Theodore Roethke (14 page)

In essence, this sequence describes the journey of the poet-protagonist into the hinterlands of the unconscious mind, retracing steps that have led him to the present; he has to recover the past to “burn it up.” The process was given a scientific basis by Freud, who pioneered the technique of
anamnesis
or filling in the memory gaps by recollection. As Mircea Eliade explains
anamnesis:
“The individual's return to the origin is conceived as an opportunity for renewing and regenerating the existence of him who undertakes it.”
²
It is clear that Roethke understood this technique thoroughly; the “Lost Son” poems are his attempt to incorporate psychoanalytic
methods into his art. The danger here is of confusing life and art. Just as, for instance, the meditative religious poets of seventeenth-century England borrowed techniques of meditation from Ignatius, a psychoanalytic poet takes for his own certain Freudian techniques. Yet the meditative lyric
is not
meditation, nor is the psychoanalytic poem psychoanalysis. The “Lost Son” poems represent a version of the Freudian descent into the depths, a regression through time in search of what Freud called “primordial events,” moments of personal trauma that occurred in the
illud tempus
of childhood and have been repressed. The process is curative in the same way that Romantic art is cathartic.

An explication of Roethke's difficult sequence requires two points of reference: the poet's subjective history, or the biographical elements in the poems, and the larger arena of shared experience represented by myth and archetype. The greatness of the sequence derives from the tension between these poles; it is a consummately autobiographical sequence, but it participates in the wider realm of archetypal journeys. C. G. Jung's distinction between the personal unconscious and the collective unconscious is useful here. Of the former, he says: “The materials contained in this layer are of a personal nature in so far as they have the character partly of acquisitions derived from the individual's life and partly of psychological factors which could just as well be conscious.” These factors are, then, biographical or subjective. They employ a personal symbolism and may well be inaccessible to the outsider without some knowledge of the individual's family background and environment. Now, in addition to these personal elements of the unconscious there is the realm of collective unconscious: “These are the mythological associations—those motives and images which can spring anew in every age and clime without historical tradition or migration.” This is the world of dreams. It includes the deepest layers of the human mind and provides a common point of reference for all people in all times. Jung explains this concept further in
Archetypes of the Unconscious
:
“I have chosen the term ‘collective' because this part of the unconscious is not individual but universal; in contrast to the personal psyche, it has contents and modes of behavior that are more or less the same everywhere in all individuals. It is, in other words, identical in all men and thus constitutes a common psychic substrate of a suprapersonal nature which is present in every one of us.”
³

The Lost Son
illustrates the uses of mythology for modern man whose old myths have been rendered obsolete by science and by the general disintegration of culture. Writers think of this century as a time when “You cannot say, or guess, for you know only / A heap of broken images.”
⁴
The modern artist can no longer enjoy the supporting myths that
past epochs offered their creative people. Instead, myths have to be fashioned from the materials at hand, some of which are necessarily subjective. Roethke's main source of material was his own life, and he wrote about his life-crises in a fresh way. His images of the greenhouse, the father-florist, and the open field come directly from his personal experience. Yet these personal images take on greater meaning when framed by a mythic pattern. It is as if the poet placed a sheet of rice paper over the archetypal pattern of a face, but drew his own features into the portrait. As Thomas Mann said: “Myth is the foundation of life, the timeless
schema
, the pious formula into which life flows when it reproduces its traits out of the unconscious.”
⁵

All of the “Lost Son” poems participate in a central myth in some way, what Joseph Campbell has called a “monomyth”:

This sounds rather specific as a general myth, but as Campbell emphasizes, the changes rung on this simple scale defy description. Any given tale may isolate one aspect of the cycle, such as the flight motif or the atonement with the father, or a number of independent cycles may be
strung together (as in the
Odyssey
). Characters or separate episodes may be fused. But the basic monomyth remains in the background, offering a framework, a principle of organization.

The most commonplace version of the monomyth is the initiatory journey, a rite of passage. This latter term refers to any ceremony of birth, puberty, marriage, or burial which arises in one form or another in all societies, past and present. They are designed to assist the individual at a liminal stage, a transitional phase of his life. Anthropologists have concentrated on the rites of primitive societies, wherein survival itself is often in question; in this situation, rites and ceremonies contribute to social cohesion, translating the personal life-crisis into public, more general concern. Also, these rites reveal to each member of a given society his or her role as warrior, bride, priest, or chieftain. As Campbell explains: “The whole society becomes visible to itself as an imperishable living unit. Generations and individuals pass, like anonymous cells from a living body; but the sustaining, timeless form remains.”
⁷

In
Rites and Symbols of Initiation
Eliade discusses the most fundamental initiatory rite of passage: the puberty rite practiced by primitive or archaic societies, which “represents above all the revelation of the sacred—and, for the primitive world, the sacred means not only everything that we now understand by religion, but also the whole body of the tribe's mythological and cultural traditions.” We have lost much of the ceremony, making this passage all the more difficult, but the crisis remains. “The Lost Son” itself re-creates the puberty rite in modern terms. The boy is separated from his father (by the father's death, although this is concealed) and from the greenhouse ambience (home, womb). He descends into the dream world of the unconscious, represented on a literal level as an escape into the surrounding swamplands. Here the adolescent hero faces a series of obstacles (tests) which he must overcome; he reaches the nadir of his journey, represented by a pit. In this dark, mythical zone he becomes aware of the vital forces within him (sexuality, manhood) and returns to reconcile himself with Otto (atonement). But things can never be the same for him now. Eliade's comments on the meaning of archaic puberty rites are relevant here to what Roethke has attempted in the poem: “In a great many cases puberty rites, in one way or another, imply the revelation of sexuality—but for the entire premodern world, sexuality too participates in the sacred. In short, through initiation, the candidate passes beyond the natural mode—the mode of the child—and gains access to the cultural mode; that is, he is introduced to spiritual values.”
⁸
Through initiation, then, the boy becomes a man; he gains full access to the pleasures and responsibilities of adulthood. The ritual is instructive and symbolic, admitting the individual to a new
role in his society. It is a slaying of the child in the initiate, a severance from the parents, an assertion of manhood. This is painful, and “The Lost Son” registers this pain. The hero returns, but the success of this journey, though real, is scarcely obvious until one has reconsidered the entire “Lost Son” sequence.

Eliade finds three distinct phases in the puberty rite, all of which are found in Roethke's poems: (1) separation from the family; (2) ordeals which may involve symbolic death; (3) resurrection of the initiate and return to the tribe. This is the exact sequence of events in “The Lost Son.” Separation, ordeals, symbolic death, and return follow in imitation of this mythic pattern. And one finds an especially primitive element in the imagery. Eliade's account of an Australian puberty rite has striking parallels in Roethke. In this rite, the adolescents are captured by their elders, often masked so as not to be recognized, and taken into the wilderness. There they are buried beneath branches in the dark and told that they are about to die, that they will be killed by a divine being. “The very act of separation from their mother,” says Eliade, “fills them with forebodings of death.” The terrifying darkness is unrelieved by stars, moonlight, or fire. Then comes the hideous whirring sound of the bull-roarers, blown by the elders, in the distance, symbolizing the approaching divinity who will murder the boys. “This experience of darkness, of death, and of the nearness of Divine Beings,” he explains, “will be continually repeated and deepened throughout the initiation.” The novices die to childhood. And when they are uncovered, they believe themselves to be “new men.” They are told the legends of the tribe, the secrets of sex, and other sacred mysteries, then allowed to return to the village. “When the lads finally come back to the camp, the mothers touch them to be sure they are really their sons. Among some Australian tribes mothers mourn over the initiands as the dead are mourned.”
⁹

“The Lost Son” itself, the central poem in the series of poems which imitate the regressive pattern, opens with a section entitled “The Flight.” This alerts the reader to the escape motif that dominates the first part of this poem. It begins quickly,
in medias res
, and in the first person; the adolescent here has been
lured
by the otherworldly cries of the dead:

Roethke wrote in his notebooks in 1944, not long before beginning this poem: “The motion of a poem: it must get underway quickly.”
¹⁰
He does this well here, at the same time establishing the associational, dreamlike quality of the style. Without any biographical glosses, one still catches the anxiety of the protagonist who has heard voices from the dead, for whom leaves come to life, who asks the snail, the bird, and the worm to be his guides through this “hard time” that he anticipates. “The softening chalk of my bones” suggests mortality—the fear of death associated with initiatory journeys. The imagery throughout is hallucinatory, nightmarish. A further dimension comes into play if one knows that Woodlawn is the graveyard where Otto Roethke was buried, having died at a crucial period in his son's life. The sequence as a whole has its origins in the effect of Otto's death on Roethke at this painful juncture. Like most epic heroes setting out, the poet-protagonist calls for divine help on the journey: “Snail, snail, glister me forward.” The poet explained his own intentions in a later essay: “Everything that lives is holy: I call upon these holy forms of life. One could even put this theologically: St. Thomas says, ‘God is above all things as causing the being of all things.' Therefore, in calling upon the snail, I am calling, in a sense, upon God” (
SP
, pp. 24–25).

The poem continues with the hero waiting for what Campbell names “the call to adventure.” There is a moment of hesitation before entering the dark wood:

The hero fishes for a direction. He dips into the pond (perhaps a symbol for memory) and broods over an “old wound.” Because the father has died, the house is empty. Like Dante before him, the pilgrim needs a
Virgil to show him the way into the abyss and out again. He becomes frantic for supernatural aid of some kind: