Theodore Roethke (13 page)

Burke uses the next poem, “Big Wind,” to illustrate his thesis that when reading the greenhouse poems “you have strongly the sense of entering at one place, winding through a series of internal developments, and coming out somewhere else.” In this essentially narrative poem the ! poet begins by defining the situation with a rhetorical question:

There follows an account of efforts to keep the greenhouse together and functioning in the storm. The florists drain the manure machine and pump the stale mixture into rusty boilers, trying to keep the temperature high enough to save the plants. The greenhouse appears to be collapsing in high winds. The narrator explains:

This exact description of the physical work dominates the middle section of “Big Wind”; careful manipulation of line length and stresses pulls the reader forward through the poem like a piece of paper caught in a wind tunnel. The heavy use of present participles in a poem set in the past tense gives this memory poem its immediacy. And the poet ends with a vivid and perfect image-with-symbol: the greenhouse as a ship:

The poem moves, as a whole, from great instability to great stability, and the final image resolves the tensions generated earlier in the poem. This is, as Burke notes, perhaps the finest poem in the greenhouse sequence, yet it has had little sustained attention from critics. Malkoff tries to force the poem into a sexual interpretation and the result is ludicrous. He writes: “In ‘Big Wind,' the protagonist confronts a more adult kind of sexuality. We have had hints of this before, particularly in the concluding lines of ‘Cuttings (
later
),' but never was sexual intercourse itself so intimately related to the poem's central metaphor.”
¹⁷
Nothing at all in “Big Wind” suggests sexual intercourse without stretching the imagination. Blessing is more sensible, seeing the poem as “a figure for the poet's life, that continuous activity of the mind pressing out to preserve itself from the violence of time and change,” echoing, of course, a famous passage from Wallace Stevens's
Necessary Angel
.
¹⁸
For the subject of the poem is the problem of energy, creative energy. The poet, like the florist in “Big Wind,” uses every possible source of imaginative energy to sustain his artificial world. But this is to exceed the literal boundaries of the poem. “Big Wind” enriches the context of the sequence as a whole; it thrusts the protagonist into a larger world, one where he is no longer on his own, where the excessive self-consciousness of “Weed Puller” and “Moss Gathering” will no longer suffice. While the poem has a completeness which makes it an ideal anthology piece on its own, within the context of
The Lost Son
it is functional. Father and son, working here in a desperate attempt to save their crop, are brought together in a touching way. It is the unity of their experience that matters to the poet recollecting the scene many years after his father's death. It is this harmony, broken by death, which the poet longs for during the rest of his life.

The last poems of the sequence widen the context of the protagonist still further. “Old Florist” draws a portrait of an elderly greenhouse attendant working at his job with loving patience, “That hump of a man bunching chrysanthemums / Or pinching-back asters, or planting azaleas, / Tamping and stamping dirt into pots” (
CP
, p. 42). The poem flashes a picture in ten lines made up of only one elaborate sentence. La Belle finds parallels here with Wordsworth's many solitaries, such as the Old Cumberland Beggar or the Old Leech-gatherer from “Resolution and Independence,” men who “live near to nature and whose worthiness and wisdom are a result of active, direct association with nature.”
¹⁹

“Transplanting” describes a normal activity around the greenhouse and picks up an earlier theme: the struggle to be born. Aided by human skills, the plants appear under less pressure in this poem than in, say, “Cuttings.” These plants, like children in the family atmosphere, are carefully attended; the controlled environment allows maturation to take place unhampered by the outside world. Of course, for the human organism, the shock of adolescence often comes from a first encounter with reality in an unadulterated form. Comparisons between the growth of the boy, the “lost son,” and the plants seem inevitable, although the connection remains unspecific until the final poem, “Frau Bauman, Frau Schmidt, and Frau Schwartze.” “Child on Top of the Greenhouse” occurs between “Transplanting” and “Flower Dump” as if to force the comparison by sheer association. In this brief lyric, composed entirely of participle phrases without main verbs, the reader enters the scene, as Blessing says,
in medias res
. The poem has one central image: the boy balancing dangerously on the slender beam that holds the glass roof together:

This portrait of the daredevil boy expands our knowledge of his character. It was very dangerous to climb on top of a greenhouse because the risk of plunging through the glass was great. The boy defies adult warnings, as well as accusations offered by the chrysanthemums, to become a hero. He needs the attention, and this ploy succeeds admirably in attracting that. Here is the artist-in-embryo, alienated from authority,
from the natural world, exposing himself to destruction in the vain hope of glory. Roethke follows this poem, bathetically, with “Flower Dump,” an emblem of decay. The pretentious exhibitionism of the child on the greenhouse roof contrasts with the compost heap, “Whole beds of bloom pitched on a pile” (
CP
, p. 43). This was the penultimate poem in the original sequence of 1948, followed by “Carnations,” which makes an upswing from the fetid level of “Flower Dump.” It tells of a “crisp hyacinthine coolness, / Like that clear autumnal weather of eternity, / The windless perpetual morning above a September cloud” (
CP
, p. 43). The sequence should have ended here, but later editions finish with “Frau Bauman, Frau Schmidt, and Frau Schwartze,” an anecdotal poem written in a style out of keeping with the rest. The poem is more whimsical, less dense; the metaphor of the child-as-plant nurtured in the hothouse environment by florist-guardians is made too explicit. The poem is more allusive than anything going before it, referring to the three Fates (implicitly) and echoing Yeats's “The Magi” in a conscious manner. With this one reservation, the greenhouse poems are preferable to almost anything else in Roethke. He would write as well again, but never with more sheer verbal energy and concreteness.

A dozen short poems, grouped into two sections, follow the sequence of greenhouse poems. In style and method, they hark back to
Open House
and are therefore less interesting, but a few of them deserve attention. Especially important is “My Papa's Waltz,” which leaves a strong impression of Otto Roethke that will carry over into the “Lost Son” poems. Otto appears as a huge, brutish man, full of whiskey and affection for his son, which he translates into an overly fierce playfulness. The boy's reaction is one of fear, although the poet's whimsical tone of recollection softens the response:

In a brief space, the poet drops a large number of clues about his family and its tensions. The father is a man of high spirits, a drinker, a family man, a member of the working class, and someone feared by his son and wife. The wife stands to one side, disapproving but unable to stop the scene. The boy clings to his father for dear life, terrified by his physical power; though “Such waltzing was not easy” and his right ear scrapes a buckle at every missed step, he pretends that all is well. Why doesn't he cry or resist? What holds the mother back? Both recognize the deep love that underlies this outwardly rough behavior, the love that haunted Roethke throughout his life, forcing him to write “Who killed Papa?” in his notebooks almost twenty years after Otto's death. This tough Prussian father, with his simple and strong emotions, expected a great deal from young Roethke. And the sense of failure which dogged the poet till his death can be traced back to these unfulfilled expectations.

Two other poems of reminiscence help to deepen our image of the poet-protagonist: “Pickle Belt” and “Double Feature.” Here we encounter the adolescent for the first time in specific terms. The former poem shows a young man at work in a pickle factory:

The latter recalls the familiar scene of a small movie theater where lovers fondle sweaty hands and sleep-heavy children lean against their mothers. The realistic details of this poem, and others like it in these sections, prepare the ground for surrealism in the “Lost Son” poems; without this gravity, the effect of weightlessness would be lost.

The last poem before “The Lost Son” is “The Waking,” a title Roethke liked well enough to use again five years later. This bright lyric celebrates the sense of joy the poet feels while crossing an open field in midsummer. Again, it is a realistic, literal poem which prepares the way for the symbolism of the “Lost Son” poems and looks forward to
The Far Field
. Here is the child's view of nature:

This sympathetic and responsive world surrounds and fills the poet. “And all the waters / Of all the streams / Sang in my veins / That summer day.” Roethke, in effect, echoes Emerson's Orphic poet who maintains that “Nature is not fixed but fluid. Spirit alters, moulds, makes it. The immobility or bruteness of nature, is the absence of spirit; to pure spirit, it is fluid, it is volatile, it is obedient.” In this ideal state, the poet knows himself to be the center of the world; the old subject-object dichotomy collapses. Again, quoting Emerson: “I become a transparent eyeball. I am nothing. I see all. The currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part and parcel of God.”
²⁰

Placed as it is before “The Lost Son,” “The Waking” has strategic importance, invoking the ideal world that the poet-protagonist lost when his father died—when the descent into adolescence and adulthood began. The poem is a wish. It is a celebration of that primal innocence the poet seeks to recover from now on. The reader's emotions are lifted, temporarily, to make the effect of the fall in the next poem all the more vivid. One senses, like the reader in Book IV of
Paradise Lost
, that the “blissful bower” will soon be lost; “The Waking” gives way to a fitful, nightmare-ridden sleep.

CHAPTER EIGHT THE LOST SON: JOURNEY OF A HERO

All the present has fallen: I am only what I remember
.

Roethke, “Notebooks” (July 1945
)

For behold, the kingdom of God is within you
.

Luke
17:21

The “Lost Son” sequence includes the four long poems that make up the fourth and last section of
The Lost Son
, all of the poems from
Praise to the End!
(1951), and the first poem of
The Waking
(1953). These poems, which are experimental in places to the point of unintelligibility, have nonetheless acquired a permanent niche in modern poetry. Roethke's method is that of free association; he presses language into the service of the unconscious to achieve the goal of all art: the extension of consciousness. Thinking along these lines, Roethke copied Hegel's famous dictum into his notebooks in 1947: “All consciousness is an appeal to more consciousness.”
¹