 

The title of the first poem of the sequence, "Where Knock IS
Open Wide," is taken from Christopher Smart's "Song to David,"
and the poem itself also has, as Mills points out, resemblances to
Dylan Thomas's "Before I Knocked."l Mills says of the poem that it
"seems to use the line from Smart to imply birth and entry into the

world."2

Professor Roy Harvey Pearce, commenting on the poem and
title, agrees: ". . . This is an entrance-into-the-world poem. For
the child, cause and effect are not 'rationally' related--thus it is the

1nock, not the door, which Opens wide on this eXperience. . . ."3

Contrary to these opinions, it seems to me that the poem treats ex-
periences that occur several months after the birth of the protagonist.
The title well describes what Doctor Sandor Ferenczi has called the
"period of magical-hallucinatory omnipotence." Doctor Ferenczi describes
the infant's wish to return to the ". . . untroubled existence in the
warm, tranquil body of the mother," and then adds that normal care for
the child fulfils these wishes as soon as they form. He continues:
"Since the child certainly has no knowledge of the real concatenation of
cause and effect, or of the nurse's existence and activity, he must

feel himself in the possession of a magical capacity that can actually

reaize all his wishes by simply imagining the satisfaction of them."”

1
Theodore Roethke (Minneapolis, 1963), p. 18.

 

2Mills, p. 18.

3
Stein, p. 181.

“"Stages in the Development of the Sense of Reality," Sex in
PsychoanalySis, trans, Ernest Jones (Dover Publications, Inc; New York,
1956), pp. 188-89.

93

This passage resembles the comment by Professor Pearce, but I would
say that the poem itself treats the gradual departure from this "period
of magical-hallucinatory omnipotence" rather than the entrance into
it. Hilton Kramer rightly says ". . . the 'events' of the poems are
perceptions and memories in which parental love and the security of home

I O I O O l
are jeOpardized or in some moment of crrsrs."

Of the five numbered sections, of the poem, the first three
are similar in tone and reproduce the thought processes of a very
young child. Section IV presents the remembered experience of a
fishing trip that the protagonist, perhaps at age four or five, took
with his father. The last section Shows us the child's mind shortly
; after his father's death. Mills describes accurately the develOpment
in this poem and the technique used throughout“the two sequences of
long poems:

Since our point of observation is located within the protagonist's
mind, though not at the level of reason or calculation, certain
external facts such as his changing age are not always easily
deterndned, We gather, however, that the poems extend over a
period from early childhood into late adolescence. . . . The
present poem ranges from the first years of life with their
scraps of nonsense verse and nursery songs, through a brief
section touching on the small boy's religious emotions, then his
fishing trip, and ending with the initial signs of anxiety and
guilt which accompany the feeling of desolation caused by the
father's death. The narrative progression of the poems, if we may
thus Speak of it, depends upon Roethke's concern for the advances
and setbacks of the evolving Spirit.

The most important structural principle of the poem is that

Sections IV and V repeat the action that informs the first three

.1"The Poetry of Theodore Roethke," Western Review, XVIII
(Winter 195a), 135. Hereafter cited as Kramer.

 

2
Theodore Roethke, pp. 19-20.

 

9'!

sections. In both instances the action is implied, not narrated
explicitly.1 This action is that of being lifted up, eSpecially that
of being lifted out of confinement or danger into protection. In the
first three sections, the infant is playing alone in his crib until
he is lifted up by an adult; in Section IV, the boy falls into the
water*while fishing and is lifted out by his father. The main move-
ment of the poem is away from the early sense of omnipotence into the
realization that he will never again be lifted from above.

There are what might be called two main sources of action in
the poem, the protagonist's definition of his identity and the
"disappearance" of objects and beings. The Speaker defines his
identity by recognizing, identifying with, and eventually pitying,
other entities. He is also dimly aware that eating and giving;birth
(or being the offspring of another person) influence the individual's
identity. The action of "disappearance" occurs in three constellations
of images, two of which are varieties of containment, one of these
threatening, the other protecting, and the third is a group of repetitive,
unreasoned actions. The protective strand, expressed in the line
"Fish me out," might be called the "save" group,2 for it includes
all manner of saving: release from harm, escape from threat,
..reCOgnition (saving in the mind). These are disappearances in the
sense that something (perhaps just a memory image, as in the case of

recognition) is taken from one state to be preserved in another, and

lRoethke says of the poems discussed in "Open Letter": "Much

of the action is implied or, particularly in the case of erotic ex-
perience, rendered obliquely," Poet and Craft, p. #1.

 

I use verbs as names for these image-clusters because all the
clusters picture action or change of state or condition.

95

they emphasize the Speaker's awareness of mutability. The threatening
<:onste11ation of disappearances may be called the "lose" group, for
it includes all forms of ending, dying, falling, injuring, capturing,
departing, sleeping, and imprisoning, each of which in a way represents
disappearance. The third constellation may be called the "repeat"
group, and includes sleeping, playing, singing, not caring, and
pitying--all forms of the protagonist's reaction to loss. These three
constellations are not mutually exclusive. For example, recognition
is both a way in which the Speaker defines his identity and a form
of "saving." Sleep is both a disappearance (especially when someone
other than the protagonist sleeps) and a reaction to loss (when the
Speaker does it himself). But let me turn to the I1 poem itself.
The opening lines read:

A kitten can

Bite with his feet;

Papa andmamma

Have more teeth.

Sit and play

Under the rocker

Until the cows

All have puppies.
These lines do more than merely picture innocence, as Denis Donoghue
believes.2 They tell us that papa, mamma, and the kitten are potential
sources of pain. The Speaker's reaction to this knowledge is withdrawal,
but even his hiding place, "under the rocker," is not a safe one, though
he has not yet learned that. The transferming of "until the cows all

1Where my explication is fairly lengthy, I shall number the

sections of my commentary to correspond to the numbered sections of the
poem under discussion.

2"Roethke's Broken Music," Stein, p. 1H7.

96

come home" does not simply tell us, as Donoghue says, that during play,
time passes swiftly.1 Rather, it indicates that in his quest for
identity, the protagonist wishes to ignore the important link between
parents and offspring. His feelings toward "Papa and Mama" are highly
ambivalent.

His ears haven't time.

Sing me a Sleep-song, please.

A real hurt is soft.

The first of these lines, whatever it refers to, is an
expression of the protagonist's sense of being rejected. As in the
preceding quatrains, his reaction is withdrawal, this time into Sleep
rather than play. Song, sleep, and play thus group themselves into
a cluster of withdrawal. The third line suggests that the child is
still in a protected state, that the "pains" that he is suffering now
as he awakens from his "period of magical-hallucinatory omnipotence"
are only the slightest hints of the pains in store for him.

Once upon a tree
I came across a time,
It wasn't ever as
A ghoulie in a dream.

These lines perhaps echo Dylan Thomas's variation upon the same
formula, "And once below a time. . . ," in "Fern Hill." The first line
may allude to the crucifixion, a notion reinforced by "a-cross."

In the last lines of Thomas's "Before I Knocked," the body of Christ

refers to the godhood of Christ as He

lStein, p. 1u7.

2In Totem and Tabu Freud Speaks of the child's desire to sever
the ancestral linkage.

 

97

Who took my flesh and bone for armour

And doublecrossed my mother's womb.
Roethke's protagonist perhaps feels that §g_has been doublecrossed by
his mother's womb. In any case, this quatrain tells of his discovery
of time. The last two lines say that at this point of time, the
devourer, had not yet taken on his ghoulish aspect. The "hurts" were
"soft," and time meant nothing more unpleasant than bedtime.

There was a mooly man

Who had a rubber hat

And funnier than that,--

He kept it in a can.

The "mooly man" is associated with the "ghoulie" by sound and
by the fact that both are relatively non-threatening foreshadowings
of later terrors. What is the significance of the mooly man's keeping
his hat in a can? We see here the beginning of the separation between
the two kinds of containment, the womb (or heaven) and the grave (or
hell). The hat is a protective container, which, Since it is rubber,
can swell like the womb. "I Need, I Need," a later poem in this
sequence, tells us that "A hat is a house," and the last lines of

"Where Knock IS Open Wide" are:

Maybe God has a house.
But not here.

In other words, God's house is not here (It is lost) because it is
imprisoned (contained) in the grave, the mooly man's can. This is a
direct contradiction of one of Plotinus's definitions of God: "The
Source, having no prior, cannot be contained by any other form of being;
It is orbed around all; possessing, but not possessed, holding all,

Itself nowhere held." Later, continuing the imagery of container and

98

contained, Plotinus defines his position regarding the competing doctrines
of materialism and idealism, the struggle between which forms the thematic
core of Roethke's narratives: "Soul is not in the universe, on the
contrary, the universe is in Soul; bodily substance is not a place to

Soul; Soul is contained in Divine Mind and is the container of body."1

Roethke's lines, then, are the child's sugar-coated perception that the
grave devours the womb, foreshadowing the child's later fall into the
knowledge that he is just a highly evolved piece of matter.

What's the time, papa-seed?
Everything has been twice.
My father is a fish.

In light of the undercurrent of meaning in the preceding
quatrains, the first of these three lines is an aggressive taunting.
The child seems to be mockingly taking the role of the Preacher in
Ecclesiastes, Speaking with the wisdom of babes and telling his
father that there is a time for birth and a time for death, as if he has
already "fallen" into knowledge and can now Speak with the sophisticated
ennui of Solomon. The second line is a variation on: "The thing that

hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that

2
which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun. . . ."

l
The Essence of Plotinus, ed. Grace H. Turnbull (New York, 19u8),

p. 166, Ennead v.v.9. I have chosen to use this edition because it is
much clearer than the standard edition, by Stephen MacKenna, on which it
is based. B.S. Page, who published a revised edition of MacKenna's
Plotinus, says in his bibliography that Miss Turnbull "often departs in
detail from MacKenna and sometimes with a gain in accuracy" (Plotinus,
The Enneads, trans. Stephen MacKenna, 2nd ed. [New York, 1956], p. 627).
Hereafter cited as Plotinus.

 

 

2Ecclesiastes II:9.

99

One easily sees here the crack in the pessimism through which the
protagonist will escape into his belief in reincarnation. The last
line of the three quoted from Roethke returns to the child's feeling
of rejection; his father is a cold fish, one who fertilizes the egg
vithout feeling fer mate or offspring. Suggestions of the theme of

evolutionary transmigration also lurk in this line.

II

I sing a small sing,

My uncle's away,

He's gone for always,

I don't care either.

I know who's got him,

They'll jump on his belly,

He won't be an angel,

I don't care either.
These two quatrains, the beginning of Section II, are an important
foreshadowing of the events in Sections III and IV. The child's
uncle, a father-figure, has apparently died, but the reaction to loss
here is more mature than in Section I. Although the Singing still
represents a withdrawal, it is coupled not with Sleep but with a self-
assertive pretense to lack of concern. We can see in "He's gone for
always" a continuation of his discovery of time. "Who's got him" is
probably the mooly man. The jumping on his belly goes back to the
imprisoned womb image of the rubber hat kept in a can.

I know her noise.

Her neck has kittens.

I'll make a hole for her.
In the fire.

100

These lines continue the aggressive tone and suggest attack
rather than withdrawal. The woman seems to be a noisy one whom the
child associates with pain, the kitten who bites with his feet, perhaps
his mother. The "hole" he plans to make resembles the mooly man's can,
a grave image. The fire is probably hellfire or eternal pain. In
any case, he is going to make her disappear.

Winkie will yellow I sang.

Her eyes went kissing away

It was and it wasn't her there
I sang I sang all day.

After blithely condemning the woman to the fire, he continues
his song of not-caring, which she had interrupted. He smugly notes
her demonstration of affection, but also notes her departure (which
he would see as a rejection). He then indicates his ambivalent
feelings for her by making her a duplicitous creature of his own
phantasy.

III
I know it's an owl. He's making it darker.
Eat where you're at. I'm not a mouse.
Some stones are still warm.
I like soft paws.
Maybe I'm lost,
Or asleep.

If Section II ends with the protagonist crooning to himself in
a lilt that hides his deeper feelings of pain, Section III begins with
a breakdown of this defense. The short, disconnected sentences convey
anxiety and distraction, while the accumulating images suggest that the
child is in bed, playing under the covers: it is dark; he denies he is a
mouse, even though he has gone into his hole; it is warm; he is aware

of the presence of his own body; and he has "disappeared," being either

lost of asleep. He does not know whether his present "disappearance"

101

is comfortable or frightening.
A worm has a mouth.
Who keeps me last?
Fish me out.
Please.

He seems to decide that his "disappearance" is of the
threatening kind, in other words, that he is buried. The worm reminds
one of the "ghoulie," who in Section I was associated with burial.

The word "keeps" harks back to the mooly man, who keeps his hat in
a can. The child wonders whether the worm's mouth will "keep" him last
or whether someone will fish him out, resurrect him. Both "worm" and
"fish" foreshadow the events of Section IV. The last line is a simple
prayer.

God, give me a near. I hear flowers.

A ghost can't whistle.

I know! I know!

Hello happy hands.

In these lines there is a quickening to a climax. The prayer
continues. The protagonist, imagining his burial, hears flowers growing
above him. When he is actually buried he will not be able to whistle
to himself in the dark, that is, comfort himself as he now does with
singing, playing, and sleeping. "I know! I know!" seems to be an
"O Altitudo!" He affirms his faith. The last line returns suddenly
to the child in the crib; someone has come to lift him up.

The first three sections treat not only protective and
threatening containment and the protagonist's reactions to these,
but also his attempts to define his identity. These attempts take the

forms of statements of fact, recognitions, and story-making, and are

related to his brief role as a pseudo-Solomon. Much of the material

102

material in Section I represents knowledge that the child has acquired
(and Slight distortions of this). He has heard bedtime songs and in
Section II he begins singing them fer himself. The lines,

Once upon a tree
I came across a time . . .

and,

My father is a fish,
and perhaps even the mooly-man quatrain, are his attempts at story-
making. He closely resembles Stephen Dedalus at the opening oflg

Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, who also tries his hand at early

 

Singing:

Once upon a time and a very good time it was there was a
moocow coming down along the road met a nicens little boy
named baby tuckoo. . . .

His father told him that stoty: his father looked at him
through a glass: he had a hairy face.

He was baby tuckoo. The moocow came down the road where
Betty Byrne lived: she sold lemon platt.

O, the wild rose blossoms
On the little green_place.

 

 

He sang that song. That was his song.

9, the green wothe botheth.

 

When you wet the bed first it is warm then it gets cold. His
mother put on the oilsheet._ That had the queer smell.l

The development from listening to songs to singing them parallels

the child's changing reaction to loss (or pain). In Section I he hides,

1
(New York, 1969), p. 7.

103

asks for a song, plays, and sleeps, but in II he sings, flaunts his
"don't-care" attitude, and, at least in his mind, takes action against

the noisy woman.'

IV
In Section IV the protagonist is a boy of four or five, going
on a fishing trip with he father. The action is related in the past
tense, apparently looking back from a point in time after the father's

death.1

The first verse paragraph describes a frog escaping from a
bird's beak. The boy then describes his pity fer a fish that they have
aught and his prevailing upon his father to throw the fish back. This
action marks a significant step in the definition of his identity.

He no longer hides or turns to phantasy when he encounters pain, but
acts purposively. He identifies himself with the gasping fish; both

of them are "trying to talk." Two early Greek statements relating to
Pythagoras's life and teachings are relevant here. The first is in

the writings of Diogenes Laertius, who recounts a story from XenOphanesz
"ONce they say that he [Pythagoras] was passing by when a puppy was
teing shipped, and he took pity and said: 'Stop, do not beat it; for it
is the soul of a friend that I rec0gnized when I heard it giving

tongue.'"2 Interestingly enough, the notion that Pythagoras taught

the doctrine of the transmigration of souls rests mainly on the anecdote.

1
Leslie Fiedler writes: "In Roethke's verse. . . father and

mother are dead before the poetry begins; and it is against the looming
threat of annihilation, the prescience of the death that cut him off

just as he was attaining full rec0gnition, that ht asserts the frail

'I' which the cult of objectivity would have him disavow," Waitingfifor the

 

End, p. 228.

2The Presocratic Philosophers, ed. G. S. Kirk and J. E. Raven
(Cambridge, England, 1957), p. 22.

 

104

But, another statement, by Porphyrius, is also especially relevant
when we recall the protagonist's earlier words, "My father is a fish."
Porphyrius summarized Pythagoras's teachings as follows: "None the
less the following became universally known: first, that he maintains
that the soul is immortal; next, that it changes into other kinds

of living things; also that events recur in certain cycles, and that
nothing is ever absolutely new; and finally, that all living things
Should be regarded as akin. Pythagoras seems to have been the first

to bring these beliefs into Greece."1 Whether or “Ot Roethke found

his ideas in the presocratics,2 every one mentioned by Porphyrius
appears in these poems.

In the present context, the protagonist continues to associate
his father with a fish:

Bullheads have whiskers.
And they bite.

Here is a momentary hostility to the father, who, we will remember,
also "bites." But immediately the other Side of his ambivalence asserts
itself and he recalls his father's gentleness:

He watered the roses.

His thumb had a rainbow.

The stems said, Thank you.

Dark came early.

The significance of these lines is obvious, the last line hinting at

the approach of death. An abrupt change of tone follows:

1
Kirk and Raven, p. 223.

2
In "The Pure Fury" (EH, p. 158) he mentiones Parmenides.

105

That was before. I fell! I fell!

The worm has moved away.

My tears are tired.

Nowhere is out. I saw the cold.

Went to visit the wind. Where the birds die.
How high is have?

Keeping the background action of the fishing trip in mind, we
may say that these lines tell of the boy falling into the water. He
cries and struggles. He feels that "Nowhere is out" of the water;

. l
he 13 overwhelmed. Then, after he is lifted out, he feels the cold
wind. "How high is have" perhaps refers to this being lifted. This
literal meaning is distorted by the symbolic weight that the Speaker
himself Eels as he recalls the events. The symbolic action is the
confrontation of death, the fall into eXperience, where "experience"

esSentially means knowledge of death.

I'll be a bite. You be a wink.
Sing the snake to sleep.

These lines, revealing the child's self-assertion in the face of
something he does not fully understand, are a variation upon: "I'll
be the cops; you be the robbers." In a sense, they are a regression
to the period of magical-hallucinatory omnipotence, eSpecially if
he believes that this game will

Sing the snake to sleep.

V.
Section V amplifies the meaning of the protagonist's fall: he
falls from Childhood's innocence when his father dies and he also falls
1 . . . .
Either Blake, a certain ancestor of this poem, or Heraclitus,
Plato, or Plotinus could suggest to Roethke water as a symbol for

materiality and a fall into water as a symbol for the descent of the
soul into the body, a type of death.

106

from faith. The first two lines tell the father to return and they
also inform the father that affection returns (like bread cast upon
the waters):

Kisses come back,
I said to Papa. . . .

The third quatrain relates the fall to the child's definition

of his identity:

I'm somebody else now.

Don't tell my hands.

Have I come to always? Not yet.

One father is enough.
The father's death changes the speaker's place in the family, the
isecond line indicating that ht is unready to take on the new
rSSponsibilities. He realizes that he has not suddenly reached a
place beyond which there is no change, a heaven. The last line seems
to be a denial of God's existence, perhaps growing out of the boy's
bitterness. The poem ends with two lines that bring together his
fall, the contrast between protective and imprisoning containment,

and loss:

Maybe God has a house.
But not here.

I Need, I Need (PE, pp. 21-23)

 

If "Where Knock IS Open Wide" develOps the contrast between
benevolent and hostile containment, "I Need, I Need" fecuses attention
on the opening of the container (or the gate between two conditions or
places), and on the movements into and out of that opening. Like the

preceding poem, this one reveals the Speaker's ambivalence, here

107

eSpecially seen in actions of expulsion and intromission. He both
needs and rejects his shadowy companion. This poem transforms the
loss theme of "Where Knock IS Open Wide" by stating it in an
aggressive imperative: "Get lost!" But like the preceding poem, "I
Need, I Need" depicts a maturing of the speaker, so that by the end
of the poem his aggression has harmonized with his love.

When Roethke read this poem over the BBC network in July of 1953,
She introduced it with this comment: ". . . 'I Need, I Need' opens with
very oral imagery, the child's world of sucking and licking. Then there
is a Shift to a passage in which two children are jumping rcpe. The
reader isn't Eglg the children are jumping rope: he simply hears the
two reciting, alternatively, jingles to each other; then this mingled
longing and aggressiveness changes, in the next passage, to a vaguely
felt, but definite, feeling of love in one of the children."1 If
Roethke had extended his remarks, he might have mentioned some other
"oral images" that contrast with sucking and licking, such as sneezing
and spitting, and he might have related this contrast to the difference
between emotional need (love) and rejection (hatred).

Section I shows the protagonist, "a little boy who is very sad,"2
wandering listlessly and thinking about his absent mother. She is
associated in his mind with various receptacles, such as "a deep dish,"

a mouth, a Spoon, a cellar, a hat, and a house. The connotations of

l . .
"An American Poet Introduces Himself and hlS Poems," Poet and

Craft , p. 10.

2
Roethke, "Some Remarks on Rhythm," Poet and Craft, p. 75.

 

108

tend to be favorable and protective, but threatening undertones
are evoked by notions of devouring, eSpecially in the lines:

Do the dead bite?
Mama, she's a sad fat.

The implication here is that the boy sees his mother as an intended
victim of the dead; he foresees her death.

The concept of taking in (intromission or introjection) is
mainly benevolent and associated with the mother; the action of
expelling is for the most part hostile and associated with phallic images.
The following lines present these two clusters:

Hoo. I know the Spoon.
Sit in my mouth.

A sneeze can't Sleep.
Sneezing is an act of expulsion, though here it is not associated with
a phallic image (except perhaps the sppon).

Went down cellar,

Tdked to a faucet;

The drippy water

Had nothing to say.
Assuming the faucet is a phallic image, one can see in these lines the

boy's feeling that he has been rejected by the father who has died.

Scratched the wind with a stick.
The leaves liked it.

This image, like a later one, "A pick likes to hit ice," says that the
active agent (not the passive) is the one that feels the pleasure.

The aggressiveness that is to appear in Section II is foreshadowed
in the word "begonia," which might be a pun on "Be gone, you!" This

is, of course, the "Get lost!" theme.

109

In Section II the boy is no longer alone, but, as Roethke
describes it, exchanging rather hostile rope-skipping jingles with a
companion. The songs are obliquely concerned with the theme of
identity, particularly as identity is related to knowledge (experience)
and to the need / rejection complex. I believe the first voice (the
unindented lines) is that of the companion, the more aggressive of
the two. The line,

I haven't time for sugar,
suggests no time for kindness and alludes to the biting-devouring
actions. The next two lines,

Put your finger in your face,
And there will be a booger,

combine phallic and receptacle images and the actions of intromission
and expulsion, althoughthis last action is merely implied. If there
were hints of sexual curiosity in "Where Knock IS Open Wide," then these
lines may represent a sort of covert bragging about his knowledge on
the part of the companion.
The jingle sung by the voice that I assume to be the protagonist's

lacks hostility:

A one is a two is

I know what you is:

You're not very nice,--

So touch my toes twice.
The playing on numbers here not only implies the rope-skipping action,
but also goes back to the notion of compulsive repetition that was
introduced in the line,

Everything has happened twice,

in "Where Knock Is Open Wide." This may be a symptom of the boy's

110

lack of will and aggressiveness.l The second line maintains that he
knows the companion's identity. The- companion replies by defining
the protagonist's identity in terms of his own:
I know you are my nemesis
So bibble where the pebble is.2
The trouble is with No and Yes
As you can see I guess I guess.
But these lines are less aggressive than his first ones and also
suggest the difficulties of decisive action. The protagonist then
sings of his wishes for an identity. The companion, perhaps with an
impulse of friendliness, says that both of them are lowly and not very
knowledgeable, but an undercurrent of meaning in his words reminds the
1>rotagonist that he is a "lost son." He reSponds with a burst of
hostility:
Not you I need.
Go play with your nose.
Stay in the sun,
Snake-eyes.
The first line explicitly states one of the poem's major themes, and
the second echoes the companion's earlier‘words. The protagonist has
learned from his "friend" to eXpress hatred.
In Section III, the protagonist once more admits his emotional
need, perhaps with the tenderness of self-pity. As at the end of the

second section, he is aware of his lostness, of his separation from the

father ("a heard in a cloud"). Perhaps he even knows that if he is to

Or, it may allude to the Pythagorean idea of recurrence.

2
In "The Pbre Fury" (SE, p. 158), we find the line: "Great
Boehme rooted all in Yes and No."

111

be reunited with his father he must die:
The ground cried my name. . . .
But in these lines he is saddened, not angered, by his feeling of
being lost.
The protagonist's search for his identity appears in Section III

in the lines:

Can I have my heart back?
and,

The ground cried my name.
Section IV shows the boy trying to construct an identity by copying
the memory of his dead father. He is planting and cultivating. The
imagery is phallic and aggressive, but interestingly the boy overtly
denies that he is following his father:

When you plant, spit in the pot.
A pick likes to hit ice.

And,

My hoe eats like a goat.
The lines picture both expulsion (rejection) and intromission (need),
and in a sense ambivalently present an intermingling of creative
and destructive acts.1 An undercurrent of meaning, which comes to the
surface in,

It's a dear life I can touch,
conveys the fact that the boy does not fear or hate things that are
present. The source of his pain is the feeling that he has been
rejected by his dead father, who must be seen in contrast with "a dear

life I can touch."

1And as such, they possibly represent coitus.

112

Following this, a brief, concluding passage seems to show the
protagonist years later, leading a girl through a gate and into a
field. The significance of these lines is that he is entering another
condition, probably the realm of romantic love. The devouring theme
is present here, carrying suggestiong of the devourer becoming one
substance with the devoured. The implication is that the protagonist

is about to be consumed by love.

Bring the Day! (PE, pp. 27-28)

 

Both "Where Knock Is Open Wide" and "I Need, I Need" treated
the theme of identity in terms of the protagonist's acquiring knowledge
and of his ability to act with purpose (saving the fish and cultivating
plants). "Bring the Day!" fOcuseS attention on the problem of purposive
action. The Opposing poles Of the poem may be termed "to begin" and
"not to begin." The implied action is a conversation between the
protagonist and a woman, taking place at sunrise. They are outdoors,
possibly in the field that was entered at the end of "I Need, I Need."
The change that we see the protagonist undergo in this poem is from
dislike for the coming Of day to celebration of daybreak.

Section I reveals the protagonist's tense concern with
permission and with he own capability. The bees and lilies of the
Opening lines Suggest the male and female lovers, reSpectively.

Bees and lilies there were,
Bees and lilies there were,
Either to other,--

Which would you rather?
Bees and lilies there were.

113

These lines introduce the Speaker's indecisiveness and his desire
for consent. The second verse paragraph shows that both the lovers
want the consent of nature. The Oddly worded lines,

She asked her skin
To let me in,

emphasize this need for consent.

The third verse paragraph marks a decided turn in the develop-
ment. In psychological terms, one could say it presents the extreme
tension between the conscience, the ambition to behave in an ideal
manner, and the lawless impulses that the mind refuses to recognize
in itself. We can imagine the woman reminding her lover that there should
be a Spiritual commitment:

Forever is easy, she said.
And he replies that "forever" might be easy fOr angels, but

How many angels do you know?--
He then recalls that his ancestry can be traced back to the primovdial
Slime, to algae:

And over by Algy's

Something came by me,

It wasn't a goose,

It wasn't a poodle.
The stagnant pond (Algy's) not only symbolizes the origin of life, but
also the unconscious mind. The "something" not recognized or named
represents either a repressed wish or self-disgust. Whatever it is, it
is not tame and attractive like a goose or a poodle.

The remaining two verse paragraphs continue this sense Of

selfedisgust and give it more apparent sexual implications. The sun

11”

is rising and the Speaker is in a state of heightened sensitivity.
He feels the closeness of things, the quiet preceding the dawn, and
his own incapacity. The line,

I can't marry the dirt,
perhaps means that he feels the force of the woman's words; he knows
that he must "struggle out of the slime."1 But the beauty of the
woman or of the sunrise "melts" him, which suggests a loss Of identity.
The "white weather" is the daylight, and it "hates" him in that it
reveals him to himself and he is filled with self-disgust.

Why is how I like it.
He prefers Speculating about the "why" Of things to acting, to defining
himself.

Rallying himself out of the deSpondency that he has just
approached, the Speaker reappraises his relationship to the rest of
nature. Perhaps his own sense of his inadequacy drives him to a curious
examination Of all nature's processes. The first verse paragraph Of
Section II shows the Speaker questioning what appears to be the breeding
Of the herrings. It also Shows his curiosity about the relation between
the animate and the inanimate. Since the inanimate wind makes the
inanimate grass Speak, perhaps the whispers and singing in the waves,
between the herrings, is just another voice of the inanimate. In other
words, perhaps life is just a complex development Of the inanimate and

nothing more; perhaps everything that exists lies between the water

1
Poet and Craft, p. 37.

 

115

and the rock. In the second verse paragraph, the Speaker identifies
himself with a tree, and then immediately expresses his need for
affection, a need which may be seen as the thing that sets him apart
from the tree. But then he goes on to point out that various forms
Of life need, in a sense, the care of the inanimate, and that they in
turn love it:

When I stand, I'm almost a tree.

Leaves, do you like me any?

A swan needs a pond.

The worm and the rose

Both love

Rain.

Ralph Mills makes a sensitive comment on the third section Of
this poem when he says that it ". . . Shows the emergent self in the
image of a tiny bird waking to existence, feeling a little its own
possibilities, and facing a life that has cast Off its ties with the

past and only looks forward."1

The analogous situation, as Mills
correctly sees, is the expulsion of Adam and Eve from the Garden. In
psychological germs, the point described is that between adolescence
and adulthood. These lines Of celebration for the "Spirit's progress"
are not without a note Of resignation and wistfulness, but the poem ends on
a clearly affirmative note:

It's time to begin!

To begin!

Give Way, 0 Ye Gates (PE, pp. 31-33)

 

This poem expands upon the line,

When I stand, I'm almost a tree,

1Theodore Roethke, p. 23.

 

116

from the preceding poem. Here the Speaker iS.a tree and the implied
actions are things experienced by the tree. The title suggests that
the protagonist considers himself as a sort Of battering ram, attempting
to break through into a higher realm of life. The notion Of rein-
carnation that one finds in this poem and the explanation for the
Speaker's being a tree are, again, possibly supplied by the writings of
Plotinus, an eSpecially relevant passage being: "Those that have

lived wholly to sense become animals; according to the particular
temper Of life, ferocious or gluttonous animals. Those who in their
pleasures have not even lived by sensation, but have gone their way in
a torpid grossness, become mere growing things, for this lethargy is
the entire act Of the vegetative, and such men have been busy betreeing

n1

themselves. The term "torpid grossness" might well describe the

particular self-disgust felt by the protagonist at various points in
the preceding poems.

Although the protagonist likens himself to a tree, he asserts
himself more frequently than in earlier poems, and the sense of
inadequacy seen in "Bring the day!" is replaced by confidence, expressed
in lines scattered throughout the poem:

Believe me . . .

i 5.0.1151 love.a.duck.

Bring me a finger.

I couh melt down a stone. . . .

Make me a bird or a bear!

1
Plotinus, p. 89, Ennead III.iv.2.

117

These are only a few of the commands and assertions that reveal the
protagonist's state of mind. But unlike the preceding poems, this
one develOps from an affirmative position to a negative one; the
Speaker's soul is drawn deeper into the world of the body, possibly
to be seen as a reaffirmation of Roethke's early condemnation of the
faculty of human volition.

Section I shows the protagonist to be confident of where he
is and of where he is going. He knows the facts of his situation: he,
himself, is a theater for life and he is an observer in this theater, not
a performer. He hints that he has been seduced into his present in-
faturation with the life of his body:

Such music in a skin!
A bird sings in the bush of your bones.

And, "You . . ."

Twiced me nicely,-—

In the green of my sleep,

In the green.
In this section the Speaker seems to be addressing a cat that is
climbing through his branches. (The cat, a predator, a carnivore, later
becomes a symbol for the body.)

The Speaker addresses first the sun ("Mother of blue and the
many changes of hay") and then another tree. Both verse paragraphs
reveal assertiveness and confidence, though also suggesting a further
sinking into the life of the body. Bravado is mingled with a small
1>oy's sexual curiosity:

I could melt down a stone ,--

How is it with the long birds?
May I look too, loved eye?

118

The first of these lines shows the Speaker assuming for himself the powers
of the being he is addressing, the sun. The second and third, I take
as suggestions of sexual curiosity.
The address to the other tree sounds strangely apocalyptic:
We'll swinge the instant!--
With jots and jogs and cinders on the floor.
The sea will be there, the great squashy shadows,
Biting themselves perhaps;‘
The shrillest frogs;
And the ghost of some great howl
Dead in a wall.
The speaker's confidence even protects him from fearing this time
of tribulation, for he thinks that he will remain just an onlooker.
Perhaps there is an allusion here to the book of Revelation: "And there
came out of the smoke locusts upon the earth: and unto them was given
power, as the scorpions of the earth have power. And it was commanded
them that they should not hurt the grass of the earth, neither any
green thing, neither any tree; but only those men which have not the
seal of God in their foreheads," (ix.u).
The "shrillest frogs" might allude to the verse: "And I saw three unclean
Spirits like frogs come out of the mouth of the dragon, and out of the
mouth of the beast, and out of the mouth of the false prOphet," (Rev
xvi.13).
After describing the time of tribulation the Speaker describes
a time of joy:
In the high-noon of thighs,
In the Springtime of stones,
We'll stretch with the great stems.

We'll be at the business of what might be
Looking toward what we are.

119

Despite his being a tree, the Speaker‘swords carry clear erotic
undertones. The last lines promise self-discovery and perhaps
suggest procreation and the circularity of transmigration.

Section III clearly introduces the theme of reincarnation:

You child with a beast's heart,
Make me a bird or a bear!

He is not ready for human reSponsibility, but he does wish to be more

than a tree.

But now the instant ages,

And my thought hurts another.body.

I'm sad with the little owls.
The protagonist is sad because he is dissatisfied with himself, with
his lot. Baudelaire's poem "Les Hiboux" clarifies these lines. Its

last two stanzas read:

Leur attitude au sage enseigne
Qu'il faut on ce monde qu'il craigne
Le tumulte et le mouvement;

L'homme ivre d'une ombre qui passe

Porte toujours le chatiment
D'avoir voulu changer de place.

The protagonist may be sad with the owls, but he is not as content as
‘they are.

Baudelaire's owls are creatures of the night that do not chase
shadows, but the protagonist in Roethke's poem has been deluded by a
phantasy. The imagery of Section IV reminds one of Plato's Myth of the

Cave. The speaker's unrealistic picture of the joys of bestial life

1
Oeuvres Completes dg_Charles Baudelaire, ed. Jacques Crepet,
VOl. I (Paris, 1930), p. 132.

120

gives way to a painful awareness of what it means to be alive in the
world of particulars, in the world of flux:

Touch and arouse. Suck and sob. Curse and mourn.
It's a cold scrape in a low place.

The dead crow dries on a pole.

Shapes in the shade

Watch.

In "I Cry, Love! Love!" Roethke calls this awareness the "anguish

of concreteness." The "cold scrape in a low place" certainly suggests
the interior of a cave, and the three following lines remind one of

the "shapes" who carry objects before a fire so that these objects will

case shadows on the wall in front of the imprisoned men.1

The three concluding verse paragraphs continue to draw upon
platonic and neoplatonic imagery:

These wings are from the wrong nest.
Who stands in a hole
Never spills.

I hear the clap of an old wind.
The cold knows when to come.
What beats in me

I still bear.

The deep stream remembers:
Once I was a pond.

What slides away
Provides.

The significance of these lines becomes clear when one compares them

with the following passage from The Enneads:

 

"In the Intellectual [realm] they [the forms] remain with the

soul entire and are immune from care and trouble; but there comes

a stage at which they descend from the universal to become partial

and self-centered. This state long maintained, the soul is a deserter
from the All; it is a partial thing, isolated, weakened, full of

1None of the commentators has mentioned.what seems to me a
surprisingly prof0und influence of Plato on Roethke. I am aware of only
one explicit reference to the philosoPher, in "The Pure Fury" (E3, p. 158):
"At times my darling squeaks in pure Plato."

121

care, intent upon the fragment; severed from the whole, it nestles in
one form of being, caring only for the one, for a thing buffeted
about by the world full of things. With this comes what is known
as the casting of the wings, the enchaining in body. . . .
It has fallen, it operates through sense, it is a captive. This is
the burial, the encavernment of the soul.

The "nestling" mentioned by Plotinus may explain the gnomic lines:

Who stands in a hole
Never spills.

Beneath their apparent absurdity, these lines express the attitude of
a "careful" creature who has intently fixed his mind upon one thing,
who has fOrsaken everything in order to preserve one fragment. The
lines,

What beats in me
I still bear,

call to mind the Phaedrus, where Socrates is explaining the growth
of the soul's wing, ". . . which being shut up within company with the
emotion [desire], throbbing as with the pulsations of an artery,
pricks the aperture which is nearest, until at length the entire soul
is pierced and maddened and pained, and at the recollection of beauty
is again delighted."2

The last verse paragraph attempts to accept the flux and to relate
it to the dimly remembered life in the realm of intellectual forms, the
word "provides" suggesting physical sustenance and glimpses of the

eternal forms:

1
Plotinus, pp. ins-ug, Ennead IV.viii.u.

2
The Dialogues of Plato, trans. B. Jowett, 3rd ed., Vol. I
(London, 18927, p. 255. Hereafter cited as Plato.

 

122

The deep stream remembers:
Once I was a pond.

What slides away

Provides.

Sensibility! 0 La! (EE, pp. 37-38)

 

This poem eXplores further the relationship between the
spiritual and the physical, the word "sensibility" referring to both
:realms. The immaterial world is represented in the poem by the wind
and sun, along with references to ghosts and witches. The physical
is represented by woods, grass, and the moon. The protagonist confronts
a woman and Speaks of the effect her beauty has on him. Instead of
inducing him to remember his former life in the world of forms, it
reminds him of the necessity of his own and his beloved's death.1
He struggles to become more conscious, to see the unchanging world,
but the "progress" is painful and he feels the pull of the particular.
In the end he gives up the effort and assumes the mixed attitude of one
who loudly affirms his belief in "higher things" while at the same time
saying "0 la!"

The poem is strongly influenced by the writings of Heraclitus.
The first line,

I'm the serpent of somebody else,
is a variation on that philoSOpher's statement: "Gods are mortals, men

are immortals, each living the others' death and dying in the others'

life,"2 This is an idea that Yeats made much of in his work. Roethke's

The protagonist in a sense reacts identically with a person
described in the Phaedrus: "Now he who is not newly initiated or who has
become corrupted, does not easily rise out of this world to the sight of
true beauty in the other; he looks only at her earthly namesake, and
instead of being awed at the sight of her, he is given over to pleasure, and
like a.brutish beast he rushes on to enjoy and.beget; he consorts with
wantonness, and is not ashamed or afraid of pursuing pleasure in violation
of nature," (Plato, p. 255).

2

 

Selections from Early Greek Philosophy, ed. Milton C. Nahm

123

Speaker refers to a woman who reponses like a lake. His desire to
"seize" her betrays his aoquisitiveness (what Plato calls the "brutish"
reaction to beauty), his enslavement to things:

See, She's sleeping like a lake.
Glory to seize, I say.

Singing the praises of the woman's beauty, the protagonist, in
the second verse paragraph, blames her for his fall. He pictures her

much the way Botticelli does Venus in The Birth of Venus, except

 

that her birth is considerably lower. In fact, if we may see this
"goddess" as a symbol for spirituality, the protagonist seems to be
telling her that she has Sprung out of the material realm, returning
us to the themes of idealism and materialism:

In the fair night of some dim brain,

Thou wert marmorean-born.

I name thee: wench of things,

A true zephyr-haunted woodie.

The sea's unequal lengths announced thy birth

From a shell harder than horn.

Thy soft albino gaze

Spoke to my Spirit.
Perhaps she is a newly created goodess, Sensibility, and is born in
the physical brain, not the mind. The marble, shell; and horn stress
her tangibility. Her "soft gaze" seduces the Speaker and he enters her
world of "things." The woods is "haunted" by a "zephyr," obviously a
line meant to recall the ancient association of breath and wind with the
soul. The section ends with the protagonist's predictions of things
in come, similar to those in Section II of the preceding poem. His
foresight this time intimates mortality.

(New York, 19u7), p. 92. Fragment no. 67. This fragment does not
appear in Kirk and Raven.

12“

Section II is as disjointed as it is brief. The protagonist
contin ues in the exhibitionistic tone with which the preceding part
concluded, the essential function of the lines being to tie together
imagistically the speaker's pre-emptory attitude toward the woman,
his attachment to "thing-hood"l and his awareness of mortality.

This section is linked to the preceding by several lines that treat
the paradox that what is in flux is boring and what is permanent
(the forms) is truly interesting:

Some rare new tedium's taking shape. . . .
And, in Section II:

A shape comes to stay:
The long flesh.

The phallic image, "the long flesh," would seem permanent only to
one thoroughly deluded by the Shadows in the cave.

The final section deve10ps this concern with distinguishing
what "abides" from what flows. As the protagonist's consciousness of
death grows, he more earnestly desires to affirm the existence of the
Spiritual world. The "zephyr" is tranSfOMed:

You all-of—a-sudden gods,
There's a ghost loose in the long grass!

He then mentions some movements that, if he wished, he could attribute
to purely physical causes. After this he briefly explores the

significance of an ill-smelling wind as a symbol for the fusion of

lRoethke used this term in a statement titled "On 'Identity'"
made in 1963: "Yet we continue to make a fetish of 'thing-hood,‘ we
surround ourselves with junk, ugly objects endlessly repeated in an
economy dedicated to waste," (Poet and Craft, pp. 19-20).

125

spirituality and mortality, a Symbol foreshadowed in part one by the
line, "I smell the jumps ahead." He Speaks to the "prince of stinks"
about his exaltation, his belief in an afterlife, the prince of stinks
being either death or Satan, the Prince of the Air. But he does not
know exactly how to enter that other world, how to leave the world of
materiality; once more he is the lost son:
It's a long way to somewhere else.

This acknowledgement is followed by the only honest thinking that the
grotagonist does in this peom, and he approaches a breakthrough, but
in the last three lines his effort fails. The passage runs as follows:

The shade says: love the sun.

I have.

La, la,

The light turns.

The moon still abides.

I hear you, alien of the moon.

Is the sun under my arm?

My sleep deceives me.

Has the dark a door?

I'm somewhere else,--

I insist!

I-am.
The sun symbolizes the unchanging world of forms or Spirituality, the
moon, the ever-changing physical world. The protagonist is saying
that he loves the light because he fears the darkness. He then adopts
the position of Heraclitus: change is the only thing that abides
(fragment 83). Perhaps all lovers of the sun are nothing more than
"aliens of the moon." Thinking this, he imagines briefly that he has
completely understood the mysteries of spirituality, perpetuating in this
way the mood of "seizing" with which the poem Opened. But actually

he is in a state of hallucination, and only in that state has he

traveled the "long way to somewhere else," remaining all the while

126

imprisoned in the cave.

o Lull Me, Lull Me (33, pp. u1-u2)

 

In this poem the protagonist considers his own thinking
processes, which we have seen attempting to work in "Sensibility! 0 La!"
Developing a contrast between the pain of thinking and the pleasure
of dreaming, he again moves into an affirmation, but one that is more
honest than that concluding the preceding poem. "0 Lull Me, Lull Me"
particularly examines the nature of dreaming, setting in opposition
torpor and dreamlike images of love-making.

Section I contrasts motionless dreaming ("Blessed be torpor")
with thinking ("Tell me, great lords of sting, / Is it time to think?"),
the protagonist clearly preferring the first.

Section II begins with a celebration of the dream world, a land
of cockaigne where " . . . the air provides" and where

Light fattens the rock.
But this song ends as the speaker becomes aware that to fulfill one
wish, that of "seizing" the woman, he must exert himself:

I'm crazed and graceless,
A winter-leaping frog.

A "winter-leaping frog," of course, does not exist; a frog passes the
winter in a state of torpor.

Overcoming his need to be "soothed" and his excuses for his
torpor ("I'm still waiting for a foot"), the protagonist promises

the woman that for her he will move:

127

. . . I can't go leaping alone.

For you, my pond,

Rocking with small fish,

I'm an otter with only one nose. . . .
This is an image of love-making. The line,

I'm more than when I was born,--

indicates that the protagonist does not wish to consider sexuality
a fall, a degradation. The line, in fact, reverses the idea of
Plotinus's on which Wordsworth wrote his famous ode. Roethke's Speaker
sides rather with the Speaker of Dylan Thomas's poem, "Before I Knocked",

who says:

I who was rich was made the richer
By sipping at the wine of days.1

Roethke's poem ends on this note of affirmation of the world of materiality

and procreation.

The Lost Son (PE) pp. 47-53)

 

"The Lost Son," the best of the fourteen narratives, begins with
the protagonist at a point of Spiritual low-ebb. After mentioning
another such "relapse" in these narratives, Roethke explained that
". . . the method is cyclic. . . . There is a perpetual slipping-back,

then a going-forward. . . ."2

Owing to this "slipping-back," a number
of the poems have roughly the same structure, a fact noted by many of

the commentators. Professor Louis Martz, for instance, describes this

1 . .
The Collected Poems of Dylan Thomas, Augmented Edition (New York,
1957), p. 9.

 

2
Poet and Craft, p. 39.

 

128

common line of development as follows:

. . . Each poem opens with a flight from ordinary "reality" into
the irrational, the animal, the realm of the fish, the rat, the
mouse, the cat, the eel, the otter, the mole; there are many
implications of a return to the womb: "I feel the slime of a wet
nest." These primitive images are given in a mode of flickering,
sometimes ranting, incoherence, simulating the breakup of
established modes of consciousness. Then, out of all this
apparent disarray of being, there arises the strict, clear, calm
imagery of that greenhopse Eden: warmth, power, growth, movement
toward the light. . ...

Most of those who have written on the narratives do not go any further
into detail than does Professor Martz, but even in his sketchy outline
I believe there are several inaccuracies.

In the "Open Letter," which he wrote for John Ciardi's Mid:

Century American Poets in 1950, Roethke commented at length on the

 

development in "The Lost Son." Since there is some disagreement about
the action of the poem, and since understanding the action depends
upon understanding the first section of the poem, let me begin by
quoting Roethke's remarks on Section I, "The Flight":

["The Lost Son"]. . . is the "easiest" of the longer ones [the
narratives], I think, because it follows a narrative line indicated
by the titles of the first four sections: "The Flight," "The Pit,"
"The Gibber," "The Return." "The Flight" is just what it says

it is: a terrified running away--with alternate periods of
hallucinatory waiting (the voices, etc.); the protagonist so
geared-up, so over—alive that he is hunting, like a primitive,

for some anamistic suggestion, some clue to existence from the sub-
human. These he sees and yet does not see: they are almost tail-
flicks, from another world, seen out of the corner of the eye.

1"A Greenhouse Eden," Stein, pp. 31-32. For similar descriptions of
this line of deveIOpment see: Louis BOgan, "Verse," The New Yorker, 15
May l9u8) p. 118. Babett Deutsch, Poetry in Our Time (New York, 1965),
p. 197. Hilton Kramer, "The Poetry of Theodore Roethke," Western Review,
XVIII (Winter, 1954), 13n-135. Carroll Arnett, "Minimal to Maximal:
Theodore Roethke's Dialectic," CE) XVIII (May, 1957), ulu-uls. M. L.
Rosentha1,'CloSing in on the Self," The Nation, 21 March 1959, p. 259.
R. J. Mills, Jr., "Theodore Roethke: the Lyric of the Self," Poets in
Progress, ed. Edward Hungerfbrd (Evanston, 1962), pp. 12-13. Kenneth
Burke, "The Vegetal Radicalism of Theodore Roethke," LVIII (January
1950), 86.

 

 

 

 

129

In a sense he goes in and out of rationality; he hangs in the

balance between the human and the animal.
This is a very helpful gloss, but it leaves many difficult questions
unanswered. Perhaps the most important of these are: "What is the
protagonist fleeing, and.where is he going?" Carroll Arnett and
M. L. Rosenthal give two quite different answers to each of these.
Arnett writes of "The Flight" that it ". . . is a nightmarish waiting
fOr birth, an ambivalent invocation ('Snail, snail, glister me
forward, / Bird, soft-sigh me home') and an avoidance of consciousness
('You will find no comfort here, / In the kingdom of'bang and blab')."2
After discussing "The Lost Son," Arnett generalizes about the themes and
the usual line of develOpment found in Roethke's first three volumes:
"His themes are the struggle which the Spirit makes to release itself
from the terrors, as well as the psychic salvation, of the unconscious
world of slime and womb, so that it may enter into the understanding
and moral responsibility which the conscious 'kingdom of bang and blab'
requires as prerequisites to any truly creative growth in the world of
history."3 I agree that Roethke is concerned with the Spirit's attempts
to ". . . release itself from . . . terrors, . . ." especially the
terror of death. And I agree that he associates the unconscious mind with
"Slime and [the] womb." But I believe that Arnett is trying to make
Roethke over into a more socially conscious poet than he actually is.

The result of this distortion is a neglect of the metaphysical questioning

l
Poet and Craft, p. 38.

 

2"Minimal to Maximal: Theodore Roethke's Dialectic," CE, XVIII, ulS.

3
Arnett, ulS.

130

that so importantly informs most of Roethke's poetry. Rosenthal, on
the other hand, charges Roethke with the very irresponsibility from
which Arnett was so anxious to exonerate him. After quotingirom "Open
Letter," Rosenthal writes:

So be it--this panicy hunt for the pre-intellectual sources
of the sense of being truly alive is without doubt one of the real,
if uneasy, enterprises of the modern mind. But the poet is not
ruthless enough to carry the hunt through--any more than he was
able to remain true to the realizations at the beginning of "The
Shape of the Fire." He finds another clue to salvation, an
easier one, than the frenzied beginning would imply possible. It
is the "lost son's" psychological re-entry into the world of the
most vivid childhood memories-~the world of the "long greenhouse"
which he has called "my symbol for the whole of life, a womb, a
heaven-on-earth."

Re-entry into this paradisal womb, one gathers, is the
necessary preliminary for a rebirth of the Self. The true
"coming-through" into mature, calm reconciliation has not yet
occurred, but faith is expressed that it will do so--

A lively understandable spirit

Once entertained you.

It will come again.
The promise it too pat and.wishful--of a Freudian romance with a
happy ending. As in most of Roethke's longer work, the denouement
does not live up to the poem's initial demands.

Rosenthal considers the ". . . re-entry into . . . [the] womb . . ."
a regression necessary to Spiritual advancement, but for an unexplained
reason considers it an "easy" way. In saying, this, he touches upon a
difficult aspect of the poem--the cause of the protagonist's eventual
progress. Although Rosenthal recognizes the metaphysical level of the
poem, he misreads, in my opinion, the return to the greenhouse.

Ralph Milss correctly sees the importance of the setting in the
poem, but misses the metaphysical significance of it by sticking too
closely to the literal level: ". . . This initial section . . . treats

the confused and often tormented condition of the child-protagonist as he

1
"Closing in on the Self," The Nation (1959), p. 259.

 

131

tries to learn the direction he must take to escape those forces working
solely for his anguish or destruction."1 The protagonist is not in
immediate danger of "destruction," and is fleeing rather the awareness
<>f his own inevitable death than a present threat itself. William
Meredith comes close to making this point when he writes: "It is not an
easy poem, yet the obscurity is that of a lucid dream, where only the
causes and connections, not the facts or events, are in doubt. The
causes seem to be the death of parents, the Speaker's recognition of his
aloneness, sealed off in his link of the chain of human life, and the
loss of childhood and its illusion of order."2 One can make a fairly
gpod case for saying that in part the child's flight is caused by the
death of one or both of his parents. But the case must necessarily rest
on details in other poems in the series, eSpecially ones in "Where Knock
is Open Wide," not on those in "The Lost Son" alone. To understand
properly both the cause of the protagonist's flight and the meaning of
his return to the greenhouse, one must not be misled by a desire to
peer into the child's mind, but must examine the imagery and the changes
of scene.

I feel that the key to this poem lies in the images of contain-
ment or enclosure, both threatening and protective, and in the change
from threatening containment to protective. The scene changes from
Woodlawn Cemetery, with such images of imprisonment as crypts and wells,

to a pit, to a frost-covered greenhouse in the night, to the transparent

1 .
Theodore Roethke ("University of Minnesota Pamphlets on American
Writers," No. 30 [Minneapolis, 1963]), p. 2n. Hereafter cited as
Theodore Roethke .

 

 

2"A Steady Storm of Correspondences, Theodore Roethke's Long
Journey Out of the Self," Stein, p. B2.

132

greenhouse in the warm sunlight, to an Open field. Most of the images
in this poem belong to this cluster, which I shall call "the grave-
nest cluster," borrowing from two lines in one of the later narratives,
"Unfold! UnfoldI":

What the grave says,

Tne nest denies.

(3E) p. 83)
A second important group of images in the poem are those pertaining to
motion and stasis. These occur as images of motion, images of stasis,
and as images of motion-in-rest, combining the two. The fusion of the
two is usually described as a "swaying" and relates to the imagery of
dancing, which becomes important in Roethke's later poems. In those
poems the dance symbolizes an ideal attitude toward life, one that
achieves a mean between rejection and enslavement. In the present
poem, however, I do not think the imagery of motion-in-rest has reached
that point of development.
Roethke has said that "The Flight" is ". . . a terrified running

away--with alternate periods of hallucinatory waiting (the voices, etc.)

."1 He refers in these words to the uncombined and perverted forms

of motion and stasis, which, instead of fusing, producing an equilibrium,
as they do in Section V, replace each other violently and ineffectively.
The waiting is associated with images of threatening containment and
stagnation. One sees images of imprisonment in the opening lines:

At Woodlawn I heard the dead cry:

I was lulled by the Slamming of iron,

A slow drip over stones,

Toads brooding in wells.

1
Poet and Craft, p. 38.

 

133

The ". . . Slamming of iron . . ." describes the closing of a crypt,
and the "well" Similarly belongs to the grave-nest cluster. (I Shall
say more of this mage later.) In the second verse paragraph occurs

one of the most important grave-nest images, that of the stagnant pond:

Fished in an old wound,
The soft pond of repose;
Nothing nibbled my line,
Not even the minnows came.

Roethke had made this imagistic connection between a wound and a pond

earlier in The Lost Son:

 

Squirmers in bogs,

And bacterial creepers

Wriggling through wounds

Like elvers in ponds. . . .

("The Minimal," LE) p. 37.)

Both in "The Minimal" and in "The Lost Son" the pond-wound symbolizes
the unconscious mind2 and a place where the line between animate and
inanimate becomes indistinct. That the image symbolizes the un—

conscious is partly suggested by the juxtaposition of "The Minimal"

and "Night Crow" (on consecutive pages in The Lost Son), since "Night

 

Crow" explicitly transforms an external event into a mental one. This
symbolization is further substantiated by a statement that Roethke

makes in "Open Letter" while describing the act of writing a poem:

1
W. W. Skeat's Etymological Dictionary_states that "ME pond

[is] a variant of pound, an enclosure; it means a pool formed by
damming up water. . . ."

 

2Stanley Kunitz, in reviewing The Lost Son, writes: "Suddenly we
are under ground, under water; in a grave, in a womb, in the deep ponds
of the subconscious. . .," ("News of the Root" Poetry, LXXIII
[January 1999], 223).

 

13H

". . . Let's say you fish, patiently, in that dark pond, the unconscious,
or dive in, with or without pants on, to come up festooned with dead

cats, weeds, tin cans, and other fascinating debris. . . .”1

If the pond in the poem resembles the unconscious in which the
poet fishes, the boy in the poem resembles the poet in that both wish
to escape something painful or threatening. In "Open Letter" Roethke
speaks of the ". . . miseries and agitations which one has been permitted
to escape by the act of creation itself." But the boy does not fish
"patiently," as the poet does. He is ". . . geared-up . . . and over-
alive. . . ." He ". . . sees and yet does not see. . . ."3 This
description of the boy differs at almost every point from Roethke's
description in the "Open Letter" of the ideal reader (who one may
assume closely resembles the patient poet-fisherman): ". . . You will
have no trouble if you approach these poems as a child would, naively,

u
with your whole being awake, your faculties loose and alert." The

five consecutive four-line stanzas with end—stepped lines, the
suppression of the grammatical subject (e.g., "Fished in an old wound"),
the shift from indicative to imperative voice, the rhythms, and the
abrupt changes in setting--all indicate that the protagonist is in a

state of anxiety.

1Poet and Craft, p. 37.

 

2
Poet and Craft, p. 36.

 

3
Poet and Craft, p. 38.

 

u
Poet and Craft, p. 37.

 

135

The inefficacy of the Speaker's hallucinatory waiting grows

clear in the lines:
Sat in an empty house
Watching shadows crawl,
Scratching.
There was one fly.
The "empty house" is the last clear grave-nest image in Section I.
Following this the Speaker expands upon the pond-wound image, but adds
no new ones to the cluster. In the Speaker's invocation to "the voices"
(part of the "hallucinatory waiting"), one finds a variation of the
image of the crawling shadows. That image and the variation serve to
introduce later descriptions of motion:
Voice, come out of the Silence.
Say something.
Appear in the form of a Spider
Or a moth beating the curtain.
The Speaker's willingness to accept a Spider or moth as a Sign, as an
aid in his flight, implies anxiety. Two passages treat "the voices"
and other assistance that the Speaker attempts to acquire. In the
first verse paragraph, he turns to several of the lower forms of life:
I shook the softening chalk of my bones,
Saying,
Snail, snail, glister me forward,
Bird, soft-sigh me home.
Worm, be with me.
The verbs in the requests addressed to the snail and bird express the
speaker's readiness to move as they do. In a sense, he is seeking to
learn something by identifying himself with other creatures. Later in

Section I, when he turns to inanimate nature for aid, something Similar

occurs 3

136

Tell me:

Which is the way I take;

Out of what door do I go,

Where and to whom?

Dark hollows said, lee to the wind,

The moon said, back of an eel,

The salt said, look by the sea,

Your tears are not enough praise,

You will find no comfort here,

In the kingdom of bang and blab.
The first of these verse paragraphs refers to the container imagery
(the "empty house") and sayd that the Speaker wishes to escape imprison-
ment. The second records the answers that he receives from inanimate
nature. Each of the three entities gives an answer that in some way is
a reflection of the reSpondent, meaning that the inanimate realm provides
no clue to the solution of the Speaker's problem. Carroll Arnett mistakenly
associates "the kingdom of bang and blab" with the adult world, when
he says that the Spirit struggles ". . . so that it may enter into the
understanding and moral reSponsibility which the conscious 'kingdom of
bang and blab' requires as prerequisites to any truly creative growth

1

in the world of history." "Bang" and "blah" are both echoic words and
as such continue the mirror images of the preceding lines. The
"kingdom" is the realm of inanimate matter, which cannot aid the
individual human being in his attempt to understand the mysteries of
death and identity.

The invocation of the bird, snail, and worm introduced images of
motion, and the last six verse paragraphs of "The Flight" develop them

1 .

"Minimal to Maximal," CB (1957), #15. Atnett's statement

provides another example of the-failure to recognize the metaphysical
level of Roethke's poetry.

137

fully. The first of the six pictures the boy running over ground that
seems to be soft with graves and cluttered with gravestones:

Running lightly over Spongy ground,

Past the pasture of flat stones,

The three elms,

The sheep strewn on a field. . . .
Lack of details makes it impossible to tell whether the sheep are
animate or inanimate. The second of these paragraphs reintroduces the
pond-wound image, now clearly described as a stagnant pond (as was
implied by the earlier words, "soft pond of repose"):

Hunting along the river,

Down among the rubbish, the bug-riddled foliage,

By the muddy pond-edge, by the bog-holes,

By the shrunken lake, hunting, in the heat of summer.
In this image two important meanings are present. First, the pond
symbolizes the Speaker's unconscious mind, and second it represents the
merging point between the living and dead, and between the animate
and inanimate. In other words, it represents the place where one might
seek answers to questions about the origins of life. The protagonist
.iS making this search because he has been confronted by death. To
put it in the Simplest terms: an obsession is driving him to discover
whether he was once dust and will return to dust, or whether something

in him is immortal. This search (or flight) is, in other terms, the search

for identity, of which Mills and Kunitz have made so much.1

lMills writes: E'The Lost Son'] . . . drops us into the midst of
the child's pursuit of freedom and singular identity . . ." ("The Lyric of
the Self," p. 13.) Kunitz writes of the fourteen narratives: "The protagonist,
who recurrently undertakes the dark journey into his own underworld, is
engaging in a quest for Spiritual identity. The quest is simultaneously a
flight, for he is being pursued by the man he has become, implacable, lost,
soiled, confused. In order to find himelf he must lose himelf by re-
experiencing all the stages of his growth, by reenacting all the trans-
mutations of his being from seed-time to maturity." ("Roethke: Poet of
Transformations," The New Republic, CLII [1965], 2Q.) Another way of saying

 

138

II

The title of Section II, "The Pit," is a grave-nest image. Mills
makes this point in other terms when he writes: ". . . The pit, which
needs partially to be viewed as a female symbol, signifies the place
of origins but now becomes a Sign of defeat, even in death."1 As a
female symbol, the pit is both the female genitals and the womb; as a
"Sign" of death it is, of course, the grave. Like the stagnant pond,
it is a place where the animate and inanimate, the living and the dead,
merge. The Speaker's earlier invocations of various lower forms of life
now give way to questions, behind which lies the assumption that ontogeny
recapitulates phylogeny. To define his own identity and to understand
what death means, he must understand.where life came from and what it is.
The Speaker is compelled to raise the questions that he does by the
necessity referred to in Kunitz's statement: "In order to find himself
he must lose himself by reexperiencing all the stages of his growth, by
reenacting all the transmutations of his being from seed-time to

"2

maturity. The "stages of growth" and "transmutations" are all the

<hanges through which life has passed in the evolution of Homo sapiens

 

and all those through which the human embryo passes in the womb.

that the protagonist is " . . . pursued by the man he has become . . ." is
to say that he is granted a vision of his own unconsciousness. The

" . . . reexperiencing of all the stages of . . . growth . . ." is the
motivating principle behind the Speaker's questions in Section II and
describes the theme of evolutionary transmigration.

1
"The Lyric of the Self," p. 1n.

2
"Poet of Transformations," p. 21}.

139

"The Pit" begins with the line:

Where do the roots go?
Look down under the leaves.

The question and answer obliquely treat the matter of how the animate-
living draws sustenance from the dead and from the inanimate. The roots
go under the leaves in search of that which will sustain their lives.
The leaves, once living but now dead, feed and protect the roots.
Growing bolder, the boy asks a more ambitious question, one requesting
the identification of some being:

Who put the moss there?
These stones have been here too long.

If the roots are sustained by dead organic matter, the boy reasons, then
is the moss growing on stones sustained by the inanimate? The answer,
more indirect than the first, suggests that the moss is merely a
"production of time," like dust that may have settled on the rocks.
The respondent seems to be saying, "The moss is only green dust. You
are nothing more yourself. There is, in fact, no real difference
between animate and inanimate."

Perhaps with a mounting sense of deSperation, the protagonist
continues to press his inquiry:

Who stunned the dirt into noise?
Ask the mole, he knows.

The question foreshadows the figure of the florist in Section IV, who

is referred to as "Papa," and who resembles God the Creator, described
in Genesis as stunning the dirt into noise. Not presuming to answer this
cluestion (which is tantamount to asking, "Is there a God?") the
respondent tells the boy to ask elsewhere. However, his answer vaguely

implies that it is only the mole who "stunned the dirt into noise."

1‘40

Tenaciously, the boy maintains that he knows something of his origin:

I feel the slime of a wet nest.
Beware Mother Mildew.

This remembered origin, unfortunately, does not illuminate anything,
but simply unites in itself stagnation and Spawning. The voice

replies as before: "Perhaps you are just a product of Spontaneous
generation, appearing out of nowhere, like mildew, having no parents
and no home to which to return." In the last line, the protagonist
addresses himself, as if testing his possible acceptance of the voice's
point of view, a point of view that would make him nothing more than
one of the children of Jack Burden's "Great God Twitch," in All the

King's Men:

 

Nibble again, fish nerves.
He is saying to himself, as he touches an electrode to severed frog's

leg: "Kick again, frog's leg!"

III
In Section II the Speaker relies on his faculty of reason and makes

little pregress, appears, in fact, to be forced nearer to the View of

himself that means death to him. Section III Shows him reduced to
unreasoning gibberish by his fear and self-loathing. Roethke writes of
‘this section in "Open Letter": "In 'The Gibber' these obsessions
[symbolized by the mole, nest, and fish] begin to take hold; again there
is a frenetic activity, then a lapsing back into serenity. . . . The
next rising agitation is rendered in terms of balked sexual experience,
with an accompanying 'rant,' almost in the manner of the Elizabethans,

and a subsequent near blackout."l This section is the turning point in

1Poet and Craft, p. 38.

 

1N1

the poem's development, for in the next the boy has returned home.
The only cause that I can see for the reversal, for the boy's turning
from deSpair toward happiness, is that his reason and will cease to
‘guide him when he reaches the depths of deSpair. It is as if he has been
strangling himself, but before the strangulation becomes fatal he loses
consciousness and relaxes his grip, unwillingly saving himself. Roethke
says this when he writes in "Open Letter": "We go, as Yeats said, from
exhaustion to exhaustion. To begin from the depths and come out-that
is difficult."1

"'The Gibber" advances the poem's development in several important
ways. In this section sexuality becomes a predominant concern, and it
becomes clear that the boy is "lost" because his parents have rejected
him or have died (which amount to the same thing). The many images of
orifices (mouths, doors, and windows) suggest that the Speaker is about
to pass from one Spiritual state into another. The section begins with
reSponses that he receives to his questions addressed to inanimate nature
and to the lower forms of life. The responses, no longer oracular like
those in Section II, are clear and threatening. He is dust and he will
return to dust:

The sun was against me,
The moon would not have me.

The cows and briars
Said to me: Die.

In what Roethke has called the "crooning" passage, the operations

of the protagonist's reason are replaced by sheer sensation:

l
Poet and Craft, pp. 39-uo.

 

1U2

What a small song. What Slow clouds. What dark water.
Hath the rain a father? All the caves are ice.
Only the snow's here.

I'm cold. I'm cold all over. Rub me in father and mother.

Fear was my father, Father Fear.

His look drained the stones.
The boy's fear of death is at one with his conviction, on rational
grounds, that materialism offers the truest picture of reality.
Speaking out of this conviction, he treats his mother and father as
inanimate substance and calls his father "Father Fear."

The next three verse paragraphs are possibly a surrealistic
picture of creation as it exists in the boy's mind (i.e., straining
between idealism and materialism):

What gliding shape

Beckoning through halls,

Stood poised on the stair,

Fell dreamily down?

From the mouths of jugs

Perched on many shelves,

I saw substance flowing

That cold morning.

Like a slither of eels

That watery cheek

As my own tongue kissed

My lips awake.
These lines combine a shadowy figure who might be a ghostly creator,
suggestions of an oceanic womb, and a picture of substance mysteriously
appearing out of a jug like a genie. The last lines prepare the way

fOr the flood of auto-erotic images that come in the next verse

paragraph, the poem's climax:

 

 

 

 

 

I;

1143

If this the storm's heart? The ground is unstilling itself

My veins are running nowhere. Do the bones cast out their fire?

Is the seed leaving the dd bed? These buds are live as birds.

Where, where are the tears of the world?

Let the kisses resound, flat like a butcher's palm;

Let the gestures freeze; our doom is already decided

All the windows are burning! What's left of my life?

I want the old rage, the lash of primordial milk!

Good-bye, good-bye, old stones, the time-order is going,

I have married my hands to perpetual agitation,

I run, I run to the whistle of money.
After the surrealistic vision of creation, the speaker's mind leaps to
this vision of the apocalypse. The details here that particularly suggest
the apocalypse are: "Where are the tears of the world"; "Our doom is
already decided"; and "The time-order is going." Although this passage
and the remainder of "The Gibber" mark the turning point of the peom,
the Speaker is still plunging into the depths of the pit, not moving
out. The ground stuns itself into noise; there is no florist-father.
Throughout these lines the protagonist describes himself in images of
self-enclosed sexuality, images of denial of the capability to procreate:

My veins are running nowhere. Do the bones cast

out their fire?
Is the seed leaving the old bed? . . .

I want the old rage, the lash of primordial milk!

0 O O O O O O O O

I have married my hands to perpetual agitation.
The fire, the seed, and the "primordial milk" (perhaps even the "tears
of the world") all represent Sperm, which here does not act as a carrier
of life but as a means to an onanistic ecstasy. The Speaker, as he falls
:into the pit, reminds one of the "toads brooding in wells," in "The
Flight," which in turn reminds one of Othello'S "cistern for foul toads
to knot and gender in": both symbols of a creative source that has become

polluted, of a nest that has become a grave. With the mention of the

11+“

butcher,1 the Speaker's inturned sexual frenzy acquires connotations
of death and destruction of identity. The last line of the passage
continues this motion of the destruction of identity. Running to the
"whistle of money" symbolizes this destruction in the same way that
Thoreau's marching to the drummer of the crowd does.

Following this passage, there is a dudden break in the tension
that has been building up in the boy and a brief glimpse of a sunlit
world:

Money money money
Water water water

How cool the grass is.

Has the bird left?

The stalk still sways.

Has the worm a Shadow?

What do the clouds say?

But this is only a "sweep of light," lost as soon as seen. The last
verse paragraph of the section employs two more images of onanism and

Self-enclosed sexuality:2

1The lines: "Let the kisses resound, flat like a butcher's palm; /
Let the gestures freeze; our doom is already decided," resemble the first
stanza of Stevens's "The Emperor of Ice Cream." Both poems treat
Simultaneously death and heavy-handed sexuality.

2
Roethke's statement about "Praise to the End!" applies equally

well to the "balked sexual experience" here: "Equationally, the poem

can be represented: onanism equals death. . . ." ("Open Letter,"

Poet and Craft, p. no.) I believe that the "veins of a tree" represent
self-enclosed sexuality because in the reproductive process of trees the
circulatory systems of parent and offspring are never linked, as they are
in the reproduction of mammals.

 

145

These sweeps of light undo me.

Look, look, the ditch is running white!

I've more veins than a tree!

Kiss me, ashes, I'm falling through a dark swirl.
Mills sees in these lines a "gesture of exultation": " . . . The
protagonist passes through the "storm's heart" and glides beyond it
into a state of calm, another level of existence. The Spirit, having
survived the threats to its growth, leaps forth in a gesture of
exultation at the Sherr pleasure of being."1 But I believe that the
‘protagonist's direction has not yet changed: he is still falling into
the depths. In fact, at this point he reminds one of Doctor Faustus
:in the last scene of Marlowe's play. Roethke's line "Look, look, the
ditch is running white!" may even be an echo of Faustus's cry:

See, see where Christ's blood Streams in the firmament!
The action of falling in Roethke's poem symbolizes the cessation of the
protagonist's will.
In "The Gibber," motion and stasis still fail to unite and harmonize.
The movements possess the hallucinatory quality of the fluttering moth
in Section I, but are more violent. I refer here to the running of
the "Whistle of money" and the "perpetual agitation of hands." Another
hallucinatory event, one foreshadowing both the boy's fall into the
"swirl" and the unification of motion and stasis that comes in Sections IV
and V, occurs in the lines:
What gliding shape
Beckoning through halls

Stood poised on the stair,
Fell freamily down?

1
"The Lyric of the Self," pp. lu-IS.

146

The few images of stasis in this section are as shadowy as those of
motion:

. . . All the caves are ice. Only the Snow's here.
And:

Let the gestures freeze. . . .
In addition to the "gliding Shape," which stands "poised" and also falls,
there is one image that combines motion and stasis:

The stalk still sways.
Swaying is motion in place, an early form of Roethke's dance image.

In Sections IV and V there are many examples of this type of imagery.

IV

Probably no reader of "The Lost Son" will deny that in the last
two sections the protagonist achieves some kind of spiritual goal, or
in Mills's words, a ". . . slow ascent from the abyss of inner tensions."l
The Specific "inner tensions," I believe, are those created by the
:futile exertions of reason and will. In "The Return" (Section IV),
two groups of images indicate a relaxing or cessation of these faculties:
those of motion-in-rest and those that blur the distinctions between
animate and inanimate and between plants and animals.

Only two or three metaphors that Speak of plants as animals occur
before that turning point of the poem, and these function differently

from the "blurring" images just mentioned. "All the leaves stuck out their

1
Theodore Roethke, p. 27.

 

1H7

tongues" and "I shook the softening chalk of my bones" (both in
Section I) present pictorially the boy's "lostness," his sense of
rejection and his fear of death. Another, "These buds are live as
birds" (Section III), represents the intensification of tactile sen-
sation during the "balked sexual experience." That the Similar images
following the turning point serve to obliterate the lines intellect
draws upon nature beomces clear when these images are brought together.
In Section IV we have:

[The roses] . . . had many mouths to breathe with;

. . . The weeds sleptl;

. . . The fireman pulled out roses,
The big roses, the big bloddy clinkers;

Scurry of warmth over small plants;
and possibly:

. . .Theh_u_s_h_e_<_i_forms. . . .
In Section V we have:

The bgpg§_of weeds . . . ;

. . . The dry seed-crowns,

The beautiful surviving hopes}

[an appositive]

and possibly:

Light traveled over the field. . . .1
The third image taken from "The Return" treats the inanimate (clinkers)

as animate (roses), and plant life (roses) as animal (bloody). More

importantly, these lines symbolically answer the questions raised by the

1
I have italicized the metaphors throughout.

198

boy in "The Pit," in that they reveal to him the mystery of birth.

We are given a clue to this when the Speaker refers to the "boiler" as
the "fire-pit," making it a member of the grave-nest cluster. The

act of pulling "bloody clinkers" out of the furnace resembles pulling

a child from the womb. Additional suggestions that the boiler symbolizes
the goal of the portagonist's quest come when we are told "the way to
the boiler was dark" and that the boiler is the only source of heat

and light throughout the dark hours. Because of the heat and brightness
of the fire, the fire-pit not only eymbolizes the source of life, but
symbolizes one invulnerable to the reason and will.

Before commenting on the images of Section V, I want to call
attention to an important development in "The Return." If the preceding
sections have Shown the protagonist struggling against his fall into
the pit, against the hostile containment of the grave, Section IV Shows
the grave being transformed into a womb. Roethke writes in his "Open
Letter" that the greenhouse is his " . . . symbol for the whole of life,
a womb, a heaven-on-earth."l In order to appreciate this gloss, one
must visualize the setting. At the opening of "The Return" the Speaker
is inside of a frost-covered greenhouse at night, with only " . . . a
single light / Swinging by the fire-pit. . . ." As morning comes and
the darkness disappears, the heat comes up, melting the frost on the

panes. The boy cries out:

1
Poet and Craft, p. 39.

 

1149
Ordnung! Ordnung!
Papa is coming!
The coming of "papa," of warmth and light, the increasing tranSparency
of the greenhouse--all embody a sense of expansion and security. The
boy has been granted a vision of the mystery of birth, has returned to
an earlier state in which he knew that he had not simply evolved from
the slime.
V

If the boy's mind were still functioning as it was earlier,
Section V would take the next logical step after Section IV. It does,
.in fact, move from concern with the origin of life to the problem of
death and whether there is a birth beyond death, which i§_a step,
though not a logical one, nearer the boy's true concern. The expansion
experienced in "The Return" carries the boy's awareness beyond the
protective panes of the greenhouse, and outside he does not see roses,
Chrysanthemums, and "yellowy weeds," but "bones of weeds" and "dry seed—
crowns." In other words, he sees the emblems of death, and his
immediate interest is in the question of the weeds' survival, or
perhaps revival. To this, the poem does not provide an answer, but
rather, establishes in this last section, an equilibrium, an air of
expectancy. Images of motion and stasis are fused, as already mentioned.
The only hint at an affirmation, though, lies in the shift from wind to
light imagery. Does the swaying (or swinging--both symbolize the motion
of life) have a material cause (the wind) or a Spiritual cause (the
light)?1 In the first two verse paragraphs, it is the wind only that

stirs the "bones of weeds," but in the third something joins the wind:

lEliot, in "The Wasteland," symbolizes a world devoid of a
Spiritual prime mover with similar images:
'What is that noise?‘
The wind under the door.

150

Light traveled over the field;

Stayed.

The weeds stOpped swinging.

The mind moved, not alone,

Through the clear air, in the Silence.

The first two lines establish a kind of equilibrium. Although we are
not told what the wind is doing, the weeds apparently stop swinging
because the light "stays." By mentioning the "mind," the Speaker forces
us to seek out psychical correSpondences for these various details
of the poem. In the last two stanzas, the Speaker approaches as nearly
as possible affirming the existence of an immaterial cause:

Was it light?

Was it light within?

Was it light within light?

Stillness becoming alive,

Yet still?

A lively understandable Spirit

Once entertained you.

It will come again.

Be Still.

Wait.

Certainly in these lines Roethke echoes The Four Quartets, but just as

 

certainly he is not making the same affirmations that Eliot makes. In

fact, if we remember Eliot's line "The poetry does not matter" and

remember Roethke's descriptions of the patient fisherman (symbolizing

poet and ideal reader), we can say that Roethke's words contradict

Eliot's, for these concluding lines stress not the nature of the Spirit

or even the truth of its existence, but the impatient and receptive

waiting. Moreover, for Roethke, this waiting was inseparable from the

writing of poetry.

'What is that noise now? What is the wind doing?‘

Nothing again nothing.

(Collected Poems, 1909-1962 [New York, 1963], p. 57.) And:

. . . Bones cast in a little low dry garret,
Rattled by the rat's foot only, year to year.

 

(p. 60).

151

The Long Alley (PE) pp. 57-60)

I

This is a poem of ascension. The protagonist, perhaps as a
representative of humanity, belongs neither to the world of sub-human
nature nor to the world of Spirit. In this poem he haltingly but
definitely'moves upward, through the long alley toward the intelligible
world.

The first section opens with "sinuous river imagery: an
ambivalent brooding by the edge of the city,"1 as Roethke described it.
The imagery acts as an index to the operations of the protagonist's mind,
at this point lubricous and self-involved. The style is unctuous:

Loo, loo, said the sulphurous water,

There's no filth on a plateau of cinders.

This smoke's from the glory of God.
Although the section describes many types of flowing, none of them
iJIdicates life. In fact, the only signs of life that the protagonist
observes are the effects of man-made pollution. MOreover, he realizes
the waste and pollution are always by-products of the existence of
animate nature. He broods "ambivalently," because on the one hand he
sees the "glory" of life (even of industrial manufacturing), but on the
other hand sees its ugliness.

The last verse paragraph of Section I continues the earlier

use of imagery of actions that are symptomatic of life, such as naming,

l
Poet and Craft, p. 39.

 

152

hurrying, and burying. The abruptness of the sentences (e.g., "Can
you name it? I can't name it") indicates that the Speaker is now

struggling out of his facile state of mind.

II
Section II, which Roethke describes as beginning "a new phase"
after the relapse of the preceding section, Shows the protagonist being
pulled between the Spiritual and the bestial. Fittingly enough, the
contest takes the form of a debate between body and soul, the main
tenor of which is that each sees itself as the cause of the other's
existence. The soul begins boldly:
The fiend's away. Lord, what do you require?
The body reminds the soul that it is no prince:
The soul resides in the horse barn.
Refusing to be humiliated, the soul denies that physical substance can
exist apart from a Spiritual cause:
Believe me, there's no one else, kitten-limp sister.
The body rudely reminds the soul that life is maintained by physical
sustenance:
Kiss the trough, swine-on-Friday.
"Swine-on-Friday" is a nasty joke aimed at Jewish and Christian food rituals,
saying that even the most devout believer must eat undeniably tangible

ibod.

l
Poet and Craft,_p. 39.

 

153

To this, the soul retorts with a challenge, saying in effect "How

can physical food reach or affect a non-physical entity?"l

Come to me milk-nose, I need the loan of the quick.
Body replies that mental states depend on physical ones:
There's no joy in soft bones.
Soul then tries a new tack:
For whom were you made, sweetness I cannot touch?
Body answers by pointing to the joyful, procreative birds:
Look what the larks do.
Their lives are ends in themselves, not excuses for producing more
"horse barns" for souls to reside in. The soul turns to the question
of immortality, implying that the body will not be resurrected:
Luminous one, Shall we meet on the bosom of God?
But the incorrigible body even has an answer for this. The soul's
"God" is just its own image projected outward and worshiped
narcisistically:

Return the gaze of a pond.

III
If the protagonist's concerns thus far in the poem have seemed
unlikely ones, we Simply need to recall Thoreau's interest in the same
matters. Recalling Thoreau, we shall also be preparing ourselves for

an unexpected turn in Section III, an examination of the "cost" of

One is reminded of Milton's "Christian materialism" and
Raphael's conversation with Adam about the sustenance of angels.

1514

living. By this phrase I mean an ethical weighing of the actions that
a being must take in order to preserve his life. The problem is raised
in the first line:

. . . Must I kill something else?
The obverse, "Must something else kill me?" is presented immediately
afterwards:

Can feathers eat me?

Together these questions represent the protagonist's concern with what
might be called the "power structure" of the Situation in which he
finds himself. He is unfamiliar with that structure because he has
entered unknown territory as he "struggles out of the slime." At this
*point, the protagonist seems to be both the individual soul, moving
between bestiality and Spirituality, and life itself, and its evolution
from microorganism to man. The Speaker's anxiety then expresses itself
in a song that restates the problem and at the same time denies its
existence.

The statement of the problem develops as follows. After
announcing his concern with killing and being killed, the Speaker says:
. . . Have mercy, gristle. . . .

This implies that some part of the speaker resists the painful develOp-
ment, which is symbolized by the hardening and growth of the embryonic

bone structure, which possibly is forcing him upright. The
psycholOgical counterpart of this growth is increasing consciousness,
eSpecially consciousness of mortality. The song begins:

A waiting ghost warms up the dead
Until they creak their knees. . . .

155

In these and following lines, the protagonist echoes both the body
and the soul in Andrew Marvell's "A Dia10gue Between the Soul and
Body," where each maintains that it is forced painfully upright by
the other. The soul speaks of itself as,

A soul hung up, as 'twere, in Chains
Of Nerves, and Arteries, and Veins.l

And the body Speaks of "this Tyrannic Soul,"
Which, stretch upright, impales me so,
That mine own Precipice I go;

And warms and moves this needles? Frame;
(A Fever could but do the same.)

But an even closer Similarity between Roethke's poem and Marvell's lies
in the body's (or the Speaker's) condemnation of the soul for forcing
it to endure life and-~in full awareness--to meet death. In Marvell's
poem the body says of the soul:

And, wanting where its Spight to try,

Has made me live to let me dye.

A Body that could never rest,

Since this ill Spirit it possest.
Throughout Section III of Roethke's poem, the protagonist continues
to question the need of life's feeding on life. Many lines describe
his resistance to carnivorism:

The hay hOps in the horse's mouth,

The chin jumps to the nose.

and,
Rich me cherries a fondling's kiss. . . .

l
The Poems and Letters of Andrew Marvell, ed. H. M. Margoliouth,
Vol. I, 2nd ed. (Oxford, 1952), p. 20.

 

2
Marvell, p. 21.

3
Marvell, p. 21.

156

This last line may mean that ripe fruit offers itself as food just as
lovers, while fondling, offer each other kisses. A few lines later, the
hen and the goose, which represent feathered victims to be devoured,
refuse to let the Speaker's beloved (his carnivorism?) out of the Silo
(a fitting prison). In the concluding verse paragraph of the section,
the Speaker makes a pseudo-philosophical investigation of the problem.

The denial of the problem, especially of the Speaker's awareness
of his own mortality ("Can feathers eat me?"), appears in the tone and
in possible readings of some of the lines.

So up and away and what do we do
But barley-break and squeeze.

These lines bring up the anti-carnivorism theme, but they also may be
read as part of the speaker's last waltz with an old "itch" and a
refusal to take his problems seriously, an attempt to escape from his
growing consciousness into alcoholic or sexual euphoria. His escape
grows more apparent in the next lines:

Tricksy comes and tricksy goes
Bold in fear therefore. . . .

The frivolous tone continues through the section, which concludes, as

I have said, in a mock philosophical inquiry.

IV
Section IV depicts a transcendentalist's ecstasy. In the
first verse paragraph, we see the Speaker relinquishing his will, which
is partly hiS carnivorous appetite, and submitting himself to what he
feels to be forces in his immediate environment that unify flesh and

Spirit:

157

That was a close knock. See what the will wants.

This air could flesh a dead stick. Sweet Jesus, make me sweat.

Are the flowers here? The birds are.

Shall I call the flowers?
He hears a summons, which he believes comes from an externalized will.
He acknowledges the mysterious creative forces moving about him. He
requests and he invokes, actions which mark his spiritual advance out
of the tangle of the preceding section. The verse paragraph describing
the small, tender plants clarifies the Speaker's vision of ideal life,
of life at its furthest remove from aggressiveness, killing, and
devouring. In the last three lines of the section, his love for life
as it is manifested in the "small breathers, creepers and winders"
reaches its culmination:

Light airs! Light airs! A pierce of angels!

The leaves, the leaves become me!

The tendrils have me!

The Speaker has achieved union with the ideal forms of life.

V

The poem's last section descends from the clarity and lyrical
grace of Section IV. Assuming the role of the preacher (as does
Whitman after the vision in "Song of Myself"), the protagonist now
describes his ut0pia and prays that it may be realized on earth. His
utopia, like Thoreau's, consists in man's living in harmony with nature
and in reducing aoquisitiveness and trade to the barest minimums. The
protagonist, once frightened and confused, now”exhibits the self-

reliance of a Prometheus:

158

Give me my hands:
I'll take the fire.
A field of Light (BE, pp. 63-65)

"A Field of Light" grows out of "The Long Alley," primarily
by extending and partly undermining the valued actions that the
protagonist has discovered. The relaxing or relinquishing of will,
which led to the Spiritual peak in theiburth section of the preceding
poem, here becomes a static condition, approaching stagnation. The
love for non-aggressive forms of life seems to transform itself into
a love of dirt. But the Speaker’quickly overcomes these distortions
that threaten his new-born Spiritual strength, and he once more
attains felicity and union with nature.

The two major opposing clusters of images and actions are
introduced in the title. The field, which symbolizes corporeality or
love for the inanimate, is associated with imagesof a field, standing
water, sand, blackened leaves, deep grass, dust, stones, etc. The
images of this cluster are not tied to verbs of motion. Light, which
symbolizes Spiritual force, is associated with the sun, morning,
clouds, bees, and birds. Contrary to the field images, these always
exh ibit motion.

The first section pictures negatively the utopia that the
speaker envisioned at the end of "The Long Alley." There he had

prayed:

159

Send down a rush of air, 0 torrential,
Make the sea flash in the dust.

Here the "torrential" appears to have more than answered his prayer, for
the protagonist seems to be contemplating the results of a Spring
flood, while the relinquishing of will has become catatonia:

A long weed floated upward;
An eye tilted.

The movements that do occur are Strangely accidental and inexplicable.
When the Speaker reaches for a grape, it does not leap into his hand,
as the peaches and cherries were to do in the utopia, but instead:

Reached for a grape
And the leaves changed. . . .

And everything here is seen through the gauze of the past tense.
As in the preceding poem, Section II begins with an address to
some Spiritual power:
Angel within me, I asked,
Did I ever curse the sun?
Speak and abide.
These lines recall the last section of "Sensibility! 0 La!," where
the protagonist hypocritically insists that he has "loved the sun."
The "angel within" answers his present question by mentioning what appear
to be five instances of his cursing the sun:
Under, under the Sheaves,
Under the blackened leaves,
Behind the green viscid trellis,
In the deep grass at the edge of a field,
Along the low ground dry only in August. . . .
TheSe images of the field-cluster exemplify what Roethke Spoke of
as " . . . the muck and welter, the dark, the dreck of these poems"1

I
Poet and Craft, p. no.

 

160

(Roethke's italics). Not only are these images rendered static by
being presented without verbs, but they are made to convey a sense
of furtiveness through the use of certain prepositions. After hearing
this indictment, the Speaker seems to admit to having performed some
unSpecified actions, but considers them innocent:

Was it dust I was kissing?

A sigh came far.

Alone, I kissed the skin of a stone;

Marrow-soft, danced in the sand.
Even if he is glorying in the "dreck," he is at least moving.

Section III carries the movement to its climax. The protagonist
begins to separate himself from his physical environment:
The dirt left my hand, visitor.

Imagination and hints of further rapid and powerful movements Sprout:

I could feel the mare's nose.

A path went walking.

The sun glittered on a small rapids.
In ajbvely, lyrical invocation, addressed to harmless ferms of life,
the Speaker transforms the dirt that he has been guilty of loving into
"something rich and strange." It becomes a substance warmed by life
and, in turn, giving support to life:

I touched the ground, the ground warmed by the killdeer,

And the new plants, still awkward in their soil,
The lovely diminutives .

The poem's concluding verse paragraph amplifies this transformation and
reveals that it is a Sign of the speaker's harmony, perhaps union, with
rature. The harmony embraces the creatures of the field as well as the
creatures of the light:

The worms were delighted as wrens.

And I walked, I walked through the light air;
I moved with the morning.

161

The Shape of the Fire (BE) pp. 69-72)
The title, "The Shape of the Fire," brings to mind the myth

of the cave, which Socrates expounds in Book VII of The Republic.

 

Both works concern the difficulties of perception, although fOr Plato
that means seeing the abstract rather than the particular, and for
Roethke, seeing a world that harmonizes with one's own identity. DeSpite
the differences between thsee two ideal modes of perception, the
philosopher's theory does illuminate the poem.
Section I reveals the protagonist lost in a world where the
inanimate is about to extinguish the life of the animate. The lost
son perceives this hostile situation in terms of a mother's rejecting,
or refusing to feed, her offspring:
What's this? a dish for fat lips.

This may describe the earth or a woman's breast. Immediately following
this image comes an aggressive undercutting:

Who says? A nameless stranger.
The Speaker's questioning of the mother-offspring relationship continues:

Will the sea give the wind suck?
No, of course not. The inanimate will "give suck" to nothing.

The she-bear mopes under the hill.
Mother, mother, stir from your cave of sorrow.

These lines picture creaturely love and compassion being smothered
under the inanimate, or perhaps one should say the spiritual bond
between mother and offspring being smothered under corporeality. In
any case, the protagonist wants to escape:

Mother me out of here.

162

He thinks of escape in terms of adaptation. If life is to survive, it
must grow fierce; the mother becomes a witch and a fury:

These flowers are all fangs. Comfort me, fury.
Wake me, witch, we'll do the dance of rotten sticks.

The section ends with the animate being suckled by the inanimate, the
dave becoming an arbor, and the Speaker moving on:

A low mouth laps water. Weeds, weeds, how I love you.

The arbor is cooler. Farewell, farewell, fond worm.

The warm comes without sound.

Section II begins with a nursery rhyme about the Speaker's
fragmented identity, indicating that he is still a prisoner in the cave
("Where's the eye? / The eye's in the sty") and not ready to escape
("There was only one Shoe / For the waltz of To / The pinch of Where").
Following this, in prose rhythms, the Speaker mocks a man who has come
to instruct him, a figure resembling the phiIOSOpher who returns to the

cave from the world of forms in order to free his fellows:

Time for the flat-headed man. I recognize that listiner,
Him with the platitudes and rubber doughnuts. . . .

And,
Have you come to unhinge my shadow?
This verse paragraph ends with a further suggestion that the protagonist
is moving, but the erotic undertones are so pronounced that it is clear
that he is not entering Plato's realm of Ideas:
Up over a viaduct I came, to the snakes and sticks of another

winter,
A two-legged dog hunting a new horizon of howls.

The mock-serious figure of the pedagoge ("the flat-headed man")
may recall the pseudo-Solomon if "Where Knock Is Open Wide."

163

The first "howl" he hears is the following song:
Pleasure on ground
Has no sound,
Easily maddens
The uneasy man.
Who, careless, slips
In coiling ooze
Is trapped to the lips,
Leaves more than shoes;
Must pull off clothes
To jerk line a frog
On belly and nose
From the sucking bog.
The burden of this song is that one is better off staying hidden in the
protective cave than wandering about in unfamiliar territory where one
is liable to lose one's dignity. The man described in the song resembles
the philosopher who has emerged from the cave into the sunlight of the
intelligible world, and such a description would serve a prisoner as
justification for staying put. But the "voice" does not convince the
protagonist, who realizes that such an attitude is self-destructive:
My meat eats me. Who waits at the gate?
Mother of quartz, your words writhe into my ear.
Renew the light, lewd whisper.
He is now prepared for the ascent. The gate, of course, suggests the
czave mouth or any entrance into another realm. He is finally being
"mothered out of here" into the light.

Section III is a brief period of unanxious waiting. One line
explicitly states the nature of the "journey" that the protagonist is
about to begin:

The journey out of the flesh is longest.

A rose sways least.
The redeemer’comes a dark way.

16M

The redeemer, previously considered a "flat-headed man," is now
recognized for what he is.

Sections IV and V are the illumination, the first, a return to
childhood, before knowledge of death and sexuality, the second, a
description of a visionary state, unlimited by time. The following
lines partly describe the early innocence:

Death was not. I lived in a simple drowse:

Hands and hair moved through a dream of wakening blossoms.

Rain sweetened the cave and the dove still called;

The flowers leaned on themselves, the flowers in hollows;

And love, love sang toward.
The first two lines tell us that at this time the boy was not aware
of death or sexuality. The cave was sweet, not yet a prison of
delusions or a smothering corporeality. It was a state of narcissistic
and non-aggressive beauty, without any fear that flowers needed to be
fangs if they were to survive. The last line indicates that Roethke's
sunlit world is an emotional state rather than one of abstract forms,
such as Plato's is.

Section V describes a state of light and peace, where there is
no willed movement, only the motions of growth and the miraculous coming
of light:

To know that light falls and fills, often without our knowing,

As an opaque vase fills to the brim from a quick pouring,

Fills and trembles at the edge yet does not flow over,

Still holding and feeding the Stem of the contained flower.
The vase is perhaps a variation on the cave image. Here the inanimate is
"giving suck" to the animate, but of course it is the inanimate reshaped
by art, the "container" made ideal. AS in "The Lost Son" the develOpment
is essentially the metamorphosis of a grave into a womb, and it is the

symbolic or metaphysical meaning of this—-not merely the psychoanalytical--

that is most important.

165

Praise to the End! (BE) pp. 75—78)
"Praise to the End" begins with the Speaker in a depressed state,
lost and wondering why he has struggled:

It's dark in this wood, soft mocker,
For whom have I swelled like a seed?

Although he feels himself to be insignificant, he is not tormented by a
sense of inferiority:

Ooh, ooh, I'm a duke of eels.
The relaxed tone of this section contrasts with the artificial assertion
of not-caring, which we have seen in many other poems, such as in the
third section of "The Long Alley." Only a few lines of this Opening
;)art indicate that it is the knowledge of his own mortality that is
depressing the Speaker:

. . . I'm down to my skin at last.
. . . I'm dead at both ends.

And,
I'll feed the ghost alone.
The section ends on a note of philOSOphic acceptance:

All risings
Fall.

Section II begins with a more tense sort of frivolity, but this
noderates quickly and in such a way that one feels the Speaker has been
permanently strengthened by the vision of his own early innocence, as
described in Section IV of the preceding poem.

Where are you now, my bonny beating gristle,

My blue original dandy, numb with sugar?
Once I fished from the banks, leaf-light and happy. . . .

166

The Signs of the Speaker's awareness that "Now the water's low, / The
weeds exceed me" continue, but his sense of competence also continues:

Rock me to sleep, the weather's wrong.

Speak to me, frosty beard.

Sing to me, sweet.
A voice, apparently his mother's, then Sings a song about the child's
growth. In Section I he had exclaimed, "What a bone ache I have,"
and commanded, "Arch my back, pretty-bones, I', dead at both ends."
These lines express the pains of growth, or, in a psychological term, of
ascent. The mother's song describes certain minor acts of cruelty
that the child did not witness and ends with a request that he grow
large and strong. (The request is couched in obviously phallic images.)
The refrain, line four of each stanza, links the motion of the child's
growth with the imagery of the dangerous ascent, during which a slip
is fatal:

Be large as an owl, be slick as a frog,

Be good as a goose, be big as a dog,

Be sleek as a heifer, be long as a hog,--

What fOotie will do will be final.
The section ends with a verse paragraph in which the Speaker expresses

his restlessness and his intention of doing something about it:

I conclude! I conclude!
My dearest dust, I can't stay here.

Both lines ambiguously assert the speaker's decision to improve his
present psychic state and refer to the central cause of his distress,

his mortality.

167

In Section III the Speaker moves away from the "dark woods"
in which he has been. The first three quatrains of this past describe
'the change, the "crossing-over," one which resembles a Similar
incident in the second part of "The Shape of the Fire." The movement
is beneficial:

The sun came out;
The lake turned green. . . .

The Speaker then presents a clear statement of his deepest concern, his
own mortality:

I dreamt I was all bones;
The dead slept in my sleeve. . . .

And this is immediately followed by an eXplanation of his calmness:

Sweet Jesus tossed me back:
I wore the sun with ease.

Not only does a "redeemer" help the protagonist face his own mortality,
but the comerting concept of reincarnation Stands in the background.
The section ends with the protagonist convinced that at least some part
of him is in some sense immortal:

Skin's the least of me. Kiss this.
IS the eternal near, fondling?

And then the expectancy:
Ghost, come closer.

The final section, as in so many of these poems, Shows the
protagonist ascending into a state of illumination. Here the ascent is
particularly Whitmanesque, relying on either the concept of reincarnation
or on a pantheistic oneness of all life. The dreaming expectancy of

Section III is burst and the Speaker Sings of his own ecstasy:

168

Arch of air, my hear's original knock,
I'm awake all over:
I've crawled from the mire, alert as a saint or a dog.

This replaces the "knock" about which he worried in his earlier musings

on death:

This grave has an ear.
It's still enough for the knock of a worm.

His present alertness transcends the worries of sexuality, spanning

the range between saint and dog.1 He is reconciled to change and to his

om flesh:

I bask in the bower of change. . . .
"Change" here means not only mutability, but also the "change" of the
soul's habitation, whether that be a senseless stone or a nameless
creature:

Many astounds before, I lost my identity to a pebble;
The minnows love me, and the humped and spitting creatures.

l

Roethke's comment on this passage and the poem in general must
be quoted, although, since I do not understand his comment, I cannot
be certain whether it supports my reading or not:

"I've crawled from the mire, alert as a saint or a dog." Except
for the saint, everything else is dog, fish, minnow, bird, etc.,
and the euphoric ride resolves itself into a death-wish.
Equationally, the poem can be represented: onanism equals death,
and even the early testament moralists can march out happily.

(Is the protagonist "happy" in his death-wish? IS he a mindless
euphoric jigger who goes blithering into oblivion? No. In terms
of the whole sequence, he survives: this is a dead-end explored.
His self-consciousness, his very will to live saves him from the
annihilation of the ecstasy. (Poet and Craft, pp. uo-ul).

169

His early cantankerous "I conclude! I conclude!" gives way to "I
1>elieve' I believe!" What he belives is that all life is one, and that
he has lived before and will live again in another body:
I have been somewhere else; I remember the sea-faced uncles.
I hear, clearly, the heart of another singing,
Lighter than bells,
Softer than water.
In the final verse paragraph, the Speaker asks the rest of creation
to overwhelm him. He declares that he has seen death and yet is gay.
The light, which in "Sensibility! 0 La!" he thought he would carry
under his arm, has now deigned to come to him:
Wherefore, 0 birds and small fishes, surround me.
Lave me, ultimate waters.
The dark showed me a face.
My ghosts are all gay.
The light becomes me.
Roethke took the title of this poem from the first book of Wordsworth's
Prelude, where the phrase expresses the poet's thankfulness that all the
"terrors, pains and early miseries" that he experienced were necessary

steps to his present calm. That thankfulness is identical with the

joy expressed in the conclusion of Roethke's poem.

Unfold! Unfold! (BE, 81-83).

 

The title "UnfOId! Unfold!" reveals two important facets of the
poem: first, that the protagonist feels himself in a position to issue
commands; second, that he demands explanation or instruction. Possibly
the unusual nature of this demand may be explained by one's viewing
the Speaker as a prisoner who has escaped Plato's cave and who now
returns. In other words, he, himself, now plays the role of "the

flat-headed man," or at least sees himself in that role.

170

Unlike many other poems in these sequences, "Unfold! Unfold!"
does not begin with the protagonist in a state of depression and develop
as he moves into elation. This poem, rather, opens with him eXpressing
dissatisfaction with his present predicament, but confident that he will
soon be out of it, much the same tone as that which concluded Section II
of "Praise to the End!" His hasty mixing together of explanations of
why he is where he is, mystifying questions, denials of ability, and
expressions of his wishes makes him appear officious and distracted:

By snails, by leaps of frog, I cam here, Spirit.

Tell me, body without Skin, does a fish sweat?

I can't crawl back through those veins,

I ache for another choice.
The most important thing that we learn from the opening lines is that
the Speaker has lost contact with his childhood innocence; he cannot
go romping "down the summery streets of...[his] veins," as he recalls
doing in Section II of "Praise to the End!" In relation to the theme
of transmigration, these lines Speak of the protagonist's understanding
that he must accept the burdens of human consciousness, that the
(easier lives lower on the evolutionary scale are no longer for him.
The remaining lines in the section suggest that he has returned (or
been returned) from eternity to the world of time, and that he now
(again like Whitman) waits expectantly to decipher messages from that

other world:

The cliffs! The cliffs! They fling me back.
Eternity howls in the last crags,

The field is no longer simple:

It's a soul's crossing time.

The dead Speak noise.

171

Being flung back by the cliffs must be equivalent to the notion of
reincarnation as it was expressed in Section III of "Praise to the
End!":

Sweet Jesus tossed me back. . . .
The last three lines, I believe, indicate that the Speaker's preparing
to take on the role of interpreter-instructor.

Section II is a mockery of conversation or discussion, with
the overtones of a vaudeville comedy routine and Sly allusions to
inebriation. At the same time, the lines may be read as an oracular
statement about the coming of the tongue of fire:

It's time you stood up and asked
--Or sat down and did.
A tongue without song
--Can still whistle in a jug.
You're blistered all over
--Who cares? The old owl?
When you find the wind
--Look for the white fire.
The first exchange and the mention of "the old owl" touch on the notion
of the roles of instructor and student. The jug, "blistered," and the
"white fire"--all may allude to alcohol and inebriation, which in turn
may be a mocking description of the coming of ecstasy. One may easily
enough, of course, associate the song, the whistling, the wind, and
the fire with the spirit.

Section III explicitly introduces a figure who resembles the

"flat-headed man . . . with the platitudes," one who is adept at reading

oracles:

What a whelm of proverbs, Mr. Pinch!
Are the entrails clear, immaculate cabbage?

172

The Speaker, who is a colleague of Mr. Pinch's, calls him an "immaculate
cxflbage" just as earlier he called the Spirit a "body without skin."
"Immaculate" here means Spirit without flesh, and a cabbage is something
'to be unfOlded. Mr. Pinch, himself, then, is the "message" or oracle
from the Spiritual world that the Speaker is about to unfold. The
hierophant immediately launches into a boastful description of his
qualifications and of his past performances of certain rituals:

The last time I nearly whiSpered myself away.

I was far back, farther than anybody else.

On the jackpine plains I hunted the bird nobody knows:

Fishing, I caught myself behind the ears.

Alone, in a Sleep-daze, I stared at billboards.

I was privy to oily fungus and the algae of standing waters;

Honored, on my return, by the ancient fellowship of

rotten stems.

O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O C O O O O O

I met a collector of string, a Shepherd of slow forms.

My mission became the salvation of minnows.

Later,.I.did.and.I.danced inoth .simple 5.05mi ' ° '

A mouse taught me how. I was a happy asker.
The protagonist has survived dangers, and not because of cowardliness.
The line about fishing recalls "Sweet Jesus tossed me back" and also
recalls the ancient Symbol for eternity, a snake with its tail in its
mouth. The "sleep-daze" is the mystic trance, and the "billboards"
are Signs that the Spiritual leader is reading, the modern omens from
which oracles are read. "Privy," as used here, reverberates quite
fully, suggesting the secrecy of the priestly cult, the self-importance
felt by a counselor, and even the privacy of the water closet. "Honored,"
"ancient fellowships," "Shepherd," "mission," and "salvation"--all

contribute to the description of the protagonist in his role as priest

and prOphet. But why is his mission "the salvation of minnows," mice,

173

and plants? The answer may lie in the many references here to

reincarnation, for in light of that doctrine it is certainly true that
The field is no longer simple.

An apparently empty meadow teems with immortal souls, each undergoing

trials roughly Similar to the Speaker's. His feeling of compassion for

these lower forms goes back to his "salvation" of the fish in Section IV

of "Where Knock Is Open Wide."

Section IV of this poem acts as a brief indication that the
speaker's boastful self-explanation has concluded and that a revelation
is at hand:

Easy the life of the mouth. What a lust fOr ripeness!

All Openings praise us, even oily holes.

The bulb unravels. Who's floating? Not me.

The eye perishes in the small vision.

What else has the vine loosened?

I hear a dead tongue halloo.
The first sentence is a remarkable admission (of his volubility) for
the priest to make, and it is also a preparation for further unfoldings
of the truth. The section goes on to describe the protagonist's
manner of teaching. He strives to express the idea that is "ripe"
at the moment; he seeks "openings" as the train of ideas "unravels"
organically. He seems to be carried away, but keeps his feet on the
ground. He takes care not to become bogged down in details (in "the

small vision"). He remains receptive to clues from the outside, and

the "dead tongue" perhaps Speaks from the pages of a book. The voice

174

from the dead is, of course, also the voice from eternity.
In Section V that voice Speaks. The first two verse paragraphs

acknowledge a mysterious presence and invoke it:

Sing, Sing, you symbols! All Simple creatures,

All small Shapes, willow—shy,

In the obscure haze, sing!

A light comes from the leaves.

A Slow sigh says yes. And light sighs;

A low voice, summer-sad.

Is it you, cold father? Father,

For whom the minnows sang?
The protagonist, like Whitman, sees all forms of life as symbols of
God. He refers to God as "cold father" because of the creator's
distance, his prolonged absences. The "summer-sad" voice Speaks:

A house for wisdom; a field for revelation.

Speak to the stones, and the stars answer.

At first the visible obscures:

Go where the light is.
The last two lines of this passage restate the converse of Wordsworth's
"Ode" as it was given in the conclusion of "O Lull Me, Lull Me":

I'm more than when I was born.

In this world, one is not inexorably swept away from his early innocence;
in fact, one can overcome the disorders of childhood, one can learn
to see through the particular and fleeting visible shapes.

The final two verse paragraphs show that the previously

boisterous Speaker has been touched by the mood of the "summer~sad" voice:

1I readily admit that this reading of these difficult lines is
far-fetched, but at present I cannot see what other construction to put
on them. By way of extrinsic support: Roethke was an extremely successful
and conscientious teacher. See R. B. Heilman in Shenandoah, XVI (l96u),
55-6“. Also, three pieces in Poet and Craft ("The Teaching Poet," "A
Word to the Instructor," and "Last Class") deal explicitly with teaching.

 

 

175

This fat can't laugh.
Only my salt has a chance.
I'll seek my own meekness.
The "fat" is his body, his visible part, which cannot perform the dance
that the spirit needs. But his tears have a chance of making his
spirit visible. He will train himself in humility:
What grace I have is enough.
The lost have their own pace.
The stalks ask something else.
What the grave says
The nest denies.
"Lost," as used here, means of this world, not a pure Spirit. The
"lost son" then heartens himself by remembering that after death he can
look forward to another birth. The poem ends with an affirmation of
the bonds between souls in the process of living and those in the other
world:
In their harsh thickets
The dead thrash.
They help.
Essentially, in these last two verse paragraphs, the protagonist has
returned to the Situations he faced in the first section of "The Lost

Son," but this time he overcomes the threats uttered by the material

world ("bang and blab") and the fears inspired by Woodlawn's dead.

176

I Cry, Love! Love! (PE) pp. 87-89)

 

"I Cry, Love! Love!" is a meditation on birth, on the various
bodily forms that the soul enters. The tone, the protagonist's
state of mind, develops from officious confidence into a serene con-
templation of the harmony that is possible between the physical and
the Spiritual. The title is from Blake's "Visions of the Daughters
of Albion," where it occurs in a song praising the freedom of selfless
love. The last line of this song also bears on Roethke's poem:

Arise and drink your bliss, for every thing that lives is holy!1
Such a compassion for all forms of life usually accompanies a belief
in reincarnation, a belief that Blake and Roethke, at times at least,
Share.

In the first section, the protagonist expresses mild dis-
satisfaction with the "fall" into time, with birth:

Went weeping, little bones. But where?

Wasps come when I ask for pigeons.

The Sister sands, they slipper soft away.

What else can befall?
He then addresses a Spirit who seems to control the fOrm that the soul
will take in its new birth. We may recall a similar address in the

third part of "Give Way, Ye Gates":

You child will a beast's heart,
Make me a bird or a bear!

The protagonist asks the Spirit for an obscure mission, indicating
that he is not ambitious to leave the "states of probation" and return

to the realm of true being:2

1The Poetry and Prose of William Blake, p. 50.

2
See the Phadrus in The Dialogues of Plato, I, 252-253.

177

Delight me otherly, white spirit,--

Some errands, obscure as the wind's circuit,

A secret to jerk from the lips of a fish.

IS circularity such a shame?

A cat goes wider.
The line, "Is circularity such a shame?," one of the most important
questions in Roethke's poetry, essentially asks "Should an immortal
soul love or scorn 'the productions of time'?" The last verse
paragraph of the section shows the protagonist trying on an unfamiliar
and unidentified Shape. he seems pleased:

What's a thick? Two-by-two's a Shape.

This toad could waltz on a drum:

I hear a most lovely huzza:

I'm king of the boops!

The second section is a celebration of existence in non-human
inns, as if the protagonist were defending his lack of ambition. For
Plato, of course, Spiritual progress depended on th enlightenment of
reason, on freeing that faculty from the "forgetting" that attends its
birth in the mortal, human form. Roethke's protagonist, like Blake,
considers love the mainSpring of Spiritual growth and reason an in-
hibiting force:

Reason? That dreary shed, that hutch for grubby schoolboys!
The hedgewren's song says something else.
I care for a cat's cry and the hugs, live as water.
He recalls earlier existences in which he has expressed the same love
that he now feels and he blesses the "mazes" of earthly life:
I've traced these words in sand with a vestigial tail;
Now the gills are beginning to cry.
Such a sweet noise: I can't sleep for it.

Bless me and the maze I'm in!
Hello, thingy Spirit.

178

The "thingy Spirit," of course, is the world of objects in time and
space, a "spirit" that would not be blessed by Plato.

The next verse paragraph shows the protagonist at the highest
pitch of emotion that he reaches in this poem, praising the physical
world:

That anguish of concreteness!--

The sun playing on loam,

And the first dust of Spring listing over backlots,--

I proclaim once more a condition of joy.

Walk into the rain, willie!
"Anguish" here does not mean pain unmixed with pleasure. The line
exclaims about the intensity of the bond that can tie an immortal soul
to the particularities of a time and a place. The last two lines of the
passage are an unqualified acceptance of this world.

The concluding verse paragraph of the section explains the
[peaker's attitude toward ecstasy and love. It is another statement of
Roethke's anti-Wordsworthian theory of education. Here, once more
employing images from Heraclitus, he says that "I am more than when I
was born," and points out that he is more because he has learned to
experience ecstasy and love:

In a sodden place, all reps and knocks approve.

A dry cry comes from my own desert;

The bones are lonely.

Beginnings Start without shade,

Thinner than minnows.
Heraclitus believed that moisture taken into the body dampened the fire
of wisdom, and he associated this dampening with ecstasy and
drunkenness: "It is a delight to souls to become wet. Whenever a man

gets drunk, he is led about by a beardless boy, stumbling, not knowing

whither he goes, for his soul is wet. The dry soul is wisest and best."

179

And, "Where the earth is dry, the soul is wisest and best."1 The
"raps and knocks" in Roethke's lines may be signals from spirits, and
the lack of shade at the beginning certainly means a lack of

moisture, a lack of drunkenness of the soul. The section ends with an
assertion that in time every form, even the most reluctant, learns to
love:

Behold, in the lout's eye,
Love.

The poem's concluding section delicately describes the serene
interaction of animate and inanimate, or of Spirit and body. The
third verse paragraph, without mentioning anything living, employs an
animating metaphor and another descriptive term that returns to the
original concern with birth:

The Shine on the face of the lake

Tilts, backward and forward.
The water recedes slowly,

Gently rocking.

 

(My italics.)
The last five lines are Slightly enigmatic, but become clear when we
recall the questioning of the inanimate-animate relationship in terms
of the mother-child relationship in Section I of "The Shape of the Fire."
There we saw lines such as,

Mother me out of here. . . .
Will the sea give the wind suck? . . .

. . . Small birds pass over water
And,

Mother, mother, stir from your cave of sorrow.

l
Nahm, pp. 92-93. Fragments 72, 73, 7a, and 76 cited in that order.

180

In the present poem, too, small birds are seen "Dipping and veering
close to the motionless water," and in the last lines the concern
with birth grows into a remembering of the mother:
Who united the tree? I remember now.
We met in a nest. Before I lived.
The dark hair sighed.
We never enter
Alone.
These lines also reveal on the part of the Speaker a beautifully covert

recognition of the sexual union of the parents that precedes the

birth of an offspring.

0, Thou Opening, 01

 

The final narrative, "0, Thou Opening, 0," is printed in italics
and is the most consistently excited of the fourteen pieces. The
speaker's mood never strays far from ecstatic delight with the world
of time and Space. Throughout, however, he acknowledges the danger
of his becoming "lost": I

I'll make it; but it may take me.

The rat's my phase.

My left side's tender.

Read me the stream.
He only slightly tempers his confidence here. His ability to survive
equals the rat's. The "stream" is Heraclitus's well-known image for
1he flux, and in asking that it be read the protagonist appears to

confront it with his intelligence, perhaps his reason. The notion that

he is somehow struggling with the flux continues:

1
This poem does not appear in PE) but is added to the sequence

in The Waking (1953).

 

181

Dazzle me, dizzy aphorist.

Fling me a precept.

I'm a draft sleeping by a stick;

I'm lost in what I have.
The "dazzle" becomes "Jesus-shimmer" in Section II, but we cannot
be certain whether it is Jesus or Socrates who is the "dizzy aphorist."
The second pair of lines is a paradox, one of Heraclitus's favorite
devices. The first suggests that the soul has gone to Sleep next to
the body and that the body is inactive (a "stick"). The next,
however, has the soul "lost" in the flux, in thinghood.

A voice hurls him two "precepts," the first resembling some

of Heraclitus's paradoxes of strife:

The Depth calls to the Height

--Neither knows it.
Those close to the Ground
--Only stay out‘of the Wind.

Two of the fragments throw light on these lines: "Men do not under-
stand how that which draws apart agrees with itself; harmony lies in
the bending-back, as for instance of the bow and of the lyre." And:
"Opposition unites. From what draws apart results the most beautiful
harmony. All things take place by strife."1 The depth and the height
call each other into being, just as do life and death. But the Speaker
is concerned with the amount of tension between the two poles. Forms
of life "close to the ground," those that do not attain a high degree

of consciousness, are not aware of the wind of mortality. The

remaining two stanzas of the section Show the Speaker attempting to

lNahn, p. 91. Fragments 1+5 and 146, reSpectively.

1.! Illa-"I
I! ,‘l‘

 

.ll'.
.I,l,l liilli.

 

 

 

 

182

decrease the tension that he, himself, feels between life and death.
In one of the fragments, Heraclitus likens the "strife" in a bow to
1

life and death: "The name of the bow islfife, but its work is death."
The first line of the next stanza echoes the plucking of a bow or
tarp and Speaks of diminished tension:

Thrum-thrum, who can equal the ease?

I've seen my father's face before

Deep in the belly of a thing to be.

The Devil isn't dead; he's just away.
The other three lines explain the lessening of strife. The Opposition
between life and death is diminished by the "circularity" of re-
incarnation, and that between good and evil, by a temporagy absence of
the Devil. The last quatrain of the section describes the inconsistancy
of the flux and the soul's attempt to adapt to it:

A true mole wanders like a worm.

Section II is a discourse against too great an "easing" of the
tension. The first prose paragraph decries the "pelludious Jesus-Shimmer"
'that transforms physicality and anaimalism into "a ghostly going of tame
hearse" that changes a physical wound, such as the one in Christ's Side,
into something painless and "spiritual." The second prose paragraph
continues the tirade against a childish and facile mystification, a
too easy denial of death and the body. Concluding the section, a verse
paragraph asserts the value of being aware of the tension and the flux:

The dark has its own light.
A son has many fathers.
Stand by a Slow stream:
Hear the sigh of what is.
Be a pleased rock

On a plain day.

Waking's

Kissing.

Yes.

lNahm, p. 92. Fragment 66,

183

The Significance of the first four lines, in Heraclitean terms,
should be obvious, and the third and fourth closely echo the most
famous fragment: "In the same rivers we do and we do not step;
we are and we are not."1 The last five lines affirm the value of
awareness, of not being a "pleased rock" except on days when there is
no weather, in other words, never.
The final section (Section III) praises intensity of awareness.

It begins with an increased sense of freedom on the part of the
protagonist. He feels his capability of living in the flux:

Oh, what a webby wonder I am!
He continues:

I sing the green, and things to come,

I'm king of another condition,

So alive I could die!
He berates the "enemies of skin," an invective in which neither Heraclitus
nor Plato would accompany him. Several lines later, he mentions a harp

whose song he associates with waking:

See what the sweet harp says.
Should a song break a sleep?

And,

I'm a tune dying
On harsh stone.

In other words, his waking brings his own death, an idea that Roethke
later eXpresses in the refrain line of "The Waking":

I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.

1
Nahm, p. 93. Fragment 81.

18H

His immersion in the flux makes him more than when he was born:
Going is knowing.
I see; I seek;
I'm near.
Be true,
Skin.
He commends his soul to the stream with a brief, final prayer.

We may say, then, that during the course of these fourteen poems
the protagonist moves from shock and withdrawal, caused by his con-
frontation with materiality and death, to a qualified love for the
productions of time. Although such otherworldly thinkers as Pythagoras,
Heraclitus, Plato, and Plotinus assist in this adjustment (to use a
loaded word), Ralph Mills and others mistakenly overemphasize the
Spiritual and mystical element in these poems. Principally, the break
between the poet and these phiIOSOphers comes in his elevation of love
for particular objects and creatures over the faculties of reason and
will. Like the thinkers mentioned, Roethke believes in the soul's
continual return to earth, in various forms, until it achieves perfection,

but unlike them this perfection is a matter of love not understanding.

As the poems of the 1950's and The Far Field Show, Roethke approaches

 

nearer and nearer to the worldly transcendentalism of Whitman, Blake,

and Yeats.

CHAPTER V

THE ANGEL IN THE VOID

At the end of "The Dying Man," which is subtitled "In Memorium:
W. B. Yeats" (WW, pp. 185-190), Roethke writes in what is for him an
unusual note of defiance:
. . . he dares to live
Who stops being a bird, yet beats his wings
Against the immense immeasurable emptiness of things.
(WW) p. 190)
This epigram recalls Matthew Arnold's description of Shelley as
" . . . a beautiful and ineffectual angel, beating in the void his
luminous wings in vain."1 We may much more easily see Shelley in this
role of futile, cosmic rebellion than Roethke, but nevertheless it was
a role that Roethke continually strove to play in his poetry during
the early 1950's. The poems written between 1951 and 1959, which are
the subject of this chapter, fall between two distinct phases, the long
rarratives and the landscape poems of the "North American Sequence."

Only the last peom, "Meditations of an Old Woman" (WW) pp. 191-212),

which belongs with the works of The Far Field, violates the consistency

 

uniting these poems. That consistency, as I see it, lies in the images
and themes employed in presenting the attitude eXpressed in the closing

lines of "The Dying Man."

1Essays in Criticism, Second Series (London, 1888), p. 252.

 

185

186

One of the ways in which Roethke demonstrates his resistance to
the "emptiness of things" is by exploring again the relationship between

flesh and Spirit. In Open House the Spirit is usually represented as

 

being diseased and the flesh as being loathsome. Throughout the poems
under discussion, on the other hand, the spirit is usually pictured
as an angelic singer and the flesh as the incarnation of beauty. The
celebration of the flesh first occurs in an "Old Lady's Winter Words"
(WW, pp. 117-119), where the Speaker remembers her'youth:

Once I was sweet with the light of myself,

A self-delighting creature,

Leaning over a rock,

My hair between me and the sun,
The waves rippling near me.

The hair and the rock signify physicality, and the sun and the stream
signify the passage of time. A poem such as "I Knew a Woman"
(WE, p. 151) is an almost pure form of this celebration: the Speaker
seems to forsake eternity for time spent in the woman's presence:

But who would count eternity in days?

These old bones live to learn her wanton ways:

(I measure time by how a body sways).
"The Sententious Man" (WW, pp. 155-157), also appears to elevate flesh

above the Spirit in the lines:

Pride in fine lineaments precedes a fall;
True lechers love the flesh, and that is all.

But then the Speaker begins to qualify this statement:

We did not fly the flesh. Who does, when young?
Some rages save us. Did I rage too long?
The Spirit knows the flesh it must consume.

187

In the next section the Spirit has attained dominance:

I stay alive, both in and out of time,
By listening to the Spirit's smallest cry. . . .

Two passages in ”Her Becoming," one of the series of poems entitled
"Meditations of an Old Woman" (WW) pp. 191-212), portray the Speaker's
delight in her body:

My Shape a levity--Yes!--
A mad hen in a far corner of the dark,
Still taking delight in nakedness,
In the sun, busy at a young body,
In the rain, slackening on a summer field;
In the back of my mind, running with the rolling water,
My breast wild as the waves.
(P. 201)

And remembering earlier days, she says:
I stepped carefully, like a new-shod horse,
A raw tumultuous girl

Making my way over wet stones.
(P. 202)

Here, as in "Old Lady's Winter Words," the love is narcissistic; the
Speaker is "selfedelighting." Often, when the love is turned outward,
the distinction between flesh and Spirit ceases to exist; or this
outward-directed love no longer serves as a Sign of exuberant life, as it
does, say, in "I Knew a Woman." In "Words for the Wind" (WW, pp. 1u7-150),
the beloved does not evaporate into pure Spirit but does become an
emblem of all the victims of death:

Are flower and seed the same?

What do the great dead say?

Sweet Phoebe, she's my theme:

She sways whenever I sway.

"0 love me while I am,

You green thing in my way!"
I cried. . . .

188

The Speaker then compliments the lady by calling her a "lovely sub-
stance" and says that "light fell"
Across her pulsing throat;
I stared, and a garden stone
Slowly became the moon.
(P. in?)
I shall return to this poem, which contains so many of Roethke's
seminal themes and images, but now I wish to call attention to two
other poems that can be said to celebrate the flesh. "A Walk in Late
Summer" (WW3 pp. 178-180) contains a stanza that praises the beauty of
objects at the foot of the Neoplatonic ladder:
A late rose ravages the casual eye,
A blaze of being on a central stem.
It lies upon us to undo the lie
Of living merely in the realm of time.
Existence moves toward a certain end--
A thing all earthly lovers mderstand.
The dove's elaborate way of comdng near
Reminds me I am dying with the year.
The rose traditionally symbolizes the meeting point between the realms
of flesh and Spirit. This image and the reference to "earthly lovers"
and the dove's approach--all represent the world of tangible things.
"Snake" (WW3 p. 181) is another poem in which the beauty of a creature
raises the Speaker's perceptions to the infinite. The description
of the snake first presents it without motion, as if timeless, and
then in motion. On seeing it the speaker says:
I felt my slow blood warm.
I longed to be that thing,

The pure, sensuous form.

And I may, some time.

189

The snake is clearly a tangible embodiment of something abstract.
Thus far I have mentioned only passages that eXpress a favorable
attitude toward the physical, but many of these poems repeat the

condemnations made in Open House. "The Sensualists" (WW) p. 162) is

 

the most vigorous of these, describing as it does the feelings of two
lovers after violent COpulation. One can read the poem as a description
of the soul entangled in, and bruised by, the flesh:
"There is no place to turn," she said,
"You have me pinned so close;
My hair's all tangled on your head,
My back is just one bruise;
I feel we're breathing with the dead;
0 angel, let me loose!"
The word "angel" here is not as casual as it appears, but reminds one
of the Spirit that is wallowing in "this sensual pen." In "The Renewal"
(WE, pp. 160-161), the Speaker struggles to resign himself to time and
(bath, and in stanza three describes his sense of the unpleasantness of
life in the body:
Sudden renewal of the self--from where?
A raw ghost drinks the fluid in my spine:
I know I love, yet know not where I am;
I paw the dark, the shifting midnight air.
Will the self, lost, be fOund again? In form?
I walk the night to keep my five wits warm.
These lines say that the Speaker immerses himself in physical existence,
hOping that through this acceptance he will achieve something higher.

Another poem describes the Speaker as a "madman," pawing the dark,

struggling to accept his life, and to see beyond it:

190

Though it reject dry borders of the seen,
What sensual eye can keep an image pure,
Leaning across a sill to greet the dawn?
A slow growth is a hard thing to endure.
When figures out of obscure Shadow rave,
All sensual love's but dancing on a grave.

The wall has entered: I must love the wall,

A madman staring at perpetual night,

A Spirit raging at the visible.

I breathe alone until my dark is bright.

Dawn's where the white is. Who would know the dawn

Where there's a dazzling dark behind the sun?

("The Dying Man," pp. 188-189)
Apparently, the world of objects, "the visible," forms a wall between
the Speaker and what Plotinus called the "intelligible" world or what
mystics call the state of "illumination." The Speaker is saying that
he must and will love the visible, as difficult as that may be, until
he can see beyond it.
That some indications of the loathing of the flesh exist in these

poems cannot be denied, but the loathing differs considerably from that

in Open House. In the present poems, the speaker appears unable to

 

ansider the flesh without also thinking ot time, death, and the intelligible
world. In other words, the loathing has become complicated, a fact that
I shall return to when discussing other themes.

Right now I wish to conclude this part of the discussion by
examining the Speaker's attitude toward physicality in "Four for Sir
John Davies" (3!, pp. 120-123). Professor Frederick J. Hoffman writes
of the poem, which comprises four independent pieces, "The importance of

the sequence depends primarily on its full committment to sexual

191

involvement."l

To me this statement seems an oversimplification. Part II,
"The Partner," for instance, shows that "embracing" the partner is
equivalent to embracing one's "body of fate," which connotes death
(though in Yeats's A Vision, from which the term is borrowed, it means
something else).

Who can embrace the body of his fate?

Light altered light along the living ground.

She kissed me close, and then did something else.

My marrow beat as wildly as my pulse.
The Speaker may hesitate to embrace his fate, but, as fate is here
represented by the woman, it does not hesitate to embrace him. And
the result of this embrace is a burning up of the Speaker's life. The
linking of the partner (who is a love-Object) with death, and the
Speaker's ambivalence toward this composite figure appears again in the

lines:

The living all assemble! What's the cue?--
-Do what the clumsy partner wants to do!

This ambivalence must be seen as qualifying Professor Hoffman's belief
that "Roethke sees the sexual act as both a move away from the
Simplicities of childish 'aloneness' and 'an harmonious' recovery of

2
life."
Professor Hoffman, in failing to recognize the Speaker's highly

ambivalent "commitment to sexual involvement," apparently falls into a

1"The Poetic Shape of Death," Stein, p. 10a.

2Stein, p. lou.

192

contradiction. After Speaking of Roethke's "full commitment," he

says in the next paragraph: "Having chosen 'desire' as a device for
extending the range of self-definition, he must now define the word

and overcome his doubts concerning its value."1 And after maintaining
that "Roethke sees the sexual act . . . as . . . 'an harmonious' recovery
of life," he writes one page later: "Beyond the dissolution of the two
[lovers] lies death; the danger of annihilation is already genuinely

present, even in the most pleasant conditions."2 If I understand the

poem, death does not "lie beyond" the lovers, but in them; and in the
aict of loving they become more aware of its immediacy. AS I pointed
out while discussing the long narratives, the awareness of death tends
to drive the protagonists of Roethke's poems into Shock. They retreat
from its presence into insentience. The principal struggle that
Roethke's poetry dramatizes is that of overcoming this withdrawa1--it

is a struggle to turn back to the world anygay. ”Four for Sir John
Davies" describes one man in the act of embracing his "body of fate,"
refusing to shrink from awareness. If I am right in saying that

Roethke affirms the value of awareness, then Professor Hoffman's
definition of love as a narcotic is incorrect. He writes: "Love assists
in our fight to postpone death; it is also a testimony of Godhead.

As a form of dying, love at least momentarily pushes the threat of dying

3

out of mind." I do not believe that this interpretation is borne out

by the details of the poem.
1 .
Stein, p. 104.

2 .
Stein, p. 105.

3
Stein, p. 105.

193

The third and fourth poems, "The Wraith" and "The Vigil,"
practically thrust the protagonist's ambivalence at the reader.
"The Wraith," as the title indicates, pictures the beloved as an
apparition appearing Shortly before her death, and "The Vigil" is the
thoughts of the protagonist after her death. The first affirms the
beauty of physical love, maintaining that

The flesh can make the Spirit visible. . . .

The last stanza describes the apparition of the woman and indicates the
imminence of her death:

It was and was not she, a Shape alone,
Impaled on light, and whirling slowly down.

In "The Vigil" the Speaker compares himself with Dante, whose beloved

also died. Dante had been forced to embrace his "body of fate"; he
Shook with a mighty power beyond his will. . . .

And then he went on to write a masterpiece about the very thing in which

Roethke's protagonist would like to believe--life after death. But on

this point Roethke's lines are noncommittal:

All lovers live by longing, and endure:
Summon a vision and declare it pure.

Does the vision have any reality apart from the seer? Or does it merely
appear because the "longing" of the lover is powerful enough to project
it on the "immense immeasurable emptiness of things"?

A direct answer to this question does not appear in "Four for
Sir John Davies." The reply, which turns aside the question, is one
that Roethke makes again and again, in various forms, in these poems of
the early 1950's. In oversimplified form, the reply is that a complexly

ambivalent reaction to "the productions of time" is the truest mode of

19H

human living. The protagonist, in the next—to-last stanza of "The Vigil,"
asserts the converse of what he had said in "The Wraith," and then
makes a brief Platonic statement about the relation between man and
objects. The "dance" symbolizes the mode of life that the protagonist
would consider nearest the ideal. The last stanza summarizes the
entire poem (or four poems) and states that it is neither the possession
nor the loss of objects and creatures in time but a cycle of both
that constitutes life:

The visible obscures. But who knows when?

Things have their thought: they are the shards of me;

I thought that once, and thought comes round again;

Rapt, we leaned forth with what we could not see.

We danced to Shining; mocked before the black

And Shapeless night that made no answer back.

The world is for the living. Who are they?

We dared the dark to reach the white and warm.

She was the wind when wind was in my way;

Alive at noon, I perished in her form.

Who rise from flesh to Spirit know the fall:

The word outleaps the world, and light is all.
In the remainder of this chapter, I Shall discuss several themes that
bear on the central point of Roethke's conception of the relationship
between flesh and Spirit.

Part of the ambiguity that I have been discussing results, as

I have said, from the protagonist's inability to see the object that
he is contemplating steadily and whole. This inability reflects the
Speaker's desire to believe in the Spirit's existence independent of
the flesh. One manifestation of his "double vision" lies in his
seeing the universal in the particular. The last stanza of "The

Reversal" (WE, pp. 160-161), for instance, resembles and clarifies the

conclusion of "The Vigil":

195

Dry Bones! dry bones! I find my loving heart,
Illumination brought to such a pitch

I see the rubblestones begin to stretch

As if realitv had Split apart

And the whole motion of the soul lay here:

I find that love, and I am everywhere.

The "dry bones," of course, make one think of the possibility of
"renewal," but they, and the "rubblestones," also symbolize tangible
objects. As when the protagonist declares of "things," "they are

the shards of me," here he feels that he exists everywhere that "things"

exist.

Another example of this identification of a being with all
the matter in the universe occurs in Section IV of "Words for the
Wind" (3E, pp. 1u7-150):

The breath of a long root,
The Shy perimeter

Of the unfolding rose,

The green, the altered leaf,
The oyster's weeping foot,
And the incipient star--
Are part of what She is.

She wakes the ends of life.

Carrying this identification process one step further, the Speaker con-
cludes by saying:

[I] . . . see and suffer myself
In another being, at last.

In "The Other (WW) p. lSH), the protagonist appears to have ascended the
Neoplatonic ladder1 to the point where he sees his beloved's beauty in

many objects and creatures:

lBaldassare Castiglione, in The Book of the Courtier (trans.
Sir Thomas Hoby [London and New York: Everyman's Library, 1928], p. 319),
writes: "For like as through the particular beautie of one bodie hee
[love] guideth her [the soul] to the universal beautie of all bodies.
Even so in the least degree of perfection through particular under-
standing hee guideth her to the universal understanding."

 

196

Is She what I become?

Is this my final Face?

I find her everyplace;

She happens, time on time--
Again he identifies with his beloved, while seeing her "every place."
The poem "The Sententious Man" (WE, pp. 155-157), perhaps in keeping
with its title, makes the perception of the universal in the particular

a general phenomenon:

I know the motion of the deepest stone.
Each one's himself, yet each one's everyone.

The second line seems to limit the range of the "particulars" to
human beings, but the first line, through the stone as a Symbol of all
tangible objects, indicates the true SCOpe of the idea.

Another form that this manifestation of the universal in the
particular sometimes takes in Roethke's poetry is a mixture of
pantheism and the doctrine of reincarnation. This form is relatively
rare in the poems of the early 1950's, but it does occur. In "A Walk
in Late Summer" (WW) pp. 179-80), for instance, the speaker declares:

Gos's in that stone, or I am not a man!
The poem "Snake" (WW, p. 181) assumes the possibility of reincarnation,
when the Speaker says after seeing the snake:

I longed to be that thing,
The pure, sensuous form.

And I may, some time.
The emphasis on the word "time" suggests that the protagonist is
imagining his return to mortal existence in another form, not a return
to the intelligible world. "The Dying Man" (WE, pp. 187-190) contains

a number of lines bearing on the concepts of pantheism and reincarnation.

But the next '0
is the existent
earth. This dc

"Smiay Morning

The Speaker of 1

says essentiallj

The first 0f the
""31 is to be a

exempllf

l
The Col,

197

In stanza one the Speaker eXplicitly doubts the immortality of the soul:

I heard the Sying man

Say to his gathered kin,
My soul's hung out to dry,
Like a fresh-salted skin;
I doubt I'll use it again.

But the next two stanzas qualify this by saying that what he doubts
is the existence of a remote Spiritual home, somehow cut off from
earth. This doubt he Shares with one of the voices in Wallace Stevens's
"Sunday Morning," who asserts:
There is not any haunt of prophecy,
Nor any dd chimera of the grave,
Neither the golden underground, nor isle
Melodious, where Spirits get them home,
Nor visionary south, nor cloudy palm

Remote on heaven's hill, that has endured
As April's green endures. . . .1

The Speaker of Roethke's poem relies more heavily on abstractions, but
says essentially the same thing:
What's done is yet to come;

I know, as the dying know,
Eternity is Now.

A man sees, as he dies,
Death's possibilities;
My heart sways with the world.
I am that final thing,
A man learning to Sing.
The first of these lines faintly suggests the notion of riencarnation,

which is to be developed in the next section of the poem. "Eternity

is Now" exemplifies once more the concept of the presence of the

1
The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens (New York, 195a), p. 68.

 

universal f
with the WC
mentioned a
gaging symb<
332.145 I s
faced with d
all awarenes:
eternal sleer
But P.
resistance to
stresses the l
with "the prod
mode of human
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t0 begome "enCUJ
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been Speaking,

an

The 135
, t
iemele, as do

198

universal in the particular. When the speaker says "My heart sways
with the world," he employs a dance image, which I have already
mentioned as a symbol of combined possession and loss. The act of
singing symbolizes the same attitude and is appropriate for the dying
man. As I said earlier, the protagonists in Roethke's poems, when
faced with death, react by withdrawing, by seeking to escape from
all awareness and all sentience. They seem to envision a protective,

1 that is not death.

eternal sleep
But Roethke's poetry continually stresses the necessity of
resistance to this desire for a state of suSpended animation, that is,
stresses the value of a painful awareness of what it means to live
with "the productions of time”; it stresses the idea that the truest
mode of human living is maintaining a balance between the two
extremes, possession and loss. Each extreme represents a form of
narcotizing, an "easy out,‘' a type of suSpenced animation, in which one
:bcuses his attention on either accumulating possessions or on refusing
to become "encumbered."
The concept of reincarnation, which provides Roethke with a
wide range of images, perhaps eXpresses this balance of which I have

been Speaking. One dies and returns; one loses one form and acquires

another. Section II of "The Dying Man" is based on these concepts:

1
The last lines of "Epidermal Macabre," (HE, p. 28), provide
an example, as does Section I of "The Lost Son" (WW, p. 79).

 

The rem
0r reincarnat iox

°f lift Sectic

A ghost
T0 grep

These lines, how
°" the intensifi
contain DO clear
of heightened n

I love
0P afte‘

If one reads the
that the SPEaker

intelligible ”Or

199

Caught in the dying light,
I thought myself reborn.
My hands turn into hooves.
I wear the leaden weight
Of what I did not do.

Places great with their dead,
The mire, the sodden wood,
Remind me to stay alive.
I am the clumsy man
The instand ages on.
I burned the flesh away,
In love, in lively May.
I turn my look upon
Another shape than hers
Now, as the casement blurs.
In the worst night of my will,
I dared to question all,
And would the same again.
What's beating at the gate?
Who's come can wait.
The remainder of the poem employs few images related to pantheism
or reincarnation, but does continue the theme of death's intensification

of life. Section III contains the lines:

A ghost comes out of the unconscious mind
To grope my sill: It moans to be reborn!

These lines, however, do not Speak of the cycle of possession and loss
or the intensification of life. The last two sections, although they
contain no clear examples of reincarnation imagery, develop the theme
of heightened life:

I love the world; I want more than the world,
Or after-image of the inner eye.

If one reads the statement "I want more than the world" as meaning not
that the Speaker desires to possess the world and possess more things
than the world contains, but as meaning that he desires to possess the

intelligible world as well as the physical world, then one sees these

lines as 3 Std

of the theme C

The principal n
stating 3“ anti
Of theantithesj-
in opposition, ‘
contains a Sta“:
is mentioned in
reincarnation:
I've th
What's i
Etemitj
The fur}
The vis:
In heave
These lines somek

and that all thin

Unique: he is not

 

time." It is the
that the Speaker
1

We are r-

200

lines as a statement of the balance previously defined. Development
of the theme continues in the lines:

I die into this life, along yet not alone.

Fish feed on fish, according to their need:

My enemies renew me, and my blood
Beats slower in my careless solitude.

By dying daily, I have come to be.
A breath is but a breath: I have the earth;
I shall undo all dying by my death.
The principal means by which these lines develop the balance is by
stating an antithesis or what Yeats called "antinomies." Neither part
of theantithesis could exist without the other, but still they are
in opposition, one gaining at the other's expense.1 The last section
contains a stanza that clarifies the relation between solitude, which
is mentioned in the lines just quoted, and the themes of pantheism and
reincarnation:
I've the lark's word for it, she Sings alone:
What's seen recedes; Forever's what we know!--
Eternity defined, and strewn with straw,
The fury of the slug beneath the stone.
The vision moves, and yet remains the same.
In heaven's praise, I dred the thing I am.
These lines somewhat obseurely state the ideas that "Eternity is Now"
and that all things pass away. The dying man's "body of fate" is not
unique: he is not alone but is accompanied by all "the productions of

'dme." It is the immanence of the "sensuous form" in the dying individual

that the Speaker refers to when he Speaks of "eternity defined." The

We are reminded of Heraclitus again.

  
   

MW of the $1115

maker's experier.
filth 'ne enccunter
uses to refer to
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tie theme of ”vi
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One of its clea:
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his father to f
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201

"fury of the Slug" is Shared by all living things because they all
must die.

The perception of the universal in the particular and of
beauty and his beloved are not the only incidents that transform the
speaker's experiences of this world. A similar transformation occurs
when he encounters one of ”the small." This is the term that Roethke
uses to refer to all creatures that ale harmless and unprotected.

When discussing a group of the poems in The Far Field, I Shall define

 

the theme of "victimization." Although the theme reaches its fullest
deveIOpment in that book, it appears in many of Roethke's earlier poems.
One of its clearest early statements is in Section IV of "Where Knock Is
Open Wide" (HE, pp. 63-66). There, the protagonist, a child, asks
his father to free a fish that they had caught. In the present group
of poems, in a sequence called "Voices and Creatures," we find one
entitled "The Small" (H!) p. 178). The last stanza describes the
speaker's reaction to some Lmnamed creatures:

The small shapes drowse: I live

To woo the fearful small;

What moves in grass I love--

The dead will not lie still,

And things throw light on things,

And all the stones have wings.
The speaker, in the preceding three stanzas, recounts his sitting alone
outdoors through a September night. A sound frightens him for an
instant by releasing from the depths of his mind unknown forms. In
the stanza quoted he thinks of the harmless sleeping animals and of death.

He pities them and himself. This compassion is the cause of his love.

The last three lines broaden his feeling to encompass the dead and the

inanimate as "81
symbolizes all 1
all creatures a:
"A Walk
death's intensi:
A gull

white

Across

In the

Bring

I am a

The Sn

on thE

Host of the Syt
the "weak ligh'
@Pmaching de
few lines in t

NI ' fl Hem" (WW

begins with t.

we geranium .
entitled "The
Victimization

Sectim1 Iv of

202

inanimate as well as the sleeping animals. The "small" perhaps
symbolizes all living things, because whether literally small or not
all creatures are unprotected from death.
"A Walk in Late Summer" (WE) pp. 179-180), another poem about
death's intensification of life, begins with an apostrophe to the small:
A gull rides on the ripples of a dream,
White upon white, slow-settling on a stone;
Across my lawn the soft-backed creatures come;
In the weak light they wander, each alone.
Bring me the meek, for I would know their ways;
I am a connoiseur of midnight eyes.
The small! The small! I hear them Singing clear
On the long banks, in the soft summer air.
Most of the symbols in the poem are conventional. The "late summer,"
the "weak light," and the "midnight eyes" all carry connotations of
approaching death. The "soft Singing" I shall discuss shortly. A
few lines in the second of the "Meditations of an Old Woman," entitled
"I'm Here" (WE) pp. 197-200), also mention "the small." Section IV

begins with the lines:

My geranium is dying, for all I can do.
Still leaning toward the last place the sun was.

The geranium is one of "the small." There is a poem in The Far Field,

 

entitled "The Geranium" (FE, p. 63), that deveIOps the theme of
victimization, the Speaker's negligence causing the plant's death.
Section IV of "I'm Here" ends with the lines:

I prefer the still joy:

The wasp drinking at the edge of my cup;

A snake lifting its head;
A snail's music.

That these creat
sees that the 01
victims. The?

cones in the la:

Although images
and victimizati
1950‘s, their 1
the central co'
If the
the Nlations'r
than mere vest
earlier wOrks
in Spite of t
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the 1
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203

That these creatures represent "the small" may not be clear, until one
sees that the old woman herself is about to become one of death's
\rictins. The poem moves toward her acceptance of this fact, which
comes in the last lines:

If the wind means me,

I'm here!

Here.
Although images of "the small" and themes of self—pity compassion,
and victimization play only a minor part in the poems of the early

1950's, their presence is Significant, especially as a foreshadowing of

the central concerns in The Far Field.

 

If the poems of this period reveal an altered attitude toward
the relationship between the flesh and Spirit, they also reveal more
than mere vestiges of the predominant attitudes found in Roethke's
earlier works. I have already mentioned that one finds in these poems,
in Spite of their general celebrations of the flesh, instances of the
same loathing expressed in "Epidermal Macabre" and other early pieces.
In addition, one sees an awareness of the evanesence of "the productions
of time," of their frequent inanity, and of death's imminence. The
awareness of these qualities, inherent in the flesh (in the widest Sense
of that word: "all tangible entities"), of course, impels the "I" of
the poems towardS--not to--an otherworldly attitude, a contempt for the
w orld. .

A beautiful passage, which clearly anticipates the techniques

of The Far Field, combines the protagonist's comments on mutability,

 

the inanity of things, and approaching death; this is the last verse

Hardei
The first seve:
symbolize the 1
maker associat
but says that s
0f the "soot si
and Of the "SOL
Soot symbolizes
accumulating in
shade or the Va
The "Cold air” ‘.
death.
Several
poem mSiimble

resemblance lief

fathep. I Shal

Phasent the the

is found in "Th

204

paragraph of "Old Lady's Winter Words" (WW) pp. 117-119):

The shadows are empty, the sliding externals.

The wind wanders around the house

On its way to the back pasture.

The cindery snow ticks over stubble.

My dust longs for the invisible.

I'm reminded to stay alive

By the dry raSp of the recurring inane,

The fine soot sifting through my south windows.

It is hard to care about corners,

And the sound of paper tearing.

I fall, more and more,

Into my own silences.

In the cold air,

The Spirit

Hardens.
The first several images (the "shadows," the "wind," and the "snow")
symbolize the unreality and transitoriness of tangible things. The
speaker associates herself with these by referring to herself as "dust,"
but says that she longs for the world of Spirit. The next images,
of the "soot sifting through the windows," of the neglected "corners,"
and of the "sound of paper tearing," are original and effective. The
soot:symbolizes death or the breakdown of the body, slowly advancing,
accumulating in the "corners." The tearing paper, literally a window
shade or the wall paper, alsc symbolizes the Slow advance of disorder.

The "cold air" is another conventional Symbol for the proximity of

death.

Several occurrences of the theme of approaching death in these
poems resemble treatment of that theme in the long narratives. The
resemblance lies in the association of the theme with the protagonist's
father. I Shall mention two examples in the present poems that in part
present the theme in terms of images of "the Sliding externals." One

is found in "The Renewal" (EH, pp. 160-161):

The nigh'
Dark han
My flesh
Love alt
These wa
I walk a
The answer to the
"instinct" that 1
the death-wish.
wishes to die. B
wish with an aff
kissing the Wind

hing Man" (WW ,

:1:ch

~<ZEZZ

Since this Sect
mt find an ex:
Ihave been dis
in the questio]

Em u .
als 15 the

implied Cemp la

EPEdOXi cal 1y a

Be
for! dis CUSQ

poem find in

205

The night wind rises. Does my father live?
Dark hangs upon the waters of the soul;
My flesh is breathing slower than a wall.
Love alters all. Unblood my instinct, love.
These waters drowse me into Sleep so kind
I walk as if my face would kiss the wind.
The answer to the question in the first line is probably "No." The
"instinct" that the Speaker prays will be "unblooded" is most likely
the death-wish. Seeing the effects of time's passage, the Speaker
‘dshes to die. But as I have said earlier, Roethke always counters this
wish with an affirmation of mortal life, here symbolized by the Speaker's
kissing the wind. A very similar passage occurs in Section IV of "The
Dying Man" (W1, p. 189):
Was it a god his suffering renewed?--
I asw my father shrinking in his Skin;
He turned his face: there was nother man,
Walking the edge, loquacious, unafraid.
He quivered like a bird in birdless air,
Yet dared to fix his vision anywhere.
Since this section of "The Dying Man" is entitled "The Exulting," we
Inst find an eXplicit expression of the complaint against the world that
I have been discussing. By implication, however, there is bitterness
in the question asked in line one. The imagery here of the "sliding ex-
ternals" is the metamorphosis in the protagonist's father. Another
implied complaint is lodged in the last line of the section, a lone that
paradoxically agrees to the fulfillment of the Speaker's death-wish:
I Shall undo all dying by my death.
Before discussing that "inanity" that the Speakers in several of these
poems find in the "sliding externals," I wish to quote the entire first

section of the "First Meditation" (HE, p. 173) of "The Meditations of

an Old Woman." This section, like the one quoted from "Old Lady's Winter

206

Words," foreshadows the techniques of The Far Field. It employs

 

many landscape images to convey the theme of mutability and approaching
death:

On love's worst ugly day,

The weeds hiss at the edge of the field,

The small winds make their chilly indictments,
Elsewhere, in houses, even pails can be sad;
While stones loosen on the obscure hillside,
And a tree tilts from its roots,

Toppling down an embankment.

The Spirit moves, but not always upward,

While animals eat to the north,

And the Shale slides an inch in the talus,

The bleak wind eats at the weak plateau,

And the sun brings joy to some.

But the rind, often, hates the life within.

How can I rest in the days of my slowness?

I've become a strange piece of flesh,

Nervous and cold, bird-furtive, whiskery,

With a cheek soft as a hound's ear.

What's left is light as a seed;

I need an old crone's knowing.
The first lines do not directly state the theme of change, but approach
it indirectly through intimations of a threat, the "hiss" of weeds and
the "chilly indictments." I fail to understand the line about the
sadness of a container (pail) within a container (house); but it seems
to be related to the images of change that follow: the stones loosening
and the tree tOppling. In the second stanza the old woman describes
life in Heraclitean images of one thing devouring another. These
images eXplain why the "rind" (flesh) often "hates the life within"
(the spirit). The last line of stanza two reminds one of the line in

"The Sententious Man" (EH, p. 155):

The Spirit knows the flesh it must consume.

207

This notion of the "life within" consuming the "rind" equates the
spirit with a seed, which lives on the surrounding fruit. The third
stanza describes the woman's body, now almost wholly consumed; she is

practically nothing but a seed. In The Far Field there is a poem that

 

also describes the spirit's consuming of the body; it is entitled
"Infirmity" (EE, pp. 86-87), and it concludes with the lines:
When opposites come suddenly in place,
I teach my eyes to hear, my ears to see
How body from Spirit slowly does unwind

Until we are pure Spirit at the end.

This is exactly what the old woman means when she says "What's left is

Jfight as a seed. . . J'

In addition to bodily decay and death, to the "sliding externals,"
and to the sexually inspired loathing of the flesh, these poems of
the early 1950's contain one other theme pertaining to the Speaker's
inclination to feel contempt for the world. This theme is the inanity
of the "productions of time." In "Old Lady's Winter Words" (fly) p. 118)
the inane resembles slightly the sound of a clock and is associated
vdth the symbol of advancing death:

I'm reminded to stay alive
By the dry reap of the recurring inane,
The fine soot sifting through my south windows.

I am not certain why the "dry raSp" reminds the woman to "stay alive."
Apparently her world of sensory eXperience no longer extends to much else

teyond this noise, and she may be saying that without this recurring

rasp she would not be aware of anything. In her seemingly anesthetized

State She resembles the Speaker of "The Pure Fury" (WE, p. 158), who

has suffered an attack of anomie but has recovered:

208

Stupor of knowledge lacking inwardness--

What book, 0 learned man, will set me right?

Once I read nothing through a fearful night,

For every meaning had grown meaningless.

Morning, I saw the world with second sight,

AS if all things had died, and rose again,

I touched the stones, and they had my own skin.
Here, the loss of meaning results from a failure to perceive the
universal in the particular and to sense the correspondences between
physical things and the Spirit. The old lady will not recover from the
"hardening of her Spirit," because the tangible world has almost ceased
to exist for her and soon it will cease entirely.

In "A Walk in Late Summer" (HE, p. 179) one finds the same
sequence of ideas as in the stanza from "The Pure Fury," a loss of
reaming, a failure to see the correspondences, a moment of change, and
a realization that "God's in that stone":

What is there for the soul to understand?
The slack face of the dismal pure inane?
The wind dies down; my will dies with the wind,
God's in that stone, or I am not a man!
For a moment the soul mistakenly thinks that the external world is

simply a void not worth understanding. The "slack face" symbolizes the

'mmgible world, the flesh. The will, as one learns in Open House, is

 

associated with the faculty of reason, and both fail to arrive at
truth or peace. When they cease functioning the Spirit sees the
correSpondences. Of course this does not mean that Roethke denies
that the void is real. In "The Swan" (HE) p. 167) he Speaks of the
corre3pondences as existing against the background of nothingness;

some of the relevant lines are:

209

I Study out a dark similitude:

Her image fades, yet does not disappear--
Must I stay tangled in that lively hair?

Is there no way out of that coursing blood?
A dry soul's wisest. O, I am not dry!1

The speaker is apparently the soul (symbolized by the swan?) and the be-
Jbved (Leda?) is the body. In the last stanza he says

Sing of that nothingness of which all is made.2

The lines in "The Dying Man" (WW3 p. 170) to which the title of this
chapter alludes also affirm the reality of the void, while at the same
time celebrating the Spirit's struggle not to be overwhelmed by the
endless inane:

The edges of the summit still appal

When we brood on the dead or the beloved;

Nor can imagination do it all

In this last place of light: he dares to live

Who stops being a bird, yet beats his wings

Against the immense immeasurable emptiness of things.
AS I have said, these lines state the balance that is one of the most
fundamental points in Roethke's work. The imagination, which sees
analogies and which empathizes, may fall Short of absolute truth, just
as reason does. But even beyond this admitted limit of the imagination's

power (where one "stops being a bird”), Roethke has his Speaker make an

affirmation: the angel is necessary.

"A dry soul's wisest" is a direct quotation of Heraclitus, a
certain indication of that philOSOpher's importance in Roethke's work.

2
This may allude to Heidegger or Rilke, who say that Being can

only be comprehended against the backdrop of Non-Being.

210

"Meditations of an Old Woman" provides some clarification of this
crucial point. In Section IV of the "First Meditation" (EE, pp. 195-196),
the woman describes her own knowledge of the inane:

I have gone into the waste lonely places

Behind the eye; the lost acres at the edge of smoky cities.
What's beyond never crumbles like an embankment,

Explodes like a rose, or thrusts wings over the Caribbean.

There are no pursuing forms, faces on walls:

Only the motes of dust in the immaculate hallways,

The darkness of falling hair, the warnings from lint and Spiders,
The vines graying to a fine powder.

There is no riven tree, or lamb dropped by an eagle.

At this point in the poem she knows only the "Stupor of knowledge

lacking inwardness," to borrow a phrase from "The Pure Fury." (EE) p. 158)
Following this passage is a series of images of pleasant sensations,

and then the poem ends with the line:

In such times, lacking a god,
I am still happy.

But the entire poem is what Roethke elsewhere has called "a drive

'toward God."1

The third meditation, entitled "I'm Here," provides a
further comment on the inane. Now the woman separates it from herself
and Sits in judgment upon it:

IS there a wisdom in objects? Few objects praise the Lord.

The bulks cannot hide us, or the bleak sheds of our own desolation.

I know the cold fleshless kiss of contraries,

The nerveless constriction of surfaces--

Machines, machines, loveless, temporal;

Mutilated souls in cold morgues of obligation.

(EE, p. 202)

The question in line one repeats that already quoted from "A Walk in
Late Summer" (EE’ p. 179): "What is there for the soul to understand?"

But the old woman, unlike the speaker in the other poem, does not

condemn all tangible things, only those that Thoreau referred to when

l
Ostroff, p. #9.

211

he Spoke of "Our inventions [that] are wont to be pretty toys, which

distract our attention from serious things."1

In the "Fourth Meditation" the woman describes the inane when it
has become embodied in the lives of men who have not ". . . known, once,

the soul's authentic hunger":

I think of the self-involved:
The ritualists of the mirror, the lonely drinkers,
The minions of benzedrine and paraldehyde,
And those who submerge themselves deliberately in trivia,
Women who become their possessions,
Shapes stiffening out into metal,
Match-makers, arrangers of picnics. . . .
(EE) p. 206)

Here the concept of tne inane descends a bit from the metaphysical
heights and becomes more closely associated with plain boredom caused
by dull people. Of course, it is not acting in this passage as a force
that impels the Speaker toward a contempt of the world. In fact, the
woman prays that these peOple will "wake up to the world":

how I wish them awake!

May the high flower of the hay climb into their hearts;

May they lean into light and live;

May they sleep in robes of green, among the ancient ferns;

May their eyes gleam with the first dawn;

May the sun gild them a worm;

May they be taken by the true burning;

May they flame into being!--

(HE, pp. 206-207)

These images (eSpecially the sixth line) definitely stress the beauty
of the "productions of time," although they also suggest the possibility
of seeing through these into the intelligible world.

It would be improper to end this chapter with a discussion of
the inane, for to do so would belie the affirmation that most of the
poems make. More than in any of Roethke's earlier poems, in these the

l
Walden: Or, Life in the Woods, ed. Bradford Torrey, Vol. I
(Boston, 1897), p. 8H.

 

212

"dry raSp of the recurring inane" is drowned out by song. Song, like
(hncing, symbolizes an ideal attitude, an acceptance of the world that
rmintains an equilibrium between slavish worship and ascetic rejection.
"A Light Breather" (Efln p. 115), for instance, describes the movement
of the Spirit as

Taking and embracing its surroundings,

Never wishing itself away,

Unafraid of what it is,

A music in a hood,

A small thing.

Singing.
But in singing, too, one sees the ambivalence, often resembling that
:h the concluding lines of "The Dying Man":

. . . he dares to live
Who stops being a bird, yet beats his wings. .'. .
(E, p. 190)

The singing is a reaction not so much to beauty as to "the emptiness of

things." In "The Renewal" (WW, p. 160), the speaker says:

I teach my sighs to lengthen into songs,
Yet, like a tree, endure the shift of things.

The speaker of "The Dying Man" (H!) p. 187) associates singing with
anbracing the world and his own death:

A man sees, as he dies,

Death's possibilities;

My heart sways with the world.

I am that final thing,

A man learning to sing.
The last section of this poem is entitled "They Sing, They Sing,"
(EE, p. 190), and it echoes the lines just quoted from "The Renewal":

I'll scare myself with sighing, or I'll sing. . . .

213

But this conception of song, which treats it as a form of therapy
or anesthesia, gives way to a more positive one in the lines immediately
fOllowing the one just quoted:
Descend, O gentlest light, descend, descend,
0 sweet field far ahead, I hear your birds,
They sing, they Sing, but still in minor thirds.
The singing now becomes a welcome sung from the intelligible world.
Finally, in the last of the "Meditations of an Old Woman," song is
identified with a state beyond the mortal:
O to be delivered from the rational into the realm
of pure song. . . .
(W_W_, p. 211)

In Roethke's next and last book he writes of the songs heard in the

"sweet field far ahead."

CHAPTER VI

IN THE FACE OF DEATH

I
"NORTH AMERICAN SEQUENCE"
Hugh B. Staples, in a useful article on the "North American
Sequence," makes the following introductory comments: "The poems
in 'North American Sequence' are, in a sense, an extension of Roethke's
ceaseless preoccupation with the problem of self and with the conflict

"1

between body and Spirit- A few pages later he writes: "In its

broadest outlines and in its deepest meaning, 'North American Sequence'
is a search for form, and for its implications at all levels of human
experience, individual and collective."2 One may easily reconcile these
statements: for instance, the Spirit is form and the body is substance
or formlessness. My argument with Staples is not that he contradicts
himself, but that the second statement above is misleading. The
protagonist of these poems searches no more for form than he does for
formlessness, just as in the earlier poems he affirmed the soul's value

no more than he did the body's. His real desire is to embrace both
1 0 O
"The Rose in the Sea-Wind: A Reading of Theodore Roethke's 'North

American Sequence,'" _A_I_._, XXXVI (May 19614), 189.

2
Staples, p. 191.

21”

215

extremes, so that we must see him as Whitman's comrade when that poet
writes:

I have said that the soul is not more than the body,

And I have said that the body is not more than the soul,

And nothing, not God, is greater to one than one's self is,

And whoever walks a furlong without sympathy walks to his iwn
funeral drest in his shroud. . . .

In the "North American Sequence," then, the protagonist translates his
(earlier struggles with self-loathing and fear of death into a contest
between body and soul and even into the terms of traditional mysticism.
Although one may see the conflict between body and soul in Roethke's
earliest poems, those terms do not achieve a particularly full

significance until the poetry of The Far Field. But when they achieve

 

that significance, it is not an expression favoring soul above body.
It is, rather, as Ralph Mills says of the stanza culminating the

sequence, "A balance between earthly and superior reality . . ."2

between body and soul, and even between chaos and form.

Mills characterizes the "North American Sequence" and the
"Sequence, Sometimes Metaphysical" as "an arduous but successful quest
for mystical illumination."3 He then distinguishes between the former's

use of images from nature to symbolize "the poet's states of consciousness"

1"Song of Myself," Sec. 48, in The Complete Writings of Walt
Whitman, ed. Richard Maurice Bucke, Thomas B. Harned, and Horace L. Traubel,
Vol. I (New York, 1902), p. 105. Hereafter cited as Whitman.

 

"In the Way of Becoming, Roethke's Last Poems," in Stein, p. 126.
Hereafter cited as "Becoming."

3
"Becoming," p. 115.

216

and the latter's more advanced "visionary experience," in which

. . . . . . . l
". . . the focus of activ1ty 13 almost entirely inward or Spiritual."

One frequently finds distinctions of this sort in the writings of
mystics. Miss Evelyn Underhill states it as follows: "But whilst the
contemplation of Nature entails an outgoing towards somewhat indubitably
external to us, and has as its material the world of sensible ex-
perience: the contemplation of Spirit, as it seems to those who practice
it, requires a deliberate refusal of the messages of the senses, an
ingoing or 'intorversion' of our faculties, a 'journey toward the
centre.' . . . He [the mystic] must call in his scattered faculties
by a deliberate exercise of the will, empty his mind of its swarm of
images, its riot of thought."2

I cannot agree with Mills that the "Sequence, Sometimes Metaphysical"
marks a Spiritual advance beyond the "North American Sequence," although
it does contain some poems that are more abstract than any in the latter.
The poems in "North American Sequence" remain consistently concrete
and descriptive. Reading the poems of this group with Miss Underhill's
words in mind, we may, however, see that they move toward and away
from a focal image. In other words, in places the imagery is purely
descriptive, Simply creating a setting or tone; in others, it falls

:hto catalogues or into obvious clusters; finally, one or two images,

1
"Becoming," pp. 116-117.

2
Mysticism, 17th ed. (London, 19u9), pp. 302-303.

217

relatively Stripped of surrounding descriptive details, somefimes claim

the focus of attention. These of course, are symbols. Only in an ex-

tremely rough way may the sequence as a whole be said to move from a
"swarm of images" toward a focus.

Since both Mills and Staples have discussed each of the poems
in its place in the "North American Sequence," I will follow a different
tack. In general, their comments upon the protagonist's Spiritual

progress are accurate and helpful, although, as ai shall Show, Staples

cnntradicts himself several times. Neither of these men, however,

gives the poems a detailed reading, and occasionally one feels that

they impose their own preconceptions on the text. I wish to point out

the operation of two important themes in the poems and Show their
relationships to the descriptive details and to the movement of the

poems. The first theme is that transcendence is an embracing, and the

second is that the moment of change is crucial.
AS one rec0gnizes immediately, the first theme proclaims
Roethke's similarity to Whitman. Both poets felt a strong need to

accept, to embrace, the whole of existence. At the same time, however,

.both were morbidly concerned with death and, at moments, with physical
:Self-dngust. Just as the protagonist in "Song of Myself" moves
1:hrough continual embracings of eXperience, especially of physical

(iisgust, pain, and death, into a transcendent vision, so the protagonist

:ir1"North American Sequence" moves.

The first poem, "The Longing," deals with the Speaker's desire
'tb be changed and uplifted by his eXperience. Like Whitman, he wishes

t 0 range far:

218

Old men should be explorers?
I'll be an Indian.
Iroquois.
(if, p. 15)
That he alludes to Eliot's "Easy Coker" here simply confirms the
Spiritual nature of the longing. For Roethke's protagonist, though,
this longing begins with the most uncerebral sensory perception of
"an eyeless starer." At a slightly more advanced stage, the perceiver's
alertness increases. Whitman writes:
Mine is no callous Shell,

I have instant conductors all over me whether I pass or stpp,
They seize every object and lead it harmlessly through me.

One also remembers that Whitman's perceiver read messages in all
things. Roethke expresses these ideas in the lines:

The light cries out, and I am there to hear-—

I'd be beyond; I'd be beyond the moon,

Bare as a bud, and naked as a worm.

(£5, p. l”)
Staples misreads the second section of this poem. He writes: "Re-
volting against the meretricious influences portrayed in the preceding
section, the psyche is now impelled to flee from reality into 'a dark
dream' 'beyond the moon.' This flight proves to be only one of many
0 O O 0 O 2

blind alleys and Circuitous detours in the journey out of self."
Staples condemns "detours" more readily than does the receptive

protagonist, a failing that leads the critic to a more serious mis-

reading when he comes to the following lines:

Mills is essentially right in saying: "The absolute character
of Roethke's quest is demonstrated by his desire to 'be beyond the moon'
that is, beyond the recurrence of Spiritual death and rebirth. . . ."
"Becoming," Stein, p. 121.

2
Staples, 193-19a.

219

I long for the imperishable quiet at the heart of form;
I would be a stream, winding between great striated rocks
in late summer;
A leaf, I would love the leaves, delighting in the redolent
disorder of this mortal life. . . .
(:5, p. in)
Staples considers the first line in this passage a statement of the

principle motive in the entire sequence. "The 'longing' of the

overture . . ." he writes, "is for 'the imperishable quiet at the

heart 0f form. - - -"1 But the speaker asserts with equal firmness
that he wishes to delight "in the redolent disorder of this mortal
life." (The word "redolent" suggests that the "kingdon of stinks and
sighs" of Part I is not Hell, as Staples says, p. 193, but an Inferno,
not totally devoid of value.)

Roethke's protagonist has a profound self-love, which lies, of
course, behind his fascination with death. But running counter to this
narcissism is the desire to be modified by the widest possible range of
experience, a desire which Roethke Shares with many American authors.
Philip Rahv even contends that "It is this search for experience, con-
ciucted on diverse and often conflicting levels of consciousness, which
has been the dominant, quintessential theme of the characteristic

American literary productions-~from Leaves of Grass to Wineburg, Ohio and

 

 

l
Staples, 193. W. D. Snodgrass advances an interesting inter-

pretation of Roethke's work that exactly reverses Staples's reading. He
believes that in his last book Roethke desired "to escape form and
shape, to lose all awareness of otherness. . . ." "The Last Poems of
Theodore Roethke," The New York Review of Books, 8 October 1964, p. 6.
Although Snodgrass's reading brings out some latent suggestions in the
poems, it ignores the intention at work within the poems and focuses

on the psychological make-up of the author. On the whole, it is
invalid.

 

220

beyond. . . ."1 Roethke employs many images to express this need, the

most frequent being a streatm or a body of water. "Meditation at
Oyster River" shows the protagonist adapting to (being changed by) his
experience:
I dabble my toes in the brackish foam Sliding forward,
Then retire to a rock higher up on the cliff-side.
(:5, p. 16)
Following these lines, the Speaker identifies himself with water, and
his desire to embrace all experience is revealed in the imagery of the
water's being "altered" by forces above and below its surface. "I
would be":
. . . with the water: the waves coming forward, without cessation,2
The waves, altered by sand-bars, beds of kelp, miscellaneous driftwood,
Topped by cross-winds, tugged at by sinuous undercurrents,
The tide rustling in, sliding between the ridges of stone,
The tongues of water, creeping in, quietly.
(£3, p. 17)
Staples contradicts himself in his remarks on the use of water imagery
in these poems. After saying that "In its broadest outlines and in

its deepest meaning, 'North American Sequence is a search for form. . . .,'"

he goes on to say that water is "the symbol of process and formlessness."2

Then, four pages later he writes: "The associations of Earth for

Roethke are largely pejorative. . . . Water, on the other hand, has the

l . . . . . . . .
"The Cult of Experience in American Writing," Literary Opinion

in America, ed. Morton D. Zabel (New York, 1951). p. 551.

 

 

2
The phrase "without cessation" is prompted by the speaker's

desire to escape the necessity of death. Perhaps then the quest for the
widest possible range of experiences is a variation on the theme of
reincarnation.

3Staples, 191.

221

opposite associations--goals (represented by the flowing of the river),
flux (process, growth and metamorphosis), and life (physical abundance;
esthetic delight).”l If the protagonist is searching for form, a
symbol of formlessness would almost certainly have pejorative
connotations. At least, in such a poem a symbol of formlessness could
not also represent "goals."

In "The Long Waters" the protagonist Speaks of his desire for
knowledge of the world of tire and Space in the following images:

And I acknowledge my foolishness with God,

My desire for the peaks, the black ravines, the rolling mists
Changing with every twist of wind,

The unsinging fields where no lungs breathe,

Where light is Stone.

(:2) p. 22)
The "peaks" and "ravines" represent the extremities of experience, and
the "mist" represents its evanescence. The concluding lines of the
poem clearly state the theme:

I lose and find myself in the long water;
I am gathered together once more;
I embrace the world.

(FF, p. 2”)

However, it is in the last poem of the sequence, "The Rose," that

l
Staples, 195.

2Staples believes that the protagonist's "foolishness with God"
is an "ominous illusion of eternity," which is described in Section
Three of "Journey to the Interior." The antidote for this is a "return
to actuality," but at the beginning of "The Long Waters" the protagonist,
says Staples, is mistakenly rejecting "the world of the dog." In the
course of the poem, Staples sees the protagonist returning to a healthy,
Whitmanesque embracing of the world. (Staples, 199-200). I prefer another
reading of the Opening lines, which run:

Whether the bees have thoughts, we cannot say,

But the hind part of the worm wiggles the most,

0 O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O I 0

Therefore I reject th world of the dOg

222

this theme finds its embodiment in the most striking imagery. Again,
Staples, and even Mills, oversimplifies the poem, this time by over-
looking the very important contrast established between the "rose in the
sea-wind" and the "elaborate hybrids" cultivated in the greenhouses of
the Speaker's father. The relevant lines of the poem are the following:
But this rose, this rose in the sea-wind
Stays,
Stays in its true place,
Flowering out of the dark,
Widening at high-noon, face upward,
A single wild rose, struggling out of the white embrace of
the morning-glory,
Out of the briary hedge, the tangle of matted underbrush. . . .
(5:, p. 30)
Mills says that these lines contain ”Stillness and movement, the
journey and its goal...."1 But they do more than that: they stress
the rigors of the environment and the openness of the rose's exposure.

The place where this rose grows differs considerably from another place

that the Speaker recalls:

 

Though he hear a note higher than C. . . .
(FF, p. 22)
The Speaker is reflecting on the fact that we cannot enter the mind of
another creature, but can only observe events in time and Space. The
protagonist is dedicating himself to his own perceptions, regardless
of their limitations. He wants to taste fully his own experiences.

"Becoming," Stein, p. 125.

223

And I think of roses, roses,
White and red, in the wide six-hundred—foot greenhouses,
And my father standing astride the cement benches,
Lifting me high over the four-foot stems; the Mrs. Russells,
and his own elaborate hybrids,
And how those flowerheads seemed to flow toward me,
to beckon me, only a child, out of myself.
(ff, p. 30)
As a child, the speaker identified with the protected hybrids, but as
an adult he feels closer to the other flower, growing in an unprotected
place:
Near this rose, in this grove of sun-parched, wind—warped madronas,
Among the half-dead trees, I came upon the true ease of myself,
As if another man appeared out of the depths of my being,
And I stood outside myself,
Beyond becoming and perishing,
A something wholly other,
As if I swayed out of the wildest wave alive,
And yet was still.
(£2) p. 32)
The transformation that the protagonist describes here grows out of his
Openness to experience. Mills ignores this fact when he glosses this
passage with the following statement: "Roethke nears 'the Unitive Life,"
to borrow from Everlyn Underhill another time, a life symbolically

represented by the unchanging rose, whose shape and petals might also remind
us in a more Jungian fashion of individuation and self-fulfillment in

the mandala figure. . . -"1 Staples rather obscurely comments:

"The central image is, of course, the rose in the sea-wind, the appre-
hension of whose beauty reconciles all tensions. The rose releases

him [the protagonist] from the sense of physical inadequacy and from

"Becoming," Stein, p. 126.

221+

. . . l .
spiritual despair." The statements of both men, I believe, neglect

important details of the poem.

I said earlier that Roethke's protagonist in these poems
resembles the Whitman of "Song of Myself" in his desire to "embrace the
world" and also in his concern with death. The following passages
reveal his attempt to accept that extreme of experience that is
represented by death and dissolution of the body, by formlessness:

. . . Death's face rises afresh,
Among the shy beasts, the deer at the salt-lick,
With these I would be.

(£5, p. 17)

And,
I rehearse myself for this:2
The stand at the stretch in the face of death,
Delighting in surface change. . . .
(EE, p. 21)
And finally, in a full acceptance of the world of time and Space:
I am renewed by death, thought of my death,
The dry scent of a dying garden in September,
The wind fanning the ash of a low fire.
What I love is near at hand,
Always, in earth and air.
(EE, p. 27)
In light of these passages, it is a serious distortion of the poems to
emphasize the mystical otherworldliness of Roethke's protagonist.

The second theme that I wish to trace through these poems is

an interest ot concern of the protagonist's rather than an assertion.

1
Staples, 202.

2
There is, perhaps, a grim pun in the word "rehearse."

225

It is his alertness to changes in his own psychic state. These
relate to the theme of transcendence through the embracing of the
extremes of experience, but now we will notice an anxiety about, or
heightened awareness of, internal changes in the protagonist, an
awareness caused by his attachment to himself, his narcissism, which
resists the movement toward self-overcoming. We shall see in later

sequences in The Far Field this theme develOped in terms of danger and

 

protection and of victor and victim.
The first clear striking of this note in the "North American
Sequence" occurs in tie following lines of "The Longing":
This ambush, this silence,
Where shadow can change into flame
And dark be forgotten.
I have left the body of the whale, but the mouth of the
night is still wide. . . .
(:5, p. lu)
Here the change is external and fails to alter the protagonist himself.
"Meditation at Oyster River," on the other hand, Shows him adapting
tximself and then longing for a further, violent change, which is
presented in the imagery of the dynamiting of an ice-bound river,
(fig, pp. 17-18). The next poem, "Journey to the Interior," provides
a clear picture of the expectancy preceding the moment of change and
then the moment itself. The period of expectancy is described in terms
of external events, beginning with the line,
In the moment of time when the small drop forms,
but does not fall . . .,

(5:, p. 21)

and including the Speaker's reference to his "Delighting in surface

226

change. . . ." The change itself comes in the concluding verse
paragraph:

AS a blind man, lifting a curtain, knows it is morning,

I know this change:

On one side of Silence there is no smile;

But when I breathe with the birds,

The Spirit of wrath becomes the Spirit of blessing,

And the dead begin from their dark to Sing in my sleep.

(fifi, p. 21)

Here, as in the sequence as a whole, the change is for the better,
transforming wrath into beatitude, Silence into song, and perhaps
death into life. Notice, also, that whereas the expectancy is presented
in terms of external sensory data ("the drop forms"), the change itself
is internalized. We are supposed to feel that the blind man knows it
is morning by intuition, not by cues.

"The Long Waters" introduces another facet of this theme, the
Siu~render of self-will, which is pictured in terms of mutually can-
celling forces:

I remember a stone breaking the eddying current,

Neither white nor red, in the dead middle way,

Where impulse no longer dictates, nor the darkening shadow,

A vulnerable place,

Surrounded by sand, broken shells, the wreckage of water.

(FF, p. 2A)

In earlier lines of the poem, the protagonist had prayed to Mnetha,
Mother of Har, a figure from Blake's Tiriel, to protect him from the
"dubious sea-change" (fifi, p. 22). But the concluding lines describe

the Speaker as if he has undergone this change, a painful disintegration

and reintegration of his psyche:

227

I, who came back from the depths laughing too loudly,
Become another thing;
My eyes extend beyond the farthest bloom of the waves;
I lose and find myself in the long water;
I am gathered together once more;
I embrace the world.

(fifi, p. 2a)

"The Far Field" presents another description of the place "where impulse
no longer dictates":

I have come to a still, but not a deep center,

A point outside the glittering current;

My eyes stare at the bottom of a river,

At the irregular stones, irridescent sandgrains,

My mind moves in more than one place,

In a country half-land, half—water.l
(fifi, p. 27)

This precedes the line in which the speaker says, "I am renewed by
(bath. . . ." The concluding section of the poem begins:

The lost self changes,

Turning toward the sea,

A sea-shape turning around. . . .

(fifi, p. 27)

It goes on to indicate that in this place, far from the protective
greenhouses of his childhood, here where the adult is dressed in "robes

of green, in garments of adieu," he must create a heaven, must see that

All finite things reveal infinitude. . . .
(fifi, p. 28)

The final poem, "The Rose," touches on imagery of the "dead middle"
by referring to "this place, where sea and fresh water meet . . .,"
(fifi, p. 29). But it shifts to the terms of song and silence and of

light and dark. These, as we saw earlier, are associated with the

l O O O O

Roethke echoes Eliot in these lines, but whereas Eliot is
interested in the "intersection of time and the timeless" Roethke
is here depicting a shift between two mental states.

228

change that takes place when

The Spirit of wrath becomes the Spirit of blessing. . . .
(55, p. 21)

The moment before the change is described again:

I return to the twittering of swallows above water,
And that sound, that single sound,
When the wind remembers all,
And gently the light enters the sleeping Soul,
_ A sound so thin it could woo a bird. . . .

And:
. . . a drop of rain water hangs at the tip of a leaf
Shifting in the wakening sunlight
Like the eye of a new-caught fish.
(fifi, p. 31)
The climax of the poem and of the sequence fuses the themes of self-
transcendence and change. The Speaker is at last able to find the
"true ease" of himself because he accepts the inevitability of his
own changes. He embraces what is perhaps most difficult to embrace, his
own instability:
And I rejoiced in being what I was:
In the lilac change, the white reptilian calm,
In the bird beyond the bough, the single one
With all the air to greet him as he flies,
The dolphin rising from the darkening waves. . . .
(FF, p. 32)
But he also rejoices in the rose itself, which, like him, lives in a
hostile place and embraces the extremes:
And in this rose, this rose in the sea-wind,
Rooted in stone, keeping the whole of light,
Gathering to itself sound ans silence--
Mine and the sea-wind's.
(fifi, p. 32)
This sequence of poems offers the reader rewards that have not

been mentioned in Staple's pages, in Mills's, or in mine. But I believe

that in bringing out the presence of the two themes discussed here I

229

have added something to their commentaries. The protagonist certainly
evolves Spiritually, and this comes about chiefly through his acceptance
of the unprotected world of adult experience, through his acceptance

of repeated dyings of the self, and finally through his acceptance

of his own inherent changeableness.

230

II

"LOVE POEMS"

The second section of The Far Field comprises thirteen love

 

poems, which are all brief, short-lined lyrics. For the most part,
they develOp themes not found in the "North American Sequence." I
Shall discuss them in terms of the following two concerns of the
protagonist: the dread of isolation and the contrast between victor
and victim.

The Speaker of the love poems, as that of the preceding sequence,
can never move his mind far from the thoughts of death. For this
reason, these poems are less often ecstatic praises of his beloved or
of love than they are musings on the approaching end. W. D. Snodgrass
sees here a failure of love that produces what he considers to be a
longing for death, which destroys the poetic effectiveness of Roethke's
last poems: "Here DLight Listened"] and elsewhere-- e.g., 'The Long
Waters' and 'The Sequel'--there seems to be a farewell to that ecstasy,
a turning away, or turning inward from the discovery that this could
not satisfy the hunger. I do not suggest that any Specific love had
turned sour or grown cold, but rather that love had perhaps been asked

to perform a transformation, to appease a hunger, which no love possibly

. 1
COUld satisz-" Whatever the cause, the Speakers of these poems,
sometimes a man, sometimes a woman, are haunted by imminent isolation.
Isolation or loneliness worries the Speakers much more than the loss

<>f the loved one does in itself.

"'That Anguish of Concreteness'--Theodore Roethke's Career,"
Stein, p. 87.

231

"The Apparition" (fifi, p. 37) fails to commit itself on the
cpestion of whether it is loneliness or the loss of the lover that
causes the Speaker's pain. Its last stanza runs:

I twist, and I turn,
My breath but a sigh.
Dare I grieve? Dare I mourn?
He walks by. He walks by.

The next three poems continue the woman's address to an absent lover,
each of them drawing attention to her loneliness:

If I could send him only
One sleeve with my hand in it,
Disembodied, unbloody. . . .
("Her Reticence," fifi, p. 38)

And,

I dive with the black hag, the cormorant,
Or walk the pebbly Shore with the humpbacked heron. . .
("Her Longing," fifi, p. 39)

And finally,

When everything--birds, men, dogs--
Runs to cover:
I'm one to follow,
To follow.
("Her Time,”_§§, p. #0)

The pain of the inevitable isolation deepens in three poems
spoken by a male voice. After three stanzas celebrating the joys of
love, "Light Listened" concludes with these lines:

We met to leave again
The time we broke from time;
A cold air brought its rain,
The singing of a stem.
She sang a final song;
Light listened when She sang.
(fifi, p. #2)

232

The poem "His Forboding" deals exclusively with the man's profound

loneliness:
I

The shoal rocks with the sea.
I, living, still abide

The incommensurate dread

Of, being, being away

From one comely head.

II

Thought upon thought can be

A burden to the soul.

Who knows the end of it all?
When I pause to talk to a stone,
The dew draws near.

III

I Sing the wind around
And hear myself return
To nothingness, alone.
The loneliest thing I know
Is my own mind at play.

IV

Is she the all of light?

I sniff the darkening air

And listen to my own feet.

A storm's increasing where

The winds and waters meet.

(fifi, p. M5)

These lines do not demand much explanation, since they clearly set
forth a picture of a man locked within himself. The final poem of
the section, "Wish for a Young Wife," works a variation upon this theme.
The man now imagines the woman's life after his death and utters the
wish that she may live "Without hate, without grief" (fifi, p. #8). His

'WOrds suggest that he feels an undercurrent of envy for her continuing

life:

233

May your limbs never wither,

May the eyes in your face

Survive the green ice

Of envy's mean gaze. . . .
And he certainly ends his wish with a twist of self-pity:

When I am undone,

When I am no one.

(:2, p. us)

This self-pity is a symptom of the Speaker's narcissism and his horror
:hspired by his own approaching death.

The second theme that I will discuss grows out of this fear of
death and returns us to one of the principal concerns of the protagonist
in the long narratives. Perhaps the best way to state this theme is to
Ewrthat a victor is somehow repulsive though slightly admirable, and
a victim is an object of compassion though slightly contemptible. Other
concerns that serve to develop this theme are danger and protection
and activity in contrast to passivity.

"Her Longing" sets up a contrast between two periods in the life
of the female Speaker, a time of innocence and passivity followed by one
of aggressive activity:

Before this longing,

I lived serene as a fish,
At one with the plants in the pond
Open like a pool . . .

A thing quiescent!
One could say with some justification that in these lines she approaches
the role of the victim. The second verse paragraph, on the other hand,

shows her decidedly in the role of the victor:

23H

But now--

The wild stream, the sea itself cannot contain me:

I dive with the black hag, the cormorant

Or rise with the gar-eagle, the great-winged condor. . . .

However, she does not prey upon weaker forms of life but protects what

She loves:

Perpetually rising out of myself,
My wings hovering over the shorebirds,

Or beating against the black clouds of the storm,

Protecting the sea-cliffs.
(FF, p. 39)

Here she strikes a pose similar to that described in "Her Time":

The long surf of the storm booms
Down on the near Shore,
When everything--birds, men, dogs--
Runs to cover:
I'm one to follow,
To follow.

(FF, p. MO)

The "shorebirds" in "Her Longing" and the descriptions

of the woman

facing the storm in both poems recall these lines from "Meditation at

Oyster River":

. . . the Spirit runs, intermittently,

In and out of the small waves,

Runs with the intrepid shorebirds--

How graceful the small before danger!
(FF, p. 18)

The theme of victor and victim, which is present only covertly in the

lines that I have been quoting, reaches its full eXpression in the next

group, the "Mixed Sequence." One other love poem employs the elements

of danger, protection, victimization and isolation, again in muted form.

"The Shy Man," Spoken by the man himself, first describes his isolation:

235

As I moped by the high sea-wall.
Then it proceeds to the moment of expectancy, which occurs when he
‘walks with a girl beside the "high sea—wall" and realizes that he loves
her. The third and final stanza somewhat unconvincingly denies that
the man is now lonely:
The full moon has fallen, the night wind is down
And I lie here thinking in bleak Bofin town
I lie here and thinking, 'I am not alone.’
(fifi, p. 46)
Besides this explicit statement of the idea of isolation, two other
details of the poem relate it to the preceding discussion. The "high
sea-wall" symbolizes protection, either from isolation or from
oblivion; at any rate, it holds off all the destructive forces that
would inundate the lovers. The second detail is the title, which bears
no immediately obvious relation to the poem. Why is he the "shy" man?
We find an snswer, one which associates the Speaker with the themes of
\ictimization and death, in the following lines of "Meditation at
Oyster River":
Death's face rises afresh,
Among the shy beasts, the deer at the salt-lick,
The doe with its sloped shoulders loping across
the highway. . . .
(fifi, p. 17)
I do not believe that a reader can feel the full force of the title "The
Shy Man" or of the poem itself unless he has the above lines in mind.

In these poems, to be "Shy" or to be "small" is to be a non-predator, to

be a victim.

236

III
"Mixed Sequence"

The third group of poems in The Far Field, "Mixed Sequence,"

 

develops at length the theme of victimization, as well as introduces
the theme of knowledge. The latter is not entirely new to Roehtke's
work, since it actually represents another treatment of the fall into
experience, which we have seen as part Of the long narratives. One
might also consider this theme a facet Of the protagonist's awareness
Of death, but I believe that equating the two would be unnecessarily
reductive.

While discussing Section IV Of "The Abyss," the first poem Of
the "Mixed Sequence," Ralph Mills makes this comment: "We find, too,
the flowing waters of the Way of Becoming, and then two stanzas about
the poet's "knowing" and "not-knowing" with regard to this Spiritual
process in which he is so completely absorbed. "Not-knowing" is related
to the unbidden Spiritual impulse bringing him to visionary knowledge;
reason gives no answers about this generating force. . . ."1 In my
Opinion, this poem is not a Bacchic or even mystic song in praise of
non-reason. [It is, rather, a statement Of the protagonist's painful
knowledge Of life's beauties and of the inevitability Of death.
Instead of saying that the protagonist gains a "visionary knowledge,"
I would prefer to say that he momentarily overcomes his preoccupation
with death. The basic principle of the poem's development is stated

in Section II:

1"Becoming," Stein, pp. 127-28.

237

For I have moved closer to death, lived with death;
Like a nurse he sat with me for weeks, a sly surly attendant,
Watching my hands, wary.
Who sent him away?
(if, p. 52)

The third section answers the question, "Who sent him away?" I quote
it in full:

Too much reality can be a dazzle, a surfeit;

Too close immediacy an exhaustion:

As when the door swings open in a florist's storeroom—

The rush of smells strikes like a cold fire, the throat freezes,
And we turn back to the heat of August,

Chastened.

So the abyss-
The slippery cold heights,
After the blinding misery,
The climbing, the endless turning,
Strike like a fire,
A terrible violence of creation,
A flash into the burning heart of the abominable;
Yet if we wait, unafraid, beyond the fearful instant,
The burning lake turns into a forest pool,
The fire subsides into rings of water,
A sunlit silence.
(ff, pp. 52-53)

The first line echoes Eliot's variation on one of the Heraclitus's

fragments: ". . . human kind/Cannot bear very much reality."1

Although looking into the abyss, that is, into the heart of things as
they really are, terrifies the speaker, he is also fascinated and drawn
to the edge. Perhaps, as Snodgrass says, ". . . Roethke accurately
predicts his own death, clearly longing fOr it."2 If this is true, then
this poem resembles Baudlaire's "Le Gouffre," a celebration of the power

of the death-wish:

1"Burnt Norton," in THE COMPLETE POEMS . . ., p. 176.

 

2"Anguish," Stein, p. 85.

238

Ht mon esprit, toujours du vertige haute,
Jalouse du neant l'insensibilite.1

The chastening air of the florist's storeroom is, of course, both
funereal and pleasant: Roethke's protagonist is drawn to death and
also repelled by it. His drawing back takes the form of a love for all
of death's victims, a response similar to that in "Where Knock Is Open
Wide". He realizes that this love grows out of his awareness of death.
He resembles the woman who Speaks and muses in Wallace Steven's "Sunday
Morning":

She says, "But in contentment I still feel

The need of some imperishable bliss."

Death is the mother of beauty; hence from her,

Alone, shall come fulfilment to our dreams

And our desires. Although she strews the leaves
Of sure obliteration on our paths,

She makes the willow Shiver in the sun. . . .5

In a statement made at a panel discussion on "Identity," in the year

of his death, Roethke spoke of what he considered to be a widespread
desire: ". . . one could sense a real hunger for a reality more than

the imediate: a desire not only for a finality, for a consciousness
beyond the mundane, but a desire for quietude, a desire for joy. Now

this desire is what the drunkard, the saint, the mystic bankers for in
varying ways: -- a purity, a final innocence--the phrase is Mr. Spender's."3

As we have seen in the long narratives, Roethke's protagonist closely

associates the fall into experience with the awareness of death. Here

1Oeuvres Completes. . ., ed. Jacques Crepet (Paris, 1930), I, 132.

 

2THE COLLECTED POEMS . . . , pp. 68-69.

 

3POET AND CRAFT, p. 19.

 

239

he attempts to struggle beyond the stage of experience, into a new
innocence.

Roethke, while speaking on "Identity" in 1963, indicated that
one of the forces working against the attainment of "a final innocence"
is a love of objects, the aoquisitiveness that Thoreau decried.
Continuing the remarks quoted above, Roethke said: "I think we
Americans are very wistful about it. Yet we continue to make a fetish
of "thing-hood," we surround ourselves with junk, ugly objects endlessly
repeated in an economy dedicated to waste."1 In "The Abyss" one finds
the following relevant lines:

Be with me, Whitman, maker of catalogues:

For the world invades me again,

And once more the tongues begin babbling.

And the terrible hunger for objects quails me:

The sill trembles.

(53, p. 52)

The protagonist does not turn away from life, but, like Whitman and
Blake, attempts by force of empathy and imagination to make it trans-
parent, to see that "All finite things reveal infinitude" (E53 p. 28).
This attempt eSpecially means feeling a painful compassion for death's
victims rather than diverting oneself by accumulating things. The

poem ends with the line:

Being, not doing, is my first joy.
(EE, p. 5n)

Several of the other "Love Poems" deal with the theme of painful
knowledge. In "The Meadow Mouse," the Speaker, who has protected and

fed a baby field mouse, thinks of the dangers and of the inevitable

1POET AND CRAFT, pp. 19-20.

 

240

death that await the mouse, now escaped:

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, forsakes.

(EE, pp. 60—61)

The last two poems of the series state more abstractly the theme

of painful knowledge. Stanza five of "The Tranced" tells us that the

nature of this knowledge is love and that it is an overcoming of the

horrible fascination with death:

Our small souls hid from their agonies

Yet it's the nature of all love to rise:

Being, we came to be

Part of eternity,

And what died with us was the will to die.
(£2, p. 7a)

"The Moment" concludes the grouplnr tying together the view from the

edge of the abyss, love, mortality and the possible triumph over death:

We passed the ice of pain,

And came to a dark ravine,

And there we sang with the sea:
The wide, the bleak abyss
Shifted with our slow kiss.

Then skipping one verse paragraph, we come to:

All flowed: without, within;
Body and body, we
Created what's to be.

What else to say?
We end in joy.
(£2) p. 75)

As one can see from the preceding discussion, the theme of

‘knowledge touches at several points on the theme of victimization.

241

This second concern, however, receives much fuller development in the
"Mixed Sequence" than does the first, particularly in the poems about
individual human beings, animals and a geranium-—all of which have
affected the speaker. Exactly how these beings have affected him is
difficult to determine. In discussing "Where Knock Is Open Wide," I
said that there might be an element of self-pity in the speaker's com-
passion for the caught fish. W. D. Snodgrass makes that same judgment
of the occurrences of the victimization theme in the "Mixed Sequence,"
although he also interprets this identification as a regression to
prenatal bliss, which ultimately is a form of the death-wish. Snodgrass
writes: "If, in these last poems, Roethke identifies with an animal,
that is only as it tends to represent the child, the baby or fetus."
He mentions the meadow mouse, which the protagonist "...keeps and treats
as, by sympathetic magic, he would be treated...."1 One must accept
this judgment to a degree, but must also guard against overemphazing
it. Although the "Shy man" who loves the "Small," the victims, does
pity himself for the necessity of his own dying, this self-pity should
not be seen as an out-and-out debasement of his compassion.

Immediately following "The Abyss" are three poems praising
human companions that the speaker has known earlier in his life. One
supposes that he is defining himself, a shy man, by rehearsing the
characters of these people so different from himself. Each of them
offers a clear contrast to what we know of him. His Aunt Tilly lacked
his Speculative scruples:

Between the spirit and the flesh,--what war?

She never knew. . . .

1"Anguish," Stein, pp. 88—89.

2&2

Unlike his passive, meditative struggle with death, hers was aggressive:

Terror of cops, bill collectors, betrayers of the poor,--

I see you in some celestial supermarket,

Moving serenely among the leeks and cabbages,

Probing the squash,

Bearing down, with two steady eyes,

On the quaking butcher.

("Elegy, "_E_F_, p. 55)

Her opponents all symbolize death. The next poem, "Otto," describes the
protagonist's father, who was greatly admired by the boy. Like Aunt

Tilly, he is a figure who fights actively for what he values:

A Prussian who learned early to be rude
To fools and frauds. . . .

And:

And yet still violent men, whose stacked-up guns
Killed every cat that neared their pheasant runs. . . .

One line, though, reveals a similarity between the father and son:

Who loves the small can be both saint and boor. . . .
(EEJ pp. 56-57)

To love the small is a characteristic of the "shy man," and, as we have
seen, is related to his self-pity. In "Otto," though, the compassion
grows in a firmer soil. The third of these poems, "The Chums," also
describes "violent" but admired friends:

They taught me not to be too nice

The way I tipped my hat.

And when I slipped upon the ice,
They saw that I fell more than twice.
I'm grateful for that.
(:2, p. 58)
These three similar pieces act as a foil to the ones that follow.
After the three poems just discussed, the reader of the "Mixed

Sequence" finds four poems that clearly present the theme of victimization.

In all of these, the Speaker identifies with the victim. I have already

2H3

quoted the concluding lines of "The Meadow Mouse," where the Speakers

says that his mouse has escaped

To run under the hawk's wing. . . .

And, then, says, "I thinks of . . ."

All things innocent, hapless, forsaken.
(55, pp. 60-61)

"The Geranium" treats the speaker's vacillation between the roles of
persecutor and protector of the victim. The first verse paragraph
shows him rescuing the plant after neglecting it badly:

When I put her out once, by the garbage pail,

She looked so limp and bedraggled,

So foolish and trusting, like a sick poodle,

Or a wizened aster in late September,

I brought her back in again

For a new routine--

Vitamins, water, and whatever

Sustenance seemed sensible

At the time: she'd lived

So long on gin, bobbie pins, half-smoked cigars, dead

beer. . . .

(PP, p. 63)

We are not told whether the "new routine" was ever instituted, but
the speaker's compassion for the plant and his guilt become so painful
that he finally lets her be destroyed:

Near the end, she seemed almost to hear me--

And that was scary --

So when that snuffing cretin of a maid

Threw her, pot and all, into the trash-can,
I said nothing.

But I sacked the presumptuous hag the next week,
I was that lonely.
(fig, p. 63)
The poem maintains the Speaker's ambivalence: his fondness for the

plant and his dislike for it. (He hates it because it continually

reminds him that he is reSponsible for its death.) It is psycholOgically

2m;

valid for him then to fire the maid who has removed the loved and hated
object.

"The Thing" and "The Pike" most clearly present the theme of
victimization, perhaps too clearly. The first opens with a description
of pursuit:

Suddenly they came flying, like a long scarf of smoke,
Trailing a thing--what was it?--small as a lark. . . .

And it quickly reaches the kill:
Then the first bird
Struck;
Then another, another,
Until there was nothing left,
Not even feathers from so far away.
After watching the Spectacle, the speaker, apparently unaware of his

similarity to the "implacable swift pursuers," says,

And we turned to our picnic
Of veal soaked in marsala and little larks arranged on a
long platter.
(:53 p. 67)

"The Pike," a more interesting poem, begins by describing a world so
peaceful that it seems to resemble the womb:

The river turns,

Leaving a place for the eye to rest,

A furred, a rocky pool,
A bottom of water.

The crabs tilt and eat, leisurely,
And the small fish lie, without shadow, motionless,
Or drift lazily in and out of the weeds
But a world of such peace is a phantasy,
A scene for the self to abjure!

We very quickly see that the phantasy is a lethal delusion:

. . . I lean, almost into the water,
My eye always beyond the surface reflection;

2H5

I lean, and love these manifold shapes,

Until, out from a dark cove,

From beyond the end of a mossy 10g,

With one sinuous ripple, then a rush,

A thrashing—up of the whole pool,

A pike strikes.

(5:, p. 68)

The wording and structure of this poem avoid revealing the speaker's
compassion for the "small fish," but nevertheless this compassion is
implied. To return to Snodgrass's point, quoted earlier, I would say
that Roethke's protagonist may to some degree be moved to compassion for
"All things innocent, hapless, forsaken" because of his self-pity.
But not also to admit that the intention of many poems, such as "The

Pike," is to Show a non—self—centered sympathy with all things that

must die would be to read the poems perversely.

2H6

IV
"SEQUENCE, SOMETIMES MBTHAPHYSICAL"
l. Metaphysics, Meditation, or Mysticism?

The last twelve poems of THE FAR FIELD, grouped under the title

 

"Sequence, Sometimes Metaphysical" raise many unanswerable questions.
One of the less important of these questions is whether, in these poems,
Roethke predicted his own death. A surprisingly large percentage of

the people who published statements at the time of Roethke's death, in
August of 1963, asserted that he did-Allen Tate, for instance, speaks

of one of these poems, "The Marrow," as a "great lyric...in which he

foresees his death."1 One year later, Louis Martz writes of THE FAR FIELD,

 

"It is a book filled with the presence of death: Roethke is clearly

aware that he is writing his own long elegy...."2

W.D. Snodgrass goes
even further when he writes, "Here [in "North American Sequence" ],
as elsewhere in the book, Roethke accurately predicts his own death,
clearly longing for it."3 Such statements, of course, provide little

insight into the poems, although they do tell us one obvious truth:

the poems in THE FAR FIELD, and especially in "Sequence, Sometimes

 

Metaphysical," treat the difficulty of facing death.

This point introduces unanswerable questions of greater
significance than the one of whether or not Roethke foresaw his own
death. These questions concern the intentions of the poems: do they
operate as records of mystical ecstasies, religious meditations,

1"In Memorian--Theodore Roethke 1908-1963," ENCOUNTER, XXI
(October, 1963), 68.

2"Recent Poetry: the Elegaic Mode," :5: LIV (December, 196u), 29a.

3"Anguish," Stein, p. 85.

247

metaphysical lyrics, or just what?

One of the causes of our inability to answer questions about
the intentions of these poems is that many of the terms that we call
to our aid "Decay with imprecision, will not stay in place," to quote
Eliot's "East Coker." This imprecision particularly infects the
terminology of mysticism, at least as it is employed by laymen. State-
ments made by Hoffman and Mills illustrate the damage resulting from

this carelessness. Hoffman, writing of The Far Field, says: "These

 

poems, or some of them, . . . testify to the agony of moving toward the
threshold of death. I do not mean to say that the thought of death

was constantly with . . . [Roethke] , but only that he suffered a type
of 'dark night' and that it was partly caused by his being unable to

"1 Admitting

will a transcendence that he could also will to believe in.
the poem's concern with facing death, we may go on to ask whether Roethke

was a mystic, whether he was advanced far enOUgh to experience a dark

night 0f the SOUlaZ whether any mystic "wills" his "transcendences," and,
finally, whether one may separate a "transcendent" State of mind from
"belief in" that state of mind. Roethke apparently considered himself

a type of mystic. In a symposium on "In a Dark Time," the first poem

of this last Sequence, he laid claim to divine inspiration: "It [the
poem Jis the first of a sequence, part of a hunt, a drive toward God:

an effort to break through the barrier of rational experience; an

intention not unmixed with pride. . . . This was a dictated poem. . . .

1"The Poetic Shape of Death," Stein, p. 109

21 should also point out that according to Evelyn Underhill,
modern writers on mysticism frequently fail to discriminate between the
several meanings of "Darkness" and the "Dark Night." See Mysticism p. asun.

2M8

I was granted an insight beyond the usual, let us say. To Speak of
it further is a betrayal of the experience." And then Skipping a
paragraph: "There are those who believe the true artist impelled by
forces outside himself. It is possible that he who risks this dark,
the dark night of the soul, is doubly driven."1

From the fact that Roethke contradicts himself here and from
the agitated and defensive nature of these statements, we might gather
that the poet was not, in this poem and in the sequence, serenely
celebrating his union with God. The contradiction lies in the differences
between a "granted insight" and a "hunt" or "effort," as this confusion
between will and lack of will indicates, Roethke was too unsettled to
write mystical poetry. He conceived of God not as a being or condition
that a mortal man could encounter, but as a direction in which one
could travel without ever reaching an end. Such an image--an image
of an abySS--equates God with the unknown and in a sense does not even
commit one to a belief in His "existence." For mystics occupied in the
"dark contemplation," where an abyss often appears as the symbol of God,
the "darkness" is the extinction of intellect and sensory experience,
but it is not terrifying or threatening. The concluding stanza of
Henry Vaughan's "The Night" beautifully describes this comforting dark:

There is in God (some say)
A deep, but dazling darkness; AS men here

Say it is late and dusky, because they
See not all clear;

1Roethke's reSponse to Ransom, Deutsch, and Kunitz, who
commented on "In a Dark Time," in The Contemporary Poet as Artist and
Critic, Eight Symposia, ed. Anthony Ostroff (Boston, 1964), pp. u9-so.

 

2H9 \

O for that night; where I in him
Might live invisible and dim.

Roethke's last poems, however, record anxious explorations, not the
discovery of a peace such as Vaughan's.

If we cannot call Roethke's poems mystical, can we call them
meditative or metaphysical? Louis Martz points out that the poetry of
meditation must not be confused with mystical writings.2 Speaking of
the seventeenth-century English poets who wrote meditative verse, Martz
says: "Whereas the mystic's ultimate goal is union with God, the goal
of the poets who practised the disciple of devotion was "conformity
with the will of God."3 To some degree we can justifiably consider
Roethke's last poems attempts at a "conquest of the self," such as

Martz finds in the Spiritual Combat, attributed to Lorenzo Scupoli.”

 

One of the methods of discipline described in Spiritual Combat instructs

 

the student to focus his attention on one vice of which he would rid
himself. Martz writes: "It is clear that Donne and Herbert, for
instance, are adept at singling out their dominant temptations, and that
their poetry is in part a record of their attempts to "exercise" them—
selves in defense against these temptations. In his religious poetry
Donne deals with two dominant vices: the 'sinne of feare' which he

was still combating in one of his last hymns, and the sin of intellectual

pride. . . ."5

1The Works 2: Henry Vaughan, ed. Leonard Cyril Martin (Oxford,
191a), I, 523. See also Mysticism, pp. sue-355.

 

2The Poetry gf_Meditation (New Haven, 1959), p. 20. Hereafter
cited as Meditation.

3Meditation, p. 132.

”Meditation, pp. 125-135.

SMeditation, p. 132.

250

Whether or not he regarded it is a sin, Roethke, like Donne, certainly
tried to master his fear of death. A further resemblance between
Roethke's last poems and the poetry of meditation lies in the form.
Six of the twelve poems in "Sequence, Sometimes Metaphysical" employ
the six-line stanza, with a rhyme scheme of either ababcc or abbacc,

a form that was a favorite of poets such as Southwell and Herbert.
Another poem, "The Sequel," uses the eight-line stanza found in one
section of Yeat's meditation, "The Tower," though the rhyme schemes of
the two poems are different. We may say, then, that Roethke's poems

in this last section of The Far Field are better viewed as poems of

 

meditation than as celebrations of mystical union.

The preceding comments, however, do not mean that Roethke's
poems are meditations in the strickest sense of that word, which
Martz defines as follows" "Without expecting any hard and fast divisions,
. . . we should expect to find a formal meditation falling into three
distinguishable portions, correSponding to the acts of memory, under-
standing, and will--portions which we might call composition, analysis,
and colloquy."1 Of the three "acts," only understanding finds its way
into Roethke's "meditations." In place of willful action in a more or
less social context, the Speaker of these poems is an isolated figure
struggling to calm himself as he faces death. Where the seventeenth-
century meditative poems Opened with a "composition," that is, with
the focusing of the mind's eye on an image or scene related to the life
of Christ or to the life of one of the Christian saints, Roethke's

poems do not begin with a clearly defined center of attention.2 Martz,

1Meditation, p. 38.

 

2See Meditation, pp. 30-31.

 

251

quoting Luis de Granada's Of Prayer, and Meditation, writes: "The

 

effect Bf "composition"] is an intense, deliberate focusing of the
'mind and thought. . .within the bounds, and limits Of the subject. . .
either by imaginarie representation, if the matter may be subject to
the sences; ot by a simple proposing and conceit of it, if it be a
matter above senceg' or, for those following St. Ignatius, some
concrete similitude dramatizing even spiritual matters," (p. 30). Martz
then continues: "The point toward which I am working is perhaps already
evident: that such practises Of "composition" or "proposing" lie
behind the vividly dramatized, firmly established, graphically imaged
Openings that are characteristic of the poets we are considering," (p. 31).
DeSpite the Similarities between Roethke's last poems and the works Of
Southwell, Herbert, and others, Roethke usually begins his poems by
circling about his subject and by making abrupt shifts in direction,
not by focusing attention on one point immediately and penetrating into
that point, as did the earlier poets. Notice the evasiveness of these
Openings from poems in "Sequence, Sometimes Metaphysical":

A dark theme keeps me here,

Though summer blazes in the vireO'S eye.

Who would be half possessed

By his own nakedness?

("In Evening Air," FE, p. 80)

And:

In purest song one plays the constant fool

As changes shimmer in the inner eye.

I stare and stare into a deepening pool

And tell myself my image cannot die.

("Infimity," 55, p. 86)

And, from the piece that most closely resembles a seventeenth-century

meditative poem:

252

In a dark time, the eye begins to see,

I meet my shadow in the deepening shade;
I hear my echo in the echoing wood--

A lord of nature weeping to a tree.

("In a Dark Time," FE) p. 79)

If we compare these groups of initial lines with the examples of

"composition" that Martz draws from Donne's "Holy SOnnets," we see

that the Similarities in subject matter, diction and tone cannot hide

the difference in manner of development:

And:

Oh my blacke Soule! now thou art summoned

By Sicknesse, deaths herald, and champion;

Thou art like a pilgrim, which abroad hath done
Treason, and durst not turne to whence hee is fled,
Or like a thiefe. . . .

This is my playes last scene, here heavens appoint
My pilgrimages last mile; and my race
Idly, yet quickly runne, hath this last pace,

My Spans last inch, my minutes latest point. . . .1

Donne's lines do illustrate-~as Martz maintains--the principles Of

"composition" defined earlier, but Roethke's lines do not.

The third term that is pertinent to these poems, "metaphysical,"

Roethke, himself, supplies in the title of the sequence. After even

a cursory reading, one sees that there is no need to become embroiled

in the conflicting definitions of this term. Whatever else may or may

not characterize it, seventeenth-century metaphysical poetry relies

heavily on metaphor and Simile. Roethke's poems do not. The sequence

title apparently refers to the abstract nature Of many of these poems,

something very rare in Roethke's previous work. The sequence is only

1Quoted in Meditation, p. 31.

 

253

"sometimes" metaphysical, because some poems are almost entirely
imagistic and others almost entirely abstract.
2. Themes Of Death and Divine Madness

Turning to the poems themselves, I wish to discuss them in
terms of death and the celebration Of divine madness. The first, by
far the most fully develOped, appears in the first poem Of the sequence,
"In a Dark Time." I have already quoted several statements made by
Roethke during a symposium on this poem, in which John Crowe Ransom,
Babette Deutsch and Stanley Kunitz participated. This symposium, for
the most part, strikes me as being an illustration of the way in which
ingenious and learned minds can be distracted from the poem before
them by their inordinate need to find literary analogues. Ransom's
comments, for instance, take up ten pages, but very few Of his remarks
pertain directly to the poem. In my Opinion, his best insight comes
in his brief discussion Of the theme Of death and of "how much is
added to life by the premonition of death."1 Deutsch limited herself
almost entirely to pointing out possible literary analogues and
echoes, to which Roethke replied: "I must disagree with Deutsch, who
would have me more aware of my elders than I really am."2 Although
Kunitz also shows a readiness to find a source for any difficult image
or line, he reads the poem much more carefully than do the others.
Kunitz does not Speak in terms Of the "acceptance of death" that I have

mentioned, but one could easily construe his words as meaning something

1Reprinted in Ostroff, p. 30.

2
Ostroff, p. 51.

254

very similar. In his words, "... the archetypal journey of the poem
is from darkness into light, from blindness into vision, from death
into life."1 Kunitz, quoting Dr. Rollo May, describes the "darkness"
as the "anxietyEthatifis the experience of imminent non-being."2

The "light" . . . is the recognition and confession that he is 'a
fallen man,‘ whose quintessential taste is that Of being lost. To
embrace this knowledge is to overcome the dread Of non-being, is to be

"3

redeemed or, so to Speak, reborn. This amounts to saying that the

Speaker struggles with and overcomes his fear of death. While dis-
cussing the movement from dark to light, Kunitz employs terms that
recall our earlier discussion of the poetry of meditation: "If I
read Roethke aright, he is differentiating between the Spiritual life,
which is achievable through discipline, prayer and revelation, and
'the life within,‘ which is the soul locked inside the cabinet of flesh,
the cave, and not locked in alone but with the central devouring worm."u

Rather than quoting the whole of "In a Dark Time," I will
limit myself here to lines that directly treat the theme Of the
acceptance of death. The poem's second line runs:

I meet my Shadow in the deepening shade. . . .

(5:, p. 79)

1Ostroff, p. #2.

2Ostroff, p. H2.

30stroff, p. u7.

"Ostroff, pp. uu-us

255

Although this is clear, we may as well have Roethke's gloss on it:
"I meet my shadow, my double, my Other, usually tied to me, my reminder
that I am going to die. . - ~"1 In the second stanza, we find the
line:
My shadow pinned against a sweating wall.
Perhaps the wall symbolizes death, an experience beyond which we
cannot see. Immediately after this point in the poem, the Speaker
begins seeing clues or messages that possibly tell him what is beyond
the wall. He sees
A steady storm of correspondences!

And

All natural Shapes blazing unnatural light.
The last stanza presents the Speaker's fear in terms of self—disgust
and then in terms of fear of punishment by God. As soon as the speaker
shows the strength to be able to resist deSpair, to climb out Of his
fear, he gains a miraculous insight. He sees that the God whom he
feared, God the creator, is Himself the creation Of the One (or of the
Godhead). He sees further that he, himself, is "one with the One,"
and that together they are "buffeted by their own creation."2 The
stanza runs:

Dark, dark my light, and darker my desire.

My soul, like some heat-maddened summer fly,

Keeps buzzing at the sill. Which I is I}

A fallen man, I climb out of my fear.

The mind enters itself, and God the mind,

And one is One, free in the tearing wind.

My paraphrase preceding the stanza restates the condenses Roethke's

1Ostroff, p. 50.

ZOstroff, p. 53.

256

own comments. I will quote some of these now and point out what seems
to me a contradiction. The stanza begins by saying that perhaps the
"natural self . . . should die in the blaze of the supernatural."1
The Speaker's ". . . desires are 'dark,‘ unfathomable, sense—ridden."
He sees himself as a fly and asks: "Am I this many eyed, mad, filthy
thing, or am I human?" But his disgust does not overwhelm him; he

overcomes it: "

. . . I return to the human task of climbing out of
the pits of fear--and this is not an ambiguous word: fear, unlike
anxiety, has a definite object; I am afraid of God until--and here the
transition is very swif --'The mind enters itself.‘ The mind has been
outside itself, beyond itself, and now returns home to the domain of
love." It is at this point that Roethke seems to contradict himself.
Speaking of the words, "The mind enters itself," he says: " . . . this
suggests (visually at least) an androgynous act, a hole disappearing
into itself, 'crawling into your hole and pulling your hole after you,‘
the folk saying has it. An unpleasant image." The two glosses on
the line seem to Oppose each other. But perhaps this is another of
the points where Roethke would hope that he has created "a genuinely
rich dramatic ambiguity."

My paraphrase of the last two lines stayed quite close to
Roethke's comments, but nevertheless I will quote him. Speaking Of

the words, "And one is One," he says: " . . . the one not merely makes

his peace with God, . . . he--if we read One as the Godhead theologically

1This and the following comments are from Ostroff, pp. 52-53.

placed
only th
reveale
gn§_anc
buffete
festati

God exi

Of real

almost

the prw

But in

The 1a:

 

257

placed above God-~transcends God: he becomes the Godhead itself, not
only the veritable creator of the universe but the creator of the
revealed God.” A few sentences later, he continues: "The protagonist
923 and/or the Godhead are 'free in the tearing wind'---free to be
buffeted by their own creation. God Himself, in his most supreme mani—
festation, risks being maimed, if not destroyed." If, as it appears,
God exists only in His creatures, He, like the protagonist, is a victim
of reality and can only try to accept the game without fear. I will
return to this poem when discussing the theme Of divine madness, but now
I would like to point out other, perhaps less esoteric, occurrences
of the theme under discussion.

The second poem of the sequence, "In Evening Air," provides an
almost naively simple Statement of the "dark theme." In stanza two,
the protagonist cries out:

Make me, O Lord, a last, a simple thing
Time cannot overwhelm.

(:5, pp. 80-81)
But in the next stanza his attitude swings to the other extreme:
Night I embrace, a dear proximity.

The last stanza, though, brings him to a detached peace, an equilibrium:

I stand by a low fire

Counting the wisps of flame, and I watch how

Light Shifts upon the wall.

I bid stillness be still.

I see, in evening air,

How slowly dark comes down on what we do.

"The Sequel," the third poem in the sequence, resembles the
love poems quite closely. It describes the coming together of a

man and woman and then their drifting apart. The theme of loneliness

finds moving eXpression in the last two stanzas, but several lines go

258

beyond this to evoke connotations of death:

All waters waver, and all fires fail.
The poem concludes with the lines:

I am a man, a man at intervals

Pacing a room, a room with dead-white walls

I feel the autumn fail--all that Slow fire

Denied in me, who has denied desire.

(55, pp. 82-83)

Although these lines deal more directly with a spiritual or psychic
decline than with physical death, the latter is on the fringes Of their

meaning.

One of the best poems in The Far Field, "Infirmity," develops

 

in some detail the theme of the acceptance of death. The speaker sees
that his fear Of death grows out Of his attachment to his own body; but
as time makes his body less and less attractive, he realizes that he
will relinquish it easily. The poem Opens with a picture of the
protagonist as Narcissus:

I stare and stare into a deepening pool

And tell myself my image cannot die.

I love myself: that's my one constancy.

Oh, to be something else, yet still to be!

(FF, p. 86)

The second stanza describes the "meager flesh" as it "breaks down":

Sweet Christ, rejoice in my infirmity;

There's little left I care to call my own.
Today they drained the fluid from a knee

In the I
in that

bodily L

This is
explore

The fir:

"Wind ar

The next

The 1381
Some mar

bring d5

even the

 

259

And pumped a Shoulder full of cortisone. . . .1

In the next stanza, the protagonist maintains that "The soul delights
in that extremity," and then affirms a phoenix-like triumph over
bodily decay:

I'm son and father of my only death.
This is the mid-way point of the poem. The following three stanzas
explore the matter Of attachment to things of this world and detachment.
The first of these stanzas presents the extreme of detachment:

Dead to myself, and all I hold most dear,
I move beyond the reach of wind and fire.

"Wind and fire," of course, symbolize the destructiveness of time.
The next stanza states the antithetical view:

Deep in the greens of summer sing the lives
I've come to love.

The last two lines here hint that through the miracle of incarnation
some manner of attachment to things of this world does not automatically
bring damnation or self-destruction:

My soul is Still my soul, and still the Son,
And knowing this, I am not yet undone.

1The stanza form here (iambic pentameter, ababcc), the tone and
even the theme are almost identical with those of George Herbert's
"Affliction" [1]:
My flesh began unto my soul in pain,
Sicknesses cleave my bones;
Consuming agues dwell in ev'ry vein,
And tune my breath to grones.
Sorrow was all my soul; I Scarce beleeved,
Till grief did tell me roundly, that I lived.
The Works gf_GeOrge Herbert, ed. F.B. Hutchinson (Oxford, 19u1),

p. #7.

 

 

The last

by movin

that all

amicably

thtEd g

HeaVen.

 

 

 

The con

of anot

260

The last stanza reconciles the preceding stanza with the one before it
by moving to a higher level Of perception, in which the protagonist sees
that all nature conspires to aid man and that even the body can part
amicably with the soul--another way of saying that it can accept death:
Things without hands take hands; there is no choice,--
Eternity's not easily come by.
When Opposites come suddenly in place,
I teach my eyes to hear, my ears to see

How body from spirit Slowly does unwind,
Until we are pure spirit at the end.

(5E, p. 87)

The short piece, "The Decision," develops an idea that is
hinted at in "Infirmity"--the Speaker is pursued by the Hound of
Heaven. Francis Thompson's poem comes to mind when we read:

Running from God's the longest race of all.
(55. p. 88)
The concluding four lines of Roethke's poem, however, make us think

of another English poet:

Which is the way? I cry to the bread black,
The shifting shade, the cinders at my back,
Which is the way? I ask, and turn to go,

As a man turns to face on-coming snow.

This, and many other passages in this sequence, recalls George Herbert,
expecially the last stanza of "The Pulley," which God Speaks of his

gifts to mankind:

Yet let him keep the rest,
But keep them with repining restlesnesse:
Let him be rich and wearie, that at least,
If goodnesse leade him not, yet wearinesse
May tosse him to my breast.1

1Herbert, p. 160)

VI

The last
"Stoppin
for the

on the d

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SometimeI
distraup
Speaker'
StaDZa h

SYmboliz

 

The poer

Standabt

OUt his

261

The last line Of Roethke's poem perhaps also echoes Robert Frost's
"Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening." For Roethke, however, unlike
for the other two poets, the dark is dreadful, and the poem must focus
on the difficulty of facing it at all, rather than upon the peace that
the darkness offers and the pleasure of succumbing to it.

"The Decision" marks a turning point in the "Sequence,
Sometimes Metaphysical," for the poems following it express a less
distraught attitude toward the approach of death. In "The Marrow" the
speaker's voice still Shows a note of shrillness, but in the concluding
stanza he says that he sacrifices his deepest attachment to himself,
symbolized by his marrow, to God, who understands all that man doesn't:

Godhead above my God, are you there still?

TO Sleep is all my life. In sleep's half-death,

My body alters, altering the soul

That once could melt the dark with its small breath.

Lord, hear me out, and hear me out this day:
From me to Thee's a long and terrible way.

I was flung back from suffering and love
When light divided on a storm-tossed tree.
Yea, I have slain my will, and still I live;
I would be near; I shut my eyes to see;

I bleed my bones, their marrow to bestow
Upon that God who knows what I would know.

(53, pp. 89-90)

The poem "I Waited" ends with a quiet picture that employs fairly
standard symbols for the "view" of eternity seen by one who has lived
out his life:

The way grew steeper between stony walls,

Then lost itself down through a rocky gorge.

A donkey path led to a small plateau.

Below, the bright sea was, the level waves,

And all the winds came toward me. I was glad.

(FE, p. 91)

"The Tre

symboliT

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262

"The Tree, The Bird" repeats this and adds to it the bird in flight,
symbolizing the soul:
The present falls, the present falls away;
How pure the motion of the rising day,
The white sea widening on a farther Shore.
The bird, the beating bird, extending wings--.
Thus I endure this last pure stretch of joy,
The dire dimension Of a final thing.
(55, p. 92)
The present falling away is also time falling away, giving place to
the timeless. The words "endure" and "dire" are beautifully weighted
here, catching the double—vision of time and eternity. "Dimension" and
"final thing" also take on interesting meanings in the context Of these
lines.
The last three poems of the sequence and with what is essentially
an acceptance of death, though on the whole they deal with the theme
Of divine madness. "The Restored" concludes with a description of the
poet's soul, which "Grew back a new wing":
And danced, at high noon,
On a hot dusty stone,
In the still point Of light
Of my last midnight.
(FE, p. 93)
"The Right Thing" restates in terms that are only slightly different
the conclusion of "The Marrow." The poet is describing "the happy man,"
who "takes to himself what mystery he can":
And, praising change as the Slow night comes on,
Wills what he wOuld, surrendering his will
Till mystery is nO more: No more he can.
The right thing happens to the happy man.
(Egg p. 9a)

Concluding the sequence and the book, "Once More, the Round" celebrates

the divic

of death:

The ”we"
a manifes
T
Roethke's
last book
thing to
self, and
are one"
everythin

A
Of divine
esPecial
The firSt

Time":

 

Here the
Spiritua:
the3e lit
exiStenC,
POSsibil.

to his 0.

263

the divine madness, but also to an extent depicts the Speaker's acceptance

of death:

And everything comes to One,
As we dance on, dance on, dance on.

(E, p. 95)
The "we" refers to the protagonist and WIlliam Blake, their dancing is
a manifestation of visionary joy.

The theme of the acceptance of death is important throughout
Roethke's work but achieves its fullest statement in the poems of the
last book. It includes the ideas that an awareness of death adds some-
thing tO life, that fear of death indicates the wrong kind of love of
self, and that true love of self, which recognizes that "body and soul
are one" (FE, p. 94), accepts the mystery of death and willingly yields
everything to it.

Although not as important as the preceding theme, the theme
of divine madness occurs frequently throughout Roethke's work and with
especial clarity in several poems in "Sequence, Sometimes Metaphysical."
The first explicit mention appears in the second stanza of "In a Dark
Time":

What's madness but nobility of soul
At Odds with circumstance? The day's on fire!

(11:, p. 79)
Here the Speaker is recounting his effort to achieve some sort of
spiritual insight and is describing the purification of his mind. In
these lines the "madness" might be any perception of or belief in Spiritual
existence. At this point the protagonist seems to be weighing the
possibility that the fact, or "circumstance," Of death has given rise

to his own spiritual vision. "Madness," in other words, equals illusory

wish-fulf

m

vision,

1“.

his lot
Another r
some heat
Here, in
the body;
buffetin:
If this 2'
joins BIT
P€1igion

look at

VdClllat
Speaker'

“aPCissi

 

StaDZa (

APPaPer
SQt in
Wishes

him to

26H

wish-fulfilment. As we have seen, the poem goes on to affirm the
vision, at least to the point Of saying that the speaker will cast

his lot with the imagination or whatever has created the illusion.
Another reference to madness occurs in the last stanza ("My soul, like
some heat-maddened summer fly"), where the Speaker describes his desire.
Here, in a disturbed state, he condemns desire, and, by implication,

the body; later, when calmer, he sees that he must accept whatever
buffeting he receives at the hands of these creations of the imagination.
If this is an accurate account Of the meaning of the poem, then Roethke
joins Blake and the Socrates of the Phaedrus as an adherent of the
religion of the imagination. That this is so becomes clearer as we

look at the theme of divine madness in these poems.

The poems at the beginning of the sequence Show the protagonist
vacillating in his attitude toward madness. "In Evening Air" links the
speaker's self-love with being possessed, reminding us of the fusion of
narcissism and self-disgust found in "In a Dark Time." I do not under-
stand the presence Of the madness theme in the former poem, the first
stanza of which reads as follows:

A dark theme keeps me here,

Though summer blazes in the vireo's eye.

Who would be half possessed

By his own nakedness?

Waking's my care--

I'll make a broken music, or I'll die.

(55, p. 80)

Apparently, this is one of the poems in which the body and soul are
set in opposition. The Speaker, identifying himself with his soul,

wishes to be possessed but cannot be as long as the body's weight pins

him to earth. We may clarify the "waking" here by recalling the last

lines of

"Infirmi‘

In these
and $0111
identity
diStUrbe
”heat.mE
Evening
Wall, a

The n
"hese
all t'.
lmPri
belie
find

URN3Q~

 

 

 

265

lines of another poem that deals with narcissism and self-loathing,
"Infirmity":
When opposites come suddenly in place,
I teach my eyes to hear, my ears to see.
How body from spirit Slowly does unwind
Until we are pure Spirit at the end.
(E5, p. 87)
In these poems the Speaker has not yet discovered the unity of body
and soul, in other words has not yet accepted the oneness of his own
identity and the body that he knows must die. Not knowing this, he is
disturbed and his "madness" is not divine but is the disease of a
"heat-maddened summer fly." He feels walled-in, imprisoned. "In
Evening Air" ends with the protagonist watching light Shifting on a
wall, and this image reappears in the last lines of "The Sequel," an-
other poem that touches on the theme of madness, divine and otherwise:
Leaves, leaves, lean forth and tell me what I am;
This single tree turns into purest flame.
I am a man, a man at intervals
Pacing a room, a room with dead-white walls;
I feel the autumn fail--all that Slow fire
Denied in me, who has denied desire.
([5, p. 83)
The "room with the dead-white walls" might be in an asylum. The man,
whose madness is unholy, is imprisoned because he has denied desire, and
all that that implies. The protagonist's recognition of his symbolic
imprisonment for this "crime" shows that he is moving toward Blake's
religion of the imagination. In "The Marriage of Heaven and Hell" we
find the exhortation: "Sooner murder an infant in its cradle than nurse

unacted desires,"1

1The Poetry and Prose 31: William Blake, p. 37.

 

 

M

   
  
  

"The
divine mad;.
lovers, but

body and 5

Here the

that is '

266

"The Sequel," though, does describe briefly the coming of the

divine madness.

The Speaker is ostensibly referring to a meeting of two

lovers, but his words suggest that we are also seeing a wedding of the

body and soul:

I saw a body dancing in the wind,

We danced, we danced, under a dancing moon;
And on the coming of the outrageous dawn,
We danced together, we danced on and on.

(55, p. 82)

Here the acceptance of death is accompanied by an ecstasy or madness

[that is symbolized by dancing.

The last four poems of the sequence present the clearest state-

ments of the theme Of divine madness. In "The Tree, The Bird" the

protagonist describes the ecstasy that comes after the acceptance:

Uprose, uprose, the stony fields uprose,

And every snail dipped toward me its pure horn.
The sweet light met me as I walked toward

A small voice calling from a drifting cloud.

I was a finger pointing at the moon,

At ease with joy, a self-enchanted man.

(FE, p. 92)

Following these lines comes an account of the speaker's awareness of

his mortality:

Yet when I sighed, I stood outside my life,

A leaf unaltered by the midnight scene,

Part of a tree still dark, still, deathly still,
Riding the air, a willow with its kind,

Bearing its life and more, a double sound,

Kin tO the wind, and the bleak, whistling rain.

(25, p. 92)

These lines describe a detachment that is not indifference, a heightened

state Of vision like that Of "In a Dark Time": "free in the tearing

wind."

symbols a

its enti:

 

 

This pc
fmmdj
that t1
death.

the li

intell

267

In "The Restored" the poet gives us a miniature allegory, the
symbols and theme of which come from the Phaedrus. I quote the poem in
its entirety:

In a hand like a bowl
Danced my own soul,

Small as an elf,
All by itself.

When She thought I thought

She dropped as if shot.

'I've only one wing,' she said,
'The other's gone dead.’

'I'm maimed; I can't fly;
I'm like to die,‘

Cried the soul

From my hand like a bowl.

When I raged, when I wailed,
And my reason failed,

That delicate thing

Grew back a new wing,

And danced, at high noon,

On a hot, dusty stone,

In the still point of light

Of my last midnight.

(5;, p. 93)
This poem exactly parallels the description of the divine madness
found in the Phaedrus. The word "rage" also recalls Yeat's use of
that term, which associates it with desire and with the approach of
death. In its last stanza, Roethke's poem provides another example of
the linking Of dancing and ecstasy.
"The Right Thing" is a Straightforward, abstract statement of

the two themes that I have been discussing. This poem says that the

intellect and will Should not struggle against mysteries of change and

death.
be”hap

quiali

The sec«

we saw f

 

is only

realizes

The last

H18 "SUr

conClUSi

bleeds h

268
death. When these faculties relax, or cease their Operations, man will
be”happy" and the "right thing" will happen-—which I take to be a collo-
quial way of saying that the divine madness will descend on him:
Let others probe the mystery if they can.

Time-harried prisoners of Shall and Will--
The right thing happens to the happy man.

The bird flies out, the bird flies back again;
The bill becomes the valley, and is still;
Let others delve that mystery if they can.
(:5, p. 99)
The second stanza repeats the detached-but-not-indifferent vision that
we saw in "The Tree, The Bird." Here the Speaker sees that mutability
is only an appearance or that it is circular. When the protagonist
realizes that time does not threaten, he also realizes that:
...Body and soul are one!
The last stanza continues the description Of the "happy man," who:
...praising change as the Slow night comes on,
Wills what he would, surrendering his will
Till mystery is no more: NO more he can.
The right thing happens to the happy man.
(:5, p. 9n)
His "surrendering his will/Till mystery is no more" reminds us of the
conclusion of "The Marrow," where the protagonist slays his will and
bleeds his bones in order to "bestow their marrow"
Upon that God who knows what I would know.
(5:, p. 90)
The divine madness is apparently an understanding of the mystery of

time, but not an understanding in rational terms.

"Once More, The Round" concludes the book with an affirmation

of the Speaker's membership in the religion of the imagination:

The pet
creatui

"Bring

 

2'.-
7 3’10)” T

The k]
antit
Other
see 1
b0PP¢
at t
Of I
this

danv

269

What's greater, Pebble or Pond?
What can be known? The Unknown.
My true self runs toward a Hill
More! 0 More! visible.

Now I adore my life

With the Bird, the abiding Leaf,
With the Fish, the questing Snail,
And the Eye altering all;

And I dance with William Blake
For love, for Love's sake;

And everything comes to One,
AS we dance on, dance on, dance on.
(5:, p. 95)
The pebble and the pond perhaps represent the moved and the mover, the
creature and the creator. The two words bring to mind the lines from
"Bring the Day!":
The grass says what the wind says:
Begin with the rock;
End with water.
(WW, p. 71)
The known and the unknown operate here like Yeatsian or Heraclitean
antitheses, each feeding on the other's life but also each giving the
other life. And within the protagonist is the faculty that desires to
see beyond the hill and that creates what it sees there. The line
borrowed from Blake, "the Eye altering alters all," places the speaker
at the heart of the religion of the imagination. This is the doctrine
of romantic idealism: The perceiver creates the perceived. Believing
this, the ecstatic Speaker and his mentor, William Blake, "dance on,

dance on, dance on."

 

hiallegi
describe
and Sp '1‘:
PPOPOSi
Warrant
one for
or have
assert;
tPaDSC
many I
many a

H

and P
aSse]
hmha:
to h
Wri1

IQSY(

270

CONCLUSION
Poetry at a Discount
The most widely held critical dictum on Roethke defines
hiallegiance as being divided between this world and the beyond and
describes his poetry as a dramatization Of the struggle between flesh
and Spirit. The purpose of this dissertation has been to examine this
proposition and to give it detailed support in SO far as the poems
warrant it. Although many commentators have repeated this statement in
one form or another, most Of them have either left it vague and unsupported
or have overemphasized the Spiritual side. Few have made such unqualified
assertions as Glanco Cambon, who calls Roethke ". . . a thorough
transcendentalist,"1 or Hugh Staples, who calls him a "mystic."2 But
many repeat the rather more balanced Opinions of Ralph Mills. In his
many articles on Roethke, he points out that the protagonists endure
". . . anxiety over the questions Of death, God, isolation, sexuality,

"3 and that the poet's ". . . ecstatic

and parental relations . . .,
assertions of being do not hide an inability to face the realities of
human life."u But in the end, Mills always returns with special emphasis
to his favOrite point: "The pattern which visibly emerges from the

writing as a whole is seen to fall into stages ranging from the

psychological to the visionary and near-mystical. . . . The development
1 "The Tangibles of Craftsmanship," KR, XXVII (Autumn, 1965, 760.

2"Rose in the Sea-Wind," (1964), 191-

3"The Lyric of the Self," Hungerford, p. 12.

u"The Lyric of the Self," p. 19.

5“? irid'."

 

 

(F

271

of Roethke's poetry is a record of the Spirit's mutations, its divisions
from nature and expansion into love and illumination, its final,
anagogical disposition."1 In statements of this sort-—which are typical
of Mills and others-~there are two inadequacies which it is the purpose
of this dissertation tO overcome. First, these statements usually
hide in such patches of Obscurity or vagueness that no one eXpects them
to be given detailed support. Second, they fail to acknowledge the true
resonance of the poems by substituting for it what must be for almost
every reader the illusion of profundity so easily conjured up by even
the most mechanical manipulation of the terminology Of mysticism.
R. P. Blackmur has warned against this very betrayal, though he places
the blame more upon the poet and the culture than upon the reader:

We find poets either using the small conventions of the

individual life as if they were great conventions, or

attempting to resurrect some great convention of the

past, or, finally, attempting to discover the great

convention that must lie, willy-nilly, hidden in the life

about them. This is a labor, whichever form it takes,

which leads as Often to subterfuge, substitution, confusion,

and failure, as to success; and it puts the abnormal

burden upon the reader of determining what the beliefs

of the poet are and how much to credit them before he can

satisfy himself of the reality which those beliefs envisage.

The alternative is to put poetry at a discount-~which

is what has happened.
Later in this same essay Blackmur makes two other points that are

relevant here: "No feature Of a body of poetry can be as important as

it seems in discussion."3 And: "The rational imagination in poetry,

1"The Lyric of the self," p.

2"The Later Poetry of W. B. Yeats," The Expense 2: Greatness
(Philadelphia, 1958), p. 77.

 

3
Blackmur, p. 10“.

as elsew

and heur

 

such as
placing I
The gene

emphasis

in this

exPlicat

 

Only off
Such as
developg
of the t
have de
reCoeni
attenti
metaphc

is the

272

as elsewhere, can absorb magic as a provisional method of evocative

and heuristic thinking, but it cannot be based upon it."1 Critics

such as Mills have magnified the mystical element out of proportion,
placing the poetry in danger of "being swept a way with the debris."2
The general purpose Of this dissertation, then, is to correct this false
emphasis.

What I see as the more important part of the contribution made
in this dissertation lies not in the general purpose, but in the
explication of particular themes and images. Sometimes this explication
only offers fuller and more detailed support for widely accepted readings,
such as my discussion of the "Greenhouse Poems" as symbols for a
developing human identity, or my discussion of the death-theme in poems
of the early 1950's. In other sections, however, I believe that I
have defined image—clusters and themes that have not been previously
recognized. For instance, a full appreciation Of the poems demands
attention be paid to Roethke's frequent use Of animating and deanimating
metaphors and to the metaphors linking plants and animals. Kenneth Burke
is the only critic who has dealt with this matter. A similarly
neglected, crucial device, which I hope I have defined and clarified,
is the extensive group Of container images. Finally, I believe that I
have filled a surprising gap in the commentary by discussing Roethke's
exploration Of idealism and materialism as possible views Of life's

origin and end.

1Blackmur, p. 105

2Blackmur, p. 75.

Mu

it will be
was able 1
nor a mas‘
and metemj
will rema

this he w

will happ
the near
and a Jur
appear i:
BeYond t;

Opinion,

Increase

 

 

273

Much remains to be said about Roethke, but I am not certain that
it will be said for many years. He was a highly conscious artist who
was able to produce "interesting" poems, but he was neither an inventor
nor a master. In so far as his work relies on the "debris" of mysticism
and metempsychosis, it will be unread and forgotten. I think that it
will remain alive to the extent that he achieved a style of his own, and
this he was only beginning to do at the time of his death. What I suSpect
will happen is that Roethke will receive a fair amount of attention in
the near future. A collected edition Of his poems has just been published,
and a Jungian and existentialist analysis of his work is scheduled to
appear in the fall of 1966. Also Alan Seager is working on a biography.
Beyond this immediate activity, it is difficult to foresee; but in my
Opinion, as the contributions of linguistics to the study of style

increase, interest in Roethke's work will continue and perhaps even grow.

 

 

g

1:3

'9

[._1

es

I.

A SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY

Primary Sources

 

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The Lost Son and Other Poems. Garden City, New York, 1998.

 

Praise tO the End! Garden City, New York, 1951.

 

The Waking: Poems 1933-1953. Garden City, New York, 1953.

 

Words for the Wind: The Collected Verse Of Theodore Roethke.
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I Am! Says the Lamb. Garden City, New York, 1961.

 

Party at the ZOO, New York, 1963.
Sequence, Sometimes Metaphysical. Iowa City, Stone Wall Press, 1963.

The Far Field. Garden City, New York, 196:.

 

On the Poet and his Craft, Selected Prose of Theodore Roethke.
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The Collected Poems Of Theodore Roethke. Garden City, New York, 1966.

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Alvarez, A. Rev. Of FF, the Observer, 2“ October 1965, p. 27.

 

Arnett, Carroll. "Minimal to Maximal: Theodore Roethke's Dialectic,"
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Auden, W. H. Review Of OHL Sat. Rev. Of Lit., 5 April 1991, pp. 30-31.

 

B. P. Rev. Of W, The Christian Science Monitor, 2'4 December 1958, p. 5.

Baldanza, Stephen. Rev. of 0H, Commonweal, 13 June 19u1, p. 188.

 

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Berryman, John Rev. of WW, ASch, XXVIII (Summer 1959), 384-390.

Blackmur, R. P. The Expense Of Greatness. Philadelphia, 1958.

 

27M

O
r
I
r V
o
p
,r
- o

l‘

01V
D
N
C

"
. .-.
.
O
.,
. .
..O .-,‘
.- . -_..
. 'l I. '
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-- . --.-.
.
.r f
.
....-.
.V
, ,
.
-..-----
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-... .1-
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.-".‘ 1.“.
. O
..u 9'
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.v
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O
.
. I
.‘ . T
\' "T
‘.' a
I
0 Or

Blake

Lr‘

Bogan;

 

 

 

 

 

Bonne

Booth

Brant

 

Burke

Camb
Care

Car

Carr

Cast'

Ciar

Conn
Conq

Cott

275

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O

o.» ‘

.

0

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C

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in
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,-
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.

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Davids

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Dicke

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Drew,

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276

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1951, p. 4.

 

. Rev. of 3!, The New York Times Book Review, 9 Nov. 1959, p. an.
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Eliot, T. s. The Complete Poems,!l909-1962. New York, 1963.

 

F. L. Rev. of E, The San Francisco Chronicle, 20 June 1952, p. 11.
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Ferenczi, Sandor, M.D. Sex in Psychoanalysis, trans. Ernest Jones, M.D.
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Flint, F. Cudworth. Rev. of 1!, Virginia Quarterly Review, XXXV (1959),
310-320.

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277

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278

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279

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