Theodore Roethke (19 page)

In the brief third section the tone and pace shift as the hero addresses himself:

Childhood as an idyll recedes. The wish to become a bird or a bear cannot be fulfilled. The body of his mother must be given up as the boy matures. Melancholy overwhelms him. But the fourth, last section affirms that this delving into the past has not been without benefit:

In “Sensibility! O La!” the adolescent hero of
The Lost Son
returns, hence the language and imagery grow more coherent. The jerky rhythms and associational logic remain, but the literal sense of the poem again moves within our grasp. Now the hero confronts his own sexuality head-on. He prepares to
make use
of his new found powers. The first section pictures an adolescent fantasy of Venus (representing ideal woman) riding in on the waves, couched in a bizarre, pseudoarchaic language, perhaps to suggest the mock-heroic quality of the fantasy: “In the fair night of some dim brain, / Thou wert marmorean-born” (
CP
, p. 81).
The reality of physical lovemaking seems far away. But the next section forces reality back into the poem:

In effect, the hero revels in his great new phallic dimension. He is a knight now, brandishing a mighty sword.

Unfortunately, the ghost of Papa (guilt) breaks in to thwart these moments of glory in the third section: “There's a ghost loose in the long grass!” Even Mama will not let the son be; the son shouts back at her, “Mama! Put on your dark hood; / It's a long way to somewhere else.” At last, the hero refuses to succumb to these importunate ghosts and protests: “I'm somewhere else,—/ I insist! / I am.” This is a rare moment of ontological assertion for the hero, an important barrier for him to have crossed.

The first half of
Praise to the End!
concludes with “O Lull Me, Lull Me” which affirms the new sense of identity discovered at the end of the previous poem. The sexual imagery is subdued now; the hero once again asks for advice: “Tell me, great lords of sting, / Is it time to think?” (
CP
, p. 83). But the question, like so many of the hero's queries, is proleptic. He answers himself with new confidence: “I know my bones.” And the poem moves on, through its second half, in celebration of the self-discovery. Nature suddenly appears sympathetic as the hero sings, “The air, the air provides. / Light fattens the rock.” This childlike belief in the responsiveness of nature harks back to many other ecstatic passages in earlier poems, demonstrating a fundamental insight gained by the lost son in his regression, which is that the capacity for joy must not be relinquished in favor of adult sobriety. Roethke reasserts this great Romantic theme. He comes down, as did Blake, Wordsworth, and Emerson, on the side of radical innocence
earned
through experience. The ground thus far lost in the sequence has been regained, and the last stanza of the poem brings the hero to another “irresolute resolution” (in Burke's phrase). After making a final appeal to Mother Earth (“Soothe me, great groans of underneath”), the adolescent hero declares:

“The effect,” says Roy Harvey Pearce of this stanza, “is of a man finding and piecing together his knowledge of himself, which is a product of his knowledge of the natural order.”
⁵

When Roethke published
Praise to the End!
he included the earlier poems from the sequence published in
The Lost Son
, that is, “The Lost Son,” “The Long Alley,” “A Field of Light,” and “The Shape of the Fire,” most of which concern the hero in adolescence. They are therefore placed chronologically in
Praise to the End
!
at the beginning of Part Two, following the infancy poems of Part One. Three new poems of adolescence complete the sequence up to 1951.

The title poem—“Praise to the End!”—alludes to Wordsworth's poetic autobiography,
The Prelude
, making Roethke's sympathies with the Romantic view of nature and childhood explicit. Both poets trace the spiritual path of the sensitive artist from childhood to maturity. In the relevant passage, Wordsworth exclaims:

Like Wordsworth, Roethke believes that early miseries are necessary in the process that leads to a mature self. La Belle has observed how “both poets repeatedly liken the structure of their poems to a difficult journey.”
⁷
Both journeys, of course, remind us of Dante's famous pilgrim for whom “la diritta via era smarrita.” In
The Prelude
and the “Lost Son” sequence the journeys are literal and symbolic. As W. K. Wimsatt has said, it is in the nature of Romantic poetry for the metaphoric level to be concealed or embedded within the literal image or experience.
⁸

“Praise to the End!” itself has a central place in Roethke's sequence, for in it the hero rehearses the difficult primal scenes once more in summary fashion. The first section re-examines the sexual guilt felt by the adolescent hero, who finds himself, like Dante's pilgrim, in another dark wood:

Literally, the boy is “down to his skin” and full of sexual tensions for which masturbation seems the only release. So he cries out, “Father, forgive my hands.” On another level, onanism represents the despair of solipsistic withdrawal from genuine eros, which by definition involves another person.

The second section presents a nostalgic view of childhood and the child's guiltless sexuality:

The regressive descent continues, signaled by a return to nursery rhymes and infantile images of father and mother. Then the hero complains, “An exact fall of waters has rendered me impotent.” He has been “asleep in a bower of dead skin.” So, in the following section, he returns to the primal fishing scene already mentioned.

The boy is now thirteen, walking in the “goldy grass.” He revisits the scene of the fishing trip, dreaming that this time he
is
the suffering fish and that Jesus tosses him back into the water to save his life: a daring transposition of the original scene from “Where Knock Is Open Wide.” This leads to renewed confidence for the boy-hero, who declares: “I feel more than a fish. / Ghost, come closer.” The lost son has now come closer to terms with the dead father than ever before.

The final section of “Praise to the End!” suggests a relinquishing of selfhood:

Malkoff says, “the final section …ends with emphasis on regression rather than progression.”
⁹
The hero again slides back along the scale of creation, merging with the animal and fish worlds, then the sea (the unconscious) itself, and finally, light. This kind of regressive journey prefigures a later line, “The journey from self is longest.” This last section
is, literally, ecstatic (from Greek,
ek-stasis
);
the hero stands beside himself.

The last regressive movements occur in “Unfold! Unfold!” which takes its title from Henry Vaughan, the meditative poet whose mysticism and attraction to childhood qualify him as a Romantic precursor. In this poem, Roethke “unfolds” his backward vision and summarizes his method: “By snails, by leaps of frog, I came here, spirit” (
CP
, p. 89). The reader feels that illumination is impending, at first; then the hero dips into the unconscious once again. The hero hides and refuses to move into the open field, where rapture and illumination usually occur; the slime is comforting, protective. Also, the hero fears the loss of identity which accompanies mystical experience, the absorption of self (which he has struggled to attain) into the body of nature. Like Lear, the speaker stands on a windy cliff crying:

The simple crossings of barley-break are gone; the sense of play has disappeared. And the hero is stumped.

As usual, advice comes out of nowhere, perhaps from the unconscious. The alternatives are put before him bluntly: “It's time you stood up and asked /—Or sat down and did.” Perhaps the ghost of Papa is talking, for the hero's response, in the third section, seems ungenerous: “What a whelm of proverbs, Mr. Pinch!” He realizes, with amazement, the extent of his regression:

It has become far too easy to depend on the past: “Easy the life of the mouth.” So he asks himself pointedly: “What else has the vine loosened?” In other words, what has come of all this probing?

The revelations of the fifth section bring no surprises. The hero exults:

Roethke's stanza is quintessential Emerson; the hero discovers that all of nature is emblematic, that every object in creation has a corresponding
spiritual fact, that nature is itself a mirror in which the poet reads himself. Wordsworth came to much the same conclusion in
The Prelude
;
while crossing the Alps as a young man, he suddenly understood that:

Reconciliation with Papa also occurs in this last section of “Unfold! Unfold!” The leaves begin to shake in the wind, “A slow sigh says yes.” The father (Papa-Otto-God) acknowledges the son and approves of him, although the son scarcely believes his ears and inquires: “Is it you, cold father? Father/For whom the minnows sang?” Papa answers proverbially:

This advice points to the mystic way of redemption, embracing a view of the universe that, as Sullivan writes, “is less a philosophical conception than an animistic belief in a single creative propulsive energy, the soul of things, animating all living matter, including the human and subhuman in its embrace.”
¹¹
The visible world, at first, obscures; but meditation reveals the spiritual fact behind the object—an idea extended by Roethke in his last book,
The Far Field
.

The hero can now accept himself, the discovered self. And, in the last stanzas, he rehearses the lesson of the plants as if to be certain of his knowledge:

This primitive belief in the power of nature to renew itself in a cyclical way has, paradoxically, issued from the hero's confrontation—and acceptance—of his father's death. Again, to refer back to Freud and Norman O. Brown, death-acceptance implies life-acceptance. The hero has
been freed—at least in this fiction—from his obsession, cured of the past. The last three lines embody this insight: “In their harsh thickets / The dead thrash. / They help.”

“I Cry, Love! Love!” brings the sequence, in
Praise to the End
!
, to a close. It contains the hero's final effort to summon the love that binds, which makes us whole. The beginning mingles childhood recollections of uncertainty with joy: “I hear a most lovely huzza: / I'm king of the boops!” (
CP
, p. 92). This near-nonsense language gives way rapidly to more rational (mature) contemplation in the second section. The traditional Romantic bias toward intuition over intellection livens the opening rant: