Theodore Roethke (2 page)

To long for a purity not available
within
nature or the natural processes is a common Romantic urge, and Roethke does not escape its pull. One critic
⁷
points to the poem called “Snake,” where Roethke notices a young snake drawing away and says:

It would seem contradictory that this form could be both “pure” and “sensuous,” but Roethke wants to relinquish nothing. Like Stevens, he believes that “the greatest poverty is not to live / In a physical world….”
⁹
He seeks out “that anguish of concreteness”—a total immersion
within
nature. In the early poem “Epidermal Macabre,” Roethke, again, wishes the body away, but the spirit he longs for remains carnal:

Yeats makes a similar wish in
The Tower
, and Roethke is as much a Platonist as his Irish master. His one pure expression of the body-spirit dichotomy occurs in the late poem “Infirmity” where the gradual separation of these previously integrated elements is acknowledged: “How body from spirit slowly does unwind / Until we are pure spirit in the end” (
CP
, p. 244). But this unwinding comes only after the body ceases to provide joy, in either old age or sickness. For the most part, Roethke accepts his physical state as something worthy of celebration. The body is the source of all energy. It is part of the natural world and, in the highest state of consciousness, self and other intermingle. Self-possession becomes world possession, as in “The Long Waters”:

Like Wordsworth, Whitman, and Yeats, Roethke was writing the poetry of autobiography, working with the materials of his own life and
shaping them into a personal myth or mythos in Northrop. Frye's sense of the term as a general organizing principle of literary form. Coming well
after
the discovery of psychoanalysis, Roethke had available a vocabulary and technique for invading the unconscious dimension. When he became interested in psychoanalysis through Kenneth Burke, his colleague at Bennington in 1942, his poetry moved into the arena of greatness. But
Open House
did not suggest the beginning of a major career. With the advantage of hindsight, one can go back and find in it themes that flow into Roethke's later vein, but at the time no one knew what was coming. Roethke himself was pessimistic about his talents. He later wrote: “It took me ten years to complete one little book, and now some of the things in it seem to creak. Still, I like about ten pieces in it.”
¹⁰
Open House
will be examined later, for it serves as a prelude to Roethke's career, and the contrast between this apprentice volume and
The Lost Son
(1948) is startling. The question is what happened to the poet in the early and mid-forties to effect his transformation from minor versifier to major poet? How did the discovery of psychoanalysis work in the poet to release his imaginative energies?

The answer involves Roethke's relationship to the Romantic movement as it developed in America. An important clue is offered by Norman O. Brown in
Life Against Death
:

Indeed, what Roethke discovered in this crucial period of his career was exactly what Wordsworth seems to have realized at Alfoxden: the use of memory. Roethke nearly always kept a journal after 1929, first as a graduate student at Michigan and then at Harvard. In the thirties, these journals are really working notebooks; they contain rough drafts of poems, odd lines that came into his head which might possibly be useful for a poem one day—but nothing personal apart from the record of a few dreams. Not until he met Kenneth Burke and began to take psychoanalysis seriously did the journals come alive. Suddenly, the reader of these mostly unpublished pages finds a poet searching his memory, working his way back in time, confronting in a most brutal and direct fashion the primal imagery at the source of his deepest conflicts. Roethke
explained: “To write about one's past is not to escape but to understand the present.” And again: “I go back because I want to go forward.”
¹²
Or in this beautiful line from another journal of the period: “All the present has fallen: I am only what I remember.”
¹³
One cannot understand the original method of Roethke's poems after 1948 without seeing how he adapted the techniques of analysis in a special way, relating them to Romantic poetics, to extend if not complete (as Brown suggests) the historical movement called Romanticism.

One central source of conflict for Roethke was his father's death when he was fifteen. He returns to this painful experience of loss throughout his career, always seeking that final atonement where conflicts are abolished and harmony is restored. I doubt whether he attained this goal, but perhaps he didn't really want to; this conflict proved a wealthy source of poetry. From this single life-crisis, Roethke generated his mythos, a world of luminous personal symbols. Otto, the father, lords over this dream world; he is the “garden master” (as Rosemary Sullivan has called Roethke himself in an excellent book).
¹⁴
Otto metamorphoses into God in the later poems, but this God is curiously like Otto: loving and terrible at once, a symbol of immense power and wrath, more like the Jehovah who punished Job than the gentler Elohim who visited Adam and Eve in the garden. Otto Roethke's father had come from Prussia in 1870 to Saginaw, Michigan, and started the greenhouses which caught the poet's imagination. Roethke says: “It was a wonderful place for a child to grow up in and around. There were not only twenty-five acres in the town, mostly under glass and intensely cultivated, but farther out in the country the last stand of virgin timber in the Saginaw Valley and, elsewhere, a wild area of cut-over second-growth timber, which my father and uncle made into a small game preserve” (
SP
, p. 8).

The greenhouse as a symbol was obviously rich in possibilities. In the journals, Roethke explores its full meaning: “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.”
¹⁵
There is an ambivalence here; this “greenhouse Eden” is not William Blake's Eden, wherein all the natural processes are completed, the contraries resolved. Again, it seems closer to Blake's lower paradise, Beulah, that “married land” sung of by the prophet Isaiah. Far from the transcendental state of resolution, the greenhouse stands for process, for generation. It is paradisiacal in its lushness, its proliferation of beautiful sights and smells, and its perfectly controlled atmosphere, protected from the wilderness outside its walls. But this paradise remains unnatural, artificial. Only the massive effort of the florist-father keeps it going through winter. It is analogous with the family itself, that hothouse
where a child matures in the constant temperature of parental protection. The poem “Forcing House” comes to mind:

The jungle aspect of Roethke's paradise cannot be avoided; the rubbery shoots that dangle and droop, the vines that reach out for something to wind around: these terrify the child. To press the analogy one step further, family affection threatens the child's tender ego with extinction; the father-son struggle witnessed in Roethke becomes part of the son's efforts to establish identity. Because Otto died at a crucial stage in young Theodore's development, the son never had the chance to complete this primal warfare.

What fascinates me is Roethke's willful plunge into the unconscious to find the symbols that would ground his poetry in a reality that is at the same time particular and mythic, autobiographically true and metaphorically resonant. We may gain insight into how Roethke achieved this balance by looking into Emerson's important essay, “The Poet.” He writes: “The poet … puts eyes and a tongue into every dumb and inanimate object. He perceives the independence of the thought on the symbol, the stability of the thought, the accidency and fugacity of the symbol. As the eyes of Lyncaeus were said to see through the earth, so the poet turns the world to glass, and shows us all things in their right series and procession.”
¹⁶
If Roethke's greenhouse was nothing more than a personal detail of one man's life, it would cease to interest us; instead, he has turned the greenhouse world into a symbol for all that is miraculous, lovely, and threatening about the life cycle. Blessing rephrases the Emersonian notion of perceiving “the thought on the symbol” when he says “the relationships among the concrete figures of a poem may be analogous to the relationships among a potentially infinite number of abstract ideas, and that as the relationships in the literary work shift and develop, so, too, do the ideas they may represent shift and develop.
Roethke, by using as few abstractions as possible and by insisting that, for the most part, both tenor and vehicle of his metaphors will be rooted in the physical world, has left the range of interpretation almost as wide as did the original greenhouse in which he grew up.”
¹⁷
In other words, Roethke has allowed each symbol to stand naked in all its “anguish of concreteness,” and this allows the reader a special burden of interpretation. It was Ezra Pound who warned the apprentice poet never to say “dim lands of peace”; “dim lands” must suffice, if the poet knows how to write. Roethke did know how, of course; his greenhouse poems, especially, are among the most concrete (and symbolically charged) that have been written in this century.

One can read the “Lost Son” sequence on many levels. Karl Malkoff really laid the groundwork for interpretation in his seminal commentary on the sequence; he singles out the movement of the protagonist through early adolescence into sexual maturity, and this literal plot should never get too far out of sight.
¹⁸
But these poems have a symbolic richness exceeding the basic plot; the generalizing energy of myth takes control from the beginning of the sequence; the tension between tenor (autobiographical fact) and vehicle (myth) never relaxes for a moment. The poem is Romantic in essence, related directly to that genre of questromance so often described by Frye and Bloom—the journey toward home, the hero's necessary pilgrimage.
The Odyssey
remains the prototype of this genre, and one thing that never changes is the bereft condition of the traveler. He has lost an original state of bliss; like Dante's bewildered hero, the poet-pilgrim, he finds himself in a dark wood from which he must escape. In Blake's version of this basic myth, the contraries of existence constitute the dark wood that must be escaped. The modern hero has Milton's Satan for an ancestor, the Promethean figure who battles for his own redemption with little real hope for success. The High Romantics from Wordsworth through Yeats internalized this myth, which made the quest for self (and self-transcendence) the proper subject for poetry. The movement is from the discovery of the natural self to self-liberation through the redemptive powers of imagination, although, as Bloom says, “the imagination's freedom is frequently purgatorial, redemptive in direction but destructive of the social self.”
¹⁹

The “Lost Son” sequence is incomplete in that the quest never ends; the journey is regressive, and each step forward seems to precede two steps backward. The hero periodically lands on islands that promise to be home, but Circe and Calypso soon appear and he sees that Ithaca, self-realization, adulthood, and transcendental apocalypse are far away, an impossible shore.
The Far Field
represents the final stage in this mythic
journey. It is Roethke's
Paradise
But it has much more in common with Emerson (and Whitman) than any European source. The title poem, “The Far Field,” is one further ring widening out from Emerson's central text,
Nature
(1836): “Crossing a bare common, in snow puddles, at twilight, under a clouded sky, without having in my thoughts any occurrence of special good fortune, I have enjoyed a perfect exhilaration. Almost I fear to think how glad I am. In the woods too, a man casts off his years, as the snake his slough, and at what period soever of life, is always a child. In the woods, is perpetual youth.”
²⁰
Roethke writes in this vein: “For to come upon warblers in early May / Was to forget time and death”—