Theodore Roethke (12 page)

The first section of
The Lost Son
contains thirteen poems, plus the autobiographical vignette “Frau Bauman, Frau Schmidt, and Frau Schwartze” which was added to the greenhouse poems in later editions. This sequence, says Louis Martz, is “one of the permanent achievements of modern poetry.”
²
These brief lyrics, all containing the image of a greenhouse at their centers, prepare the way for the longer, more difficult poems of the “Lost Son” sequence.
The Lost Son
, in contrast to
Open House
, is not just a collection of poems; it is a book and must be read whole, in sequence. It tells a story, the backward journey of the poet through memory toward self-realization. It is a version of what Bloom calls the interior quest-romance.

These poems represent a dramatic shift in style away from the formal lyrics of
Open House
. Roethke imposed no outward structure on them, allowing them to grow from within and seek their appropriate shapes. This is what “free verse” should mean: language exactly equivalent to reality, a skin pulled tautly over experience. It remains the easiest kind of poem to do badly and the most difficult to do well, because without formal restraints, the poet must have a perfect ear; he must
never
lose sight of his object for an instant. Roethke succeeds in this brilliantly. Each poem unfolds into what seems its one possible shape—like a plant, whose ultimate form is contained implicitly in the seed itself. Always the language of free verse has to be concrete. As Roethke observes: “The poet: perceives the thing in physical terms.”
³
A mimetic theory of language underlies this notion; the objective of poetic diction in these terms is to reflect, imitate, the physical image. To achieve this effect, Roethke had to summon reserves of technical virtuosity learned in his apprentice years. The first fruits are the greenhouse poems, of which Burke has said: “No matter how brief the poems are, they progress from stage to stage. Reading them, you have strongly the sense of entering at one place, winding through a series of internal developments, and coming out somewhere else.”
⁴

The final thirteen (original) greenhouse poems in
The Lost Son
survived a winnowing process stretching from 1942 until their publication in 1948. Abandoned drafts of greenhouse-type poems scatter the notebooks from these years, and by browsing through them one learns about Roethke's huge effort to be concrete, to “perceive the thing in physical terms.” Here is an early, uncollected poem called “Growth” (1943):

Sloppy and unfocused, the poem dissolves into hopeless abstraction in the last four lines. Yet there is promise in the line “Soft snail-marrow jogging its acorn of shell,” which combines concrete description with rhythms that suggest the primitive sense of unrestrainable life.

“The Snail” is an early unpublished version of a much later, considerably revised, poem called “A Light Breather” (1953). It was written, in the following draft, in 1944, anticipating in manner the greenhouse poems of
The Lost Son
. The poet avoids nearly all abstractions (the word “spirit” may be allowed for the conceit's sake) and generates a mimetic rhythm:

Roethke had finally hit upon his own style; he had found a way of making his conceits physical and concrete. This poem was unsuitable, of course, for the greenhouse sequence, so Roethke tucked it away for later use. But he knew he had discovered a voice unlike anyone else's.

Roethke had learned how to whittle a poem to its bones. Here is a wordy early draft of a poem called “Propagation,” which Roethke would divide into the first two lyrics of the greenhouse sequence, “Cuttings” and “Cuttings (
later
)”:

‘Cuttings” is sleeker, more evocative:

The odd noun combination “sticks-in-a-drowse” reflects the continuing influence of Hopkins, as does the sensuous and concrete imagery. Monosyllables dominate the poem and internal alliteration forces the reader onward as the delicate shoot breaks upward through the topsoil. The poet himself stays out of the picture, but the poem imitates a psychic state; it can be read as a conceit with one half of the metaphor missing, the tenor presented without its vehicle (as in Blake's “Sick Rose”). The poem describes a state of consciousness which precedes the rational; it is a direct representation of the infantile nervous system, “polymorphously perverse” in Freud's sense of that provocative phrase. It is a poem about beginnings without fanfare, a poem of expectancy.

“Cuttings (
later)”
brings the poet-protagonist into focus. Roethke dramatizes the conflict of life against death in the plant world: “This urge, wrestle, resurrection of dry sticks, / Cut stems struggling to put down feet” (
CP
, p. 37). One critic calls attention to the “sliding of the metaphorical images by which the plants are rendered backward along
the phylogenetic scale.”
⁸
Indeed, the poem's metaphors descend the Great Chain of Being systematically: saint becomes suckling, and sobbing infant becomes fish. One senses at a very early stage in the sequence that the poet intends more than mere descriptions of a natural process. Blessing, somewhat vaguely, suggests that “the real
meaning
of these poems is the energy they convey.”
⁹
Yet Blessing has singled out an important aspect of the greenhouse poems as a whole: they
move
. Whereas the lyrics of
Open House
can be thought of as photographs, the lyrics of
The Lost Son
are cinematic. Stanley Kunitz put it this way: “What absorbs his attention is not the intricate tracery of a leaf or the blazonry of the complete flower, but the stretching and reaching of a plant, its green force, its invincible Becoming.”
¹⁰

“Root Cellar” follows, taking us back further into the dank, steamy atmosphere of a greenhouse cellar, where the life force survives at the level of instinct:

The cellar, with its explicitly sexual imagery (“Shoots dangled and drooped, / Lolling obscenely”), may be read as a metaphorical equivalent of the unconscious mind. Here life persists at its most primitive level, gasping among roots and stems in a lively slime. “Nothing would give up life: / Even the dirt kept breathing a small breath.” The life force thrives on opposition, importunately breathing. Sullivan points out the “terrifying and perverse” nature of Roethke's life impulse, calling the cellar “a chaos of aimless and bewildering multiplicity.”
¹¹
Yet there is something positive about the fact that “Nothing would give up life.” It is strangely comforting to know that life
insists
on itself, albeit at this elemental level.

We come upon the actual greenhouse in “Forcing House,” which describes the artificial environment working
against
the natural seasons of the planet. Here are “Fifty summers in motion at once, / As the live heat billows from the pipes and pots” (
CP
, p. 38). And in “Weed Puller,” which follows, we are introduced to the protagonist, the “lost son,” at his labors:

The boy ferrets among a variety of loathsome weeds, grubs, sticks, and fern-shapes, “Tugging all day at perverse life.” This labor resembles what Roethke called in the notebooks “The long testing of the unconscious before one gets even a few symbols true to himself.”
¹²
In any case, the poem takes the form of descent into an underworld, whether or not we liken it to the unconscious; the last lines are explicit: “Me down in that fetor of weeds, / Crawling on all fours, / Alive, in a slippery grave.”

The boy is not present in the next poem, “Orchids,” one of the most accomplished in the sequence:

The conflict of opposites occurs more subtly here than before. Daylight governs the first stanza, while evening presides over the second. Similarly, the air is alternately warm and cold. The plants, like strange reptiles in a zoo, are awake, then asleep. The adder-mouthed creatures sway upward under the influence of sunlight, then recede to their mossy cradles when moonlight filters through the glassy roof. The gradual transformation of metaphor in the poem deserves attention; the snake imagery, signifying a very low point on the phylogenetic scale, gives way to bird
imagery in the first stanza. By the second, the orchids have become “So many devouring infants!” The climbing is to a human level, albeit infancy. Yet a stronger transformation takes place in the last lines as the “Loose ghostly mouths” hover in suspended animation, “neither dead nor alive,” waiting and breathing. The plants achieve a kind of spirituality, having become ghosts. (One recalls the Latin meaning of
spiritus
:
breath.) By reversing direction along the scale of being, the poet sets “Orchids” in opposition to “Cuttings (
later),”
perhaps to suggest that a dialectical progression exists between the individual poems as a sequence. Malkoff, who reads the poems as a thinly veiled sexual autobiography, sees the dialectic of innocence and experience as a primary pattern in the sequence, and says of “Orchids” that “infancy here is not the age of innocence, but rather of demanding, grasping, undisciplined sexual urges.”
¹³
While this is true, I think one loses the highly specific, concrete texture of this great lyric by treating its allegorical dimension as anything more than subliminal. It is first a poem about orchids.

“Moss-Gathering” brings the boy back to our attention. It narrates an experience familiar to Roethke as a child, that of going out into the countryside to gather patches of moss for lining cemetery baskets. The poem looks at the activity metaphorically. After cutting up squares from the earth's surface, the sensitive young man claims a certain feeling of remorse:

Only a poet plagued by guilt feelings could have reacted in this way to an apparently innocent task. Malkoff writes: “The ‘gathering' itself takes place in a landscape with clearly sexual overtones; it is followed by a feeling of guilt at the onanistic action.”
¹⁴
The phrase “pulling off flesh” certainly may have this level of association, yet the poem needs a wider reading. We meet the boy for the second time here, again in isolation, and again his response to the environment is individual. In both “Weed Puller” and “Moss-Gathering,” nature is animate, threatening, ready to accuse or overwhelm the protagonist. Nature is never simply acted upon; it reacts, participating in the interplay of subject and object so crucial to Romantic poetry. La Belle points to Wordsworth's “Nutting,” another Romantic poet's guilt-laden account of a childhood “desecration,” as a precursor.
¹⁵
A passage toward the end of “Nutting” does parallel Roethke's last line: