Theodore Roethke (11 page)
I carry the curse of too many lives.
I have a great horror of thrusting myself on people or bothering them in any way.
Not all the dead are used: we must take what we can from them.
The devil who has my heart / Will not let me be.
Charlie and Otto Roethke
labored for sixty years
trying to make a greenhouse
that was truly theirs.
27
1944
Thanatos: death defines love.
When a man comes to realize that something he has done is evil, then he has suffered a growth of the soul.
An almost insane terror of death.
The tough who crave but do not whimper for love.
Papa is holy.
What an irony that we love the concrete so much, yet this is the very thing that must pass away.
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The bones of my human guilt.
To write about one's past is not to escape but to understand the present.
“Without contraries is no progression” (Blake)
I go back because I want to go forward.
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What a miserable little talent I have! after all the ten years of effort.
Style is the ultimate morality of the mind.
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I learned the struggle in the stem.
Whose guilt I carry?
Make your poetry the reflection of your life.
31
1945
Times when every simple act of life is a burden: times of
NO THOUGHT
.
“For it is the nature of man to deteriorate unless he recognizes the tendency and the source of his deterioration and expends actual effort to reduce them.” (Yvor Winters)
Ah papa! It was seven long months before your guts leaked away.
Visit me: wrath and fury.
Blow out my veins.
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I don't believe there is a God, but to try to believe in one is one of the noblest human efforts.
Lawrence had the fierce sense of lifeâbut notice thisâa place became exhausted for him. He could not pull it out of himself.
I suppose it is a dangerous feeling of power you get from a successful
duel with death. But God you have a pride in yourself when you
know
your fever has been 103.5â104 for five days and you can still bark orders and sit up and not lie down limp as a rag.
Afraid? why hell, I've been afraid all my lifeâdogs, thunder, my cousin.
Ah papa! He could snot his nose like an archbishop.
Something from this illness seems to have shaken loose powers; I am alive with ideas, some bad, no doubt, but there is more vehemence, more energy, more contempt, more love.
The will, that treacherous guide, often betrays our deepest self.
33
I became to myself a barren land. (Psalms 19:12)
Lawrence ⦠his particular psychological situation always linked to the life around him.
“One of the perils of the soul is the loss of the soul.” (C. G. Jung)
The poem is a kind of death: it is finished, a complete, a comprehensive act. The better the poem, the more final the destruction.
AnxietyâIt is only when we begin to hurt those that we love that the guilt with which we are born becomes intolerable â¦we hate ourselves in them.
A poem that is the shape of the psyche itself⦠in times of great stress, that's what I tried to write.
34
Things, how they involve me!
The soul cannot be defiled.
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A constant attempt to see things in human form which are not human at all.
My private conscience is terrible.
An anguish of concreteness.
We must seek to go beyond the pleasure principle to come through to social and philosophical reality, yet preserving the freshness and naivete.
The dream has its own internal laws.
36
Why am I afraid of death when so much of me is dead already?
The thought of oblivion reduces all happiness to ashes.
37
Am I saying anything new when I say that poetry is difficult: heart-breakingly so?
A teacher: a wonderful capacity for being enthusiastic about the obvious.
A bleakness about poetry-writing: like getting to the factory at seven in the morning.
The poet: perceives the thing in physical terms.
All the present has fallen: I am only what I remember.
38
“Actually, our human passions are always connected with antagonistic passions, our love with hate, and our pleasure with our pains. Between joy and the external cause there is invariably some gap and some obstructionâsociety, sin, virtue, the body, the separate self. Hence arises the ardor of passion. And hence it is that the ardor for complete union is indissolubly linked with a wish for death that brings release.” [unidentified quotation]
We live by fictions and myths. They seem as necessary as food.
In many things I was the son of my father.
I feel beneath me the whole vast motion of the world.
To all men, at some times, comes the conviction that he is the center of the world.
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Happiness and gaiety are incidental, the inseparable counterparts of a capacity for grief and pity.
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â¦a haunting sense that I was an herbaceous plant, as large as a large tree, with a trunk of the same pith, and branched as large and shadowingâ¦.
Poetry is still the natural form of self-expression.
For ten years I played the roaring boy when really I was the frightened boy.
A notion of centrality: there is a core to all things that even a child knows, yet it is one of those ancient thoughts that can never become a cliche.
41
A man must resist some of the elements of his own age.
“Life can only be understood backwards; but it can only be lived forwards.” (Kierkegaard)
The visible obscures delight.
I'm in the pits still; in the mires, spiritually. I can't seem to throw off the sensuality that is part of me. I don't want to throw it off. I'm not tempted: I'm a tempter. Maybe I'm even one of that party of the Devil. One of his seducing fat charges.
42
Lost in a dismal place
I had suffered a soul's growth;
Shrunken, loose in my skin,
Out of myself I rose,
Hungry and haunted.
What was this greenhouse? It was a jungle, and it was paradise, it was order and disorder. Was it an escape? No, for it was a reality harder than the various suspensions of terror.
Snow: symbol of death, symbol of purity.
What is sown comes to life when it dies.
He'll come when. No, I know he won't come. He doesn't care about me anymore. No, I mean Him, the big He, that Great big three-cornered Papa.
43
I became learned in the rhetoric of desperation.
Something within wants to get out.
When you're alone you either get something done or you fall apart.
The visible exhausts me. I am dissolved in shadow.
I felt myself falling into a dark swirl.
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How terrible the need for God.
A great deal of art arises out of opposition.
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Lawrence: analogies in the natural world.
I can no longer reject God because the metaphors are bad.
46
Who killed Papa?
Conceptual thinking is like believing in God; one wants to put it off as long as possible.
47
These excerpts are remarkable evidence of Roethke's passionate inner life. His obsessions, his burdens, stand out clearly: family guilt, death, the Romantic contrarieties, God, and poetry. Many of the passages have been quoted before, but looked at as a mosaic in this way, the poet's mind and sensibility emerge. The same energetic language that makes
The Lost Son
his greatest achievement can be found in the notebooks, which he quarried for poems. We learn a great deal about Roethke's reading, too, by his quotations; Blake, Lawrence, Jung, and the Bible exercise a special power over him. Roethke understood in his bones how thought and feeling must never be divorced, thoughâin true Romantic fashionâhe enjoyed railing against “conceptual thinking” and reason. One central theme to emerge in these years was the importance of death for the living, how it “puts an edge to life.” This key Romantic idea harks back to Keats especially, as in the “Ode to Melancholy” or to modern restatements of this theme, as in Stevens's “Sunday Morning,” where he proclaims: “Death is the mother of beauty.” The excerpts also show that Roethke did not want to leapfrog over the material world in favor of immutable spiritual realms. He preferred that “anguish of concreteness,” crying out in a late poem: “Things, how they involve me!”
Having grown up around a greenhouse, Roethke was not isolated from the natural life cycle of plants. Now, approaching middle age, he sought to regain the insights of his childhood. He was coming to understand, perhaps remember, that “ripeness is all.” Freud put this fundamental Romantic insight on a psychological basis, arguing in
Beyond the Pleasure Principle
that death is no accident, no external event; rather, “the goal of all life is death.”
48
His suggestion that death-acceptance
implies
life-acceptance reflects the great psychologist's sane and detached way of looking at the world. Yet Roethke was not, and did not want to be, detached. The struggle of
The Lost Son
moves to reunion with the past, with the natural cycle. Roethke, in a sense, revises the myth of himself in these poems, becoming a modern version of Emerson's Orphic poet who says: “A man is a god in ruins. When men are innocent, life shall be longer, and shall pass into the immortal, as gently as we awake from dreams. Now, the world would be insane and rabid, if these disorganizations should last for hundreds of years. It is kept in check by death and infancy. Infancy is the perpetual Messiah, which comes into the arms of fallen men, and pleads with them to return to Paradise.”
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Hence, when Roethke says, in his notebooks, that he feels beneath him “the whole vast motion of the world,” he shows an awareness of the powerful cycle of nature from which most men are detached. By analogy with the vegetal world, man comes to the belief that “what is sown comes to life when it dies.” What Roethke learned as a child was the lesson of the
plants, the cyclical movement wherein change is an illusion. Life itself continues, though it continually alters form. This is the “notion of centrality” Roethke mentions in his notebooks, the “core to all things that even a child knows.”
In summary, the notebooks from these years reveal a man in the act of self-discovery; they report a strange voyage back to beginnings. Along the way, the poet-traveler meets various beasts he must slay, including his dead father and a number of old selves that refuse to sleep. He had one crucial lesson to learn: that life
includes
death and is magnified by it. Like Dante venturing into the underworld with Virgil as a guide, Roethke enters the unconscious with Burke leading him and with the spirits of Freud, Jung, and the Romantic poets in attendance. The goal of this quest finds perfect expression in the entry: “All the present has fallen: I am only what I remember.” Here lies a reality beyond the mutable, what Roethke eventually called “the pure serene of memory in one man” (
CP
, p. 201).
CHAPTER SEVEN THE GREENHOUSE POEMS
We are always demanding a framework, a metaphor, a legend
.
Roethke, “Notebooks” (20 November
1943,)
In particular, what is a greenhouse?
Kenneth Burke
In a seminal essay, “The Vegetal Radicalism of Theodore Roethke,” Burke asks himself, “What is a greenhouse?” and suggests the following possibilities:
It is not sheer nature, like a jungle; nor even regulated nature, like a formal garden. It is not the starkly unnatural, like a factory. Nor is it in those intermediate realms of institutional lore, systematic thanatopses, or convenient views of death, we find among the reliques of a natural history museum. Nor would it be like a metropolitan art gallery. It is like all of these only in the sense that it is a museum experience, and so an aspect of our late civilization. But there is a peculiar balance of the natural and unnatural in a greenhouse. All about one, the lovely, straining beings, visibly drawing sustenance from ultimate, invisible powersâin a silent blare of vitalityâyet as morbid as the caged animals of a zoo.
1
In many ways the greenhouse is an ideal symbol, embracing the central paradox of art: that art is not life, yet it must embody life. The earthly paradise of an artist has to be ordered, but it must somehow contain its oppositeâchaosâwithin itself. Tensionâthe vital element in all artâarises out of conflict, and in Romantic theory the function of the imagination
is to effect a proper balance or reconciliation of opposites. The greenhouse, literally, provides just the right contrarieties: light against darkness, order against chaos, life against death. Roethke was lucky to inherit this potent symbol from his Michigan childhood.