/ '
PO-EDIC SEQUENCES IN THEODORE ROETHKE'S
THE FAR FIELD
hy
JOHN ROBERT HOWELL, B.A.
A THESIS
IN
ENGLISH
Submitted to the Graduate Faculty
of Texas Technological College
in Partial Fulfillment of
the Requirements for
the Degree of
MASTER OF ARTS
Approved
August, 1968
hO^-V^^
TS
fio. II 7
CONTENTS
Ccrp- 2.
I.
II.
III.
INTRODUCTION
1
THE "NORTH AMERICAN" AND "MIXED" SEQUENCES
17
THE "METAPHY-SICAL" SEQUENCE
49
BIBLIOGRAPHY"
73
ii
CHAPTER I
INTRODUCTION
To most critics of his work, Theodore Roethke
is a very fine poet; to some, like James Dickey—and
xmdoubtedly Ralph J. Mills, Jr., who seems to be the
most prominent Roethke critic—he is a great American
poet. What is undeniable is that Roethke has written
a considerable number of extremely powerful and moving
poems.
His collected poems number about two hundred,
yet though relatively few in number they reflect the
same sort of exacting care one expects of T. S. Eliot
and Dylan Thomas; for Roethke was a craftsman of the
highest order. Despite his sudden death in I963, at
the height of his power, there is still a completeness
to his work.
Indeed, he himself declared that his last
completed collection. The Far Field, would be his last
book of poems. And so it proved to be; it was published
in 1964, the year after his death.
Significantly the first poem in Roethke's first
book of poems. Open House (I94l), typifies much of the
poetry he wrote in his twenty-five year career. The
first poem was also the title poem, and Roethke was
never, it seems, able to escape its basic tenets. It
begins:
tongue,"
"Jfy secrets cry aloud,/ I have no need for
He nearly always wrote as if he had no choice.
2
as if he could not stop his soul from singing. Then at
the beginning of stanza two he strikes another vital
chord,
"ify truths are all foreknown,/ This anguish
self-revealed."
The key word here is anguish, for
anguish became a dominant quality of much of his poetry,
even in his last book of poems. And in the final two
lines of this important poem he uses another word important in xmderstanding the rest of his poetry—agony.
"Rage warps my clearest cry/ To witless agony." There
is anguish, and there is agony; in short, Roethke's
poems frequently reflect a struggle.
In a review of
"Sequence, Sometimes Metaphysical" James Dickey puts it
another way:
His poems are human poems in the full weight of that
adjective: poems of a creature animal enough to
enter half into unthinking nature and unanimal
enough to be uneasy there, taking thought at what
the animal half discerns and feels.^
This struggle is the primary concern of this
thesis, especially as it relates to the sequences in his
final volume of poems. The struggle Roethke fought was
not physical, such as a struggle for wealth, fetme, or
recognition; rather, it was to discover his identity, to
understand it and its relation to the whole scheme of
things.
Some critics consider the struggle primarily a
Ijames Dickey, "Theodore Roethke," Poetry, CV
(November 1964), p. 120.
metaphysical one. These statements represent an oversimplification, but they do, in a general way, shed
light on all Roethke's poetry. The struggle is that
of his soul (spirit) and physical being to find the
meaning of life and to comprehend all that life includes.
As implied in the title of his last book Roethke
seems to have found some of the final answers to his
struggle in the symbol of the "far field," As early as
his third book of poems. Praise to the End, published in
1951, in the. poem "UnfoldJ
Unfold]" the concept of the
field as a symbol begins to appear. Early in the poem
he states:
"jl^e field is no longer simple:/ It's a
soul's crosc'
time," And often the crossing in his
poetry is a ] » ,,rimage or an expedition, a struggle, an
agonizing jci
jy. This longing for the realization of
the far field is also reflected in part five, "They Sing,
They Sing," of "The Dying Man, in Memoriam: W. B. Yeats,"
The longing soul of the poet cries:
Descend, 0 gentlest light, descend, descend.
0 sweet field far ahead, I hear your birds.
They sing, they sing, but still in minor
thirds (p. 190).2
An awareness of certain characteristics of Roethke
and his poetry helps to clarify his spiritual struggle.
The dominant element of all his poetry is, perhaps, his
All quotes in this paper except those from The
Far Field come from Words for the Wind (Bloomington,
1^87:—
extreme sensitivity to nature, whether rocks, animals,
or plants.
The Roethke fejnily had greenhouses and was
well-known for its flowers. This fact both provided
Roethke with much of the material for his first two
volumes of poems and helps explain his intense sensitivity to nature, especially plant life. Another aspect that must be kept in mind is Roethke's empathy with
his subject matter.
speaks of.
In effect,.he becomes the things he
He doesn't merely tell about something or
describe it; he feels with it and for it.
This leads to
many complex passages in his poetry, some almost indecipherable.
Still aaiother characteristic of most of his
poetry is the objective approach it reveals.
He seldom
tells the reader how or what to think; nor does he say
specifically how he himself is thinking.
What the reader
gets is a series of facts or events so arranged as to
convey the empathy with the subject the poet himself
feels.
Thus one must associate the many details Roethke
gives with a particular event or object in one's own experience.
To get meaning, if one chooses to call it that,
from one of Roethke's poems, one will often have to take
the same mental journey Roethke did, using the objective
details in the poems as signposts. There is, of course,
a heavy subjective influence on the arrangement of details and in the feeling involved, but the poems themselves are nearly always limited to objective, concrete
detail.
Roethke seldom dealt in abstractions.
And one can hardly forget the many questions
Roethke asks—a factor that constitutes another specific
feature of much of his verse. As a result, since to
answer his questions would be to know the answers to
fundamental questions concerning man and his relation
to the universe and reality, answers Roethke devoted
much of his life to explore, they give Roethke's poetry
an incisiveness and insight that could hardly be obtained
any other way.
These questions reveal the ineffable im-
plications of Roethke's poetic searchings, the insights
he glimpsed but could only express by asking the reader
what he had asked himself, the context of the questions
helping to point the way.
Showing man where he is and
where he has yet to go, they are a special part of
Roethke's poetry.
As a consequence of these technical aspects, much
perception and spiritual insight are demanded of the
reader of Roethke's poems. This is especially true of
his well-known, experimental fourteen poem "sequence,"
published in earlier books and of many of the poems in
The Far Field.
The reader must often release his mind
to this modern Virgil and be led by him to the far field,
for it is there he found many of the answers he sought.
Before treating The Far Field in detail it is best,
and in some cases necessary, to know something of
6
Roethke's development up to the time of The Far Field,
the period from about 1940 to I96I.
Much, if not all,
®^ ^^Q Fo^r Field was written between I961 and I963, and
that period of his poetry will consequently be the primary area of concentration for this study.
But the whole
context of his life is relevant.
Theodore Roethke was born in Michigan in I908, and
after graduating from Michigan State University did graduate work at Harvard.
He then began a career of teaching
at various universities until settling down at the University of Washington in 194?. Always drawn to the north
and northwest, he spent much of his life there, a factor
which influenced the imagery and subject matter of much
of his poetry.
His wife, Beatrice, is still living,
Roethke's first book of poems. Open House, was
published in March of 194l, and his second. The Lost Son
and Other Poems, in 1948. The latter began a remarkable
sequence of fourteen experimental poems which he completed
in his fourth book. The Waking (1953)> which won him a
Pulitzer Prize for that year. Nine of the fourteen poems
appeared in Praise To The End, published in 1951. In
1958 he published his collected verse. Words for the Wind,
It won him several honors, most notable of which was the
National Book Award.
In I96I he published 1 Ami
Says
the Lamb, which included lighter poems, children's poems.
and nonsense verse.
Before he died in I963 Roethke
let it be known he was working on a book of poems which
would probably be his last. As mentioned before, he
died before it was published, but when The Far Field came
out in 1964 it won Roethke posthumously his second National Book Av/ard,
His poetry career had thus spanned
nearly twenty-five years,
Roethke was from first to last
a philosophical poet with an intense preoccupation with
all aspects of nature:
rocks, water, trees, flowers,
weather, animals large and "minimal," man, and God.
Literally and figuratively, he left no stone unturned.
Thus the title of his last book. The Far Field, illustrates clearly his love of the things of nature:
he
loved everything he found in the far field.
Open House is considered a good first book of
poems.
Stylistically it is traditional, and more or
less so in content.
But what becomes clear in the poems
are elements of Roethke's distinct nature:
his love of
the bodily senses, his intense feeling, his love of
nature, and his especial love of plants and flowers.
Perhaps it was Roethke's intense feelings for these
things that was the most remarkable aspect of these
poems, an intensity that at times rivals that of Dylan
Thomas.
It was, however, his second book of poems. The
Lost Son and Other Poems, that established him as an
innovator.
In it appeared the title poem of his sequence.
8
"The Lost Son," undoubtedly the best of the fourteen
which constitute the whole. Its organization is certainly
clearer.
In this sequence of poems, which Roethke was not
to complete until The Waking, he initiated the body-soul
struggle which he carried on through the last of his poems.
In the sequence Roethke wrote in first person, but the
"protagonist" (as Roethke calls him) in these poems is
really a child; at one point in the cycle the age of thirteen is mentioned.
The boy in these poems is seeking to
establish his origin and identity. Thus he traces his
origin back through the ages to "sub-human" origins in
nature. Then he again begins to rediscover his identity.
Roethke said in "Open Letter," published originally in
1950:
"I believe that to go forward as a spiritual man
3
it is necessary first to go back."
The struggle recounted
in the fourteen poems is thus primarily a spiritual, a
metaphysical, one.
Roethke's mature style, first illustrated in The
Lost Son volume, is rather like the stream-of-consciousness
method in fiction. The poems are divided into sections,
usually three, four, or five to each poem. The poems
relate a complex series of subjectively arranged events
and images, from which emerges an increasingly defined
struggle, that for identity.
Nearly always there is an
^On the Poet and His Craft; Selected Prose of
Theodore Roethke, ed. by Ralph J. Mills, Jr. (SeattTe,
19^3)^ p."35^ ""Open Letter" first appeared in MidCentury American Poets, John Ciardi, ed.
9
intense empathy with respect to all that surrounds the
poet and all that is and has been a part of his experience.
But since the order in the poems is alogical, a
subjective welter of impressions, meaning is often difficult to grasp.
Of the fourteen poems in the sequence
"The Lost Son," the title poem is the only one with any
sort of clearly defined order.
Each poem has a loose overall theme, and each internal section generally treats some aspect.
But there is
no logical progression -and no story being told.
There is
only a listing of impressions and events, and it is in
these terms the poet expresses himself empathetically and
subjectively, though employing objective detail.
If one
fails tc become a part of Roethke's poems, he will never
fully understand them, for meaning cannot be extracted
neatly step by step, but only through a sort of revelation when the reader himself is caught up in the current
of the poem and experiences himself the things Roethke
4
speaks of.
In 1954 Roethke published his prize-winning The
Waking. It included previously published poems and a few
new ones, the most notable of which was "Four for Sir
John Davies," a poem in four long parts.
This poem
showed the influence of Davies and, more importantly, of
^See ibid., p. 42.
10
Yeats.
The first section is entitled "The Dance," a
title which has obvious Yeatsian overtones. The poem explores, among other themes, love both sensual and spiritual.
The Wakinp; was followed in I958 by Words for the
Wind, his collected verse at the time, though it omitted
many of his earlier poems. The book, which won the
National Book Award, is divided into two parts: "The
Waking," the poems that won him the Pulitzer Prize in
1953a and "New Poems." The new poems were largely traditional in approach, more like those in his first volume
5
and the first three parts of his second volume. The five
sections of new poems are entitled:
1) "An Interlude,"
2) "Love Poems," 3) "Voices and Creatures," 4) "The Dying
Man," 5) "Meditations of an Old Woman." The "Interlude" includes lighter pieces and children's verse. Among the
lighter pieces is nonsense verse, for which Roethke always had a particular liking, primarily because of its
distinct rhymes and rhythms. Rhythm was vitally important
to Roethke, hence his concern with the dance. Even in his
powerful fourteen-poem sequence cited above he included
much nonsense verse, in these instances the immature
thoughts of a child.
5part IV of The Lost Son and Other Poems contained
"The Lost Son" and three other poems of the Lost Son"
sequence. It was this final section of the volume that
marked Roethke as an innovator.
11
The "Love Poems" in Words for the Wind are traditional but nevertheless advance many of Roethke's themes.
The section "Voices and Creatures" is varied in style
and more pessimistic.
appearances here.
Death and evil make frequent
The final two sections are the most
notable of the five. Actually, each is a poetic sequence
consisting of five related poems.
"The Dying Man," sub-
titled "In Memorial: W. B. Yeats," in effect explores
some common themes of Yeats and Roethke, among them death
and singing.
"Meditations of an Old Woman" is composed
of five internal monologues of an old woman.
The tech-
nique here is somewhat similar to the one Roethke employed
in his "fourteen poem" sequence, though here closer to
stream-of-consciousness.
The woman moves randomly back
and forth in time, thinking fondly of her youth and of
the present harsher realities.
In 1961 Roethke published _I Ami Says the Lamb,
which included previously published poems and new nonsense poems.
The title of the book hints at Roethke's
concern with being and identity.
This overpowering joy
of being took form for Roethke in a spontaneous outpouring, frequently as nonsense verse.
The poems are actually
more meaningful than they are at first glance, but with
titles like "The Kitty-Cat Bird," "The Whale," "The
Chair," and "Goo-Girl," one hardly expects struggle and
agony.
Indeed, these poems almost entirely reflect the
12
purely joyous side of Roethke's character, the joy of
merely being alive.
The Far Field is divided into four parts and includes only new poems.
The four parts are:
I "North
American Sequence," II "Love Poems," III "Mixed Sequence,"
IV "Sequence, Sometimes Metaphysical,"
As may be noted
here, Roethke uses the term sequence with some frequency.
Although his sequences do not tell a story or follow any
carefully prescribed pattern, they do explore some large
thematic area, a spiritual problem or concept, an area
which cannot readily be defined, but which represents
the totality of the import of the individual poems. The
fourteen-poem "Lost Son" sequence is an instance already
mentioned and may be examined in detail as typical.
To understand a given poem of the "Lost Son" sequence is not to understand or have "the key" to them
all even though the technique may be the same in each
instance.
A quick reading would seem to indicate only
that the poems are all nearly alike in technique.
But
as the word sequence implies, the poems hang together,
each poem exploring some aspect of the total meaning.
The poems in Roethke's sequences are broadly related and
similar, but are not mere repetition of the exact same
material.
Each of Roethke's sequential poems is a
^"Sequence, Sometimes Metaphysical" also appeared
separately in an expensive format.
13
distinct entity and can be meaningful when read by itself, even out of the sequence context.
The poems in the "Lost Son" sequence were conceived of and published at random intervals and not as a
whole until The Waking (1953).
Only four poems of the
"Lost Son" sequence appeared in The Lost Son and Other
Poems (1948), the volume which initiated it. Nine
appeared in Praise to the End (1951) and one in The Waking (1953).
In The Waking the concluding poem is simply
added to the complete sequence, which appears here as a
unit for the first time, though with some rearrangement
of the original order. For example, "The Lost Son" has
been moved from the first position to the seventh. This
final order seems to follow a simple sort of progression,
that of the maturing process. "Where Kiock is Open Wide3"
the first poem in The Waking, is childlike in style and
tends toward nonsense verse. This can be seen in an example from part one of the poem:
A kitten can
Bite with his feet;
Papa and Mamma
Have more teeth.
Sit and play
Under the rocker
Until the cows
All have puppies (p. 63).
The later poems become more sophisticated in style and
content, as exemplified by selection from part two of
the last poem of the sequence, "0 Thou Opening, 0":
14
The dark has its own light.
A son has many fathers.
Stand by a slow stream:
Hear the sign of what is.
Be a pleased rock
On a plain day.
Waking's
Kissing.
Yes (p. 108).
This selection also illustrates another of Roethke's
peculiar propensities: the progressively shortening line
length to end a stanza or poem. .
Any clearly logical or emotional progression in
the preceding sequence is difficult, if not impossible,
to find.
In general, however, it can be said that the
poems that constitute it explore the origins and meanings
of life and the identity of the soul and self from the
point of view of a thirteen-year-old boy, covering his
life from birth to puberty.
There is another aspect of Roethke's poetry, in
addition to the sequence structure, which is particularly
evident in the three "far field" sequences.
This is
Roethke's cataloging of objects, places, and events.
Roethke himself stated his inclination for this technique or "technical effect," which he called "enumeration," in "Some Remarks on Rhythm."
7
This, of course,
places him directly in the tradition of the Whitmanian
catalog, as he himself admits.
Finally, in his last
•7
Mills, 0£. cit., p. 82. This article originally
appeared in Poetry XCVlI (October I96O).
15
volume Roethke used again many of the symbols and techniques which were already an established part of his
thematic development.
The Far Field, then, truly represents the culmination of Roethke»s work, both poetically and thematically.
The sequence is undoubtedly his finest--and certainly
his most unique—contribution poetically, and it reaches
its full maturity in this volume.
Major themes he
treated in his earlier poetry also reach a culmination
in his final volume.
This is particularly true of his
metaphysical strivings and struggles.
In The Far Field
he does seem to reach many of the final answers he
sought, and the book does then provide a fitting climax
to his work.
Critical comment on The Far Field and its sequences hat been mixed, though always generally favorable.
Several critics contend that Praise to the End
is his peak and that if The Far Field equals it, at
least it does not surpass it.
Other critics feel The
Far Field is indeed the culmination of Roethke's work.
Typical comments are the following.
John Wain contends that The Far Field is merely
a continuance of earlier themes:
With regard to subject matter. The Far Field makes
no conspicuous forward move. The themes of these
last poems are the themes of all Roethke's work:
the interplay of human with nonhuman life, the
quest for a peace and joy that represents individual salvation. Once or twice there are hints of a
16
redistribution of emphasis: the word "God," which
is not often met with in the poems of the forties
and fifties, occurs more frequently here, and is
evidently not used lightly; there are hints of a
movement toward religious belief.8
Frederick J. Hoffman seems to feel that the work pushes
ahead to further resolutions:
The Far Field demonstrates the extent to which
Roethke has defined death to himself before the
summer of I963. The poems, or some of them, also
testify to the agony of moving toward the threshold
of death. I do not mean to say that the thought of
death was constantly with him, but only that he
suffered a type of "dark night" and that it was
partly caused by his being unable to will a transcendence that he could also will to believe in.9
And Ralph J. Mills is still more lavish in his praise
than Hoffman, feeling The Far Field to go beyond any of
Roethke's previous work:
I want to call attention here to the different
phases of the self's evolution as we find them
treated in the last poems of The Far Field, especially in those two parts of the book called
North American Sequence" and "Sequence, Sometimes
Metaphysical" in which the poet exceeds the limits
of previous development and sets forth on an
arduous but successful quest for mystical illumination. 10
And further in the same article he says:
In The Far Field he begins to purify and purge himself as he aims toward a union with or experience of
the Divine: that process reaches its zenith in the
lyrics of Sequence, Sometimes MetaphysicalJ"ll
°John Wain, "The Monocle of Ify Sea-Faced Uncle,"
Theodore Roethke: Essays on the Poetry, ed. Arnold Stein
(Seattle, 19^5), p.
^"The Poetic Shape of Death," Ibid., p. IO9.
10"Roethke's Last Poems," Ibid., p. 115.
11Ibid., p. 120.
CH/VPl^ER II
THE "NORTH AMERICAN" AND "MIXED" SEQUENCES
As indicated earlier. The Far Field contains
1?
three sequences. '^ Using the word in the technical sense
in which Roethke held it, the first of these, "North American Sequence" represents, at least in part, an attempt
by Roethke to set forth, as Mills avers, "on an arduous
but successful quest for mystical illumination."
And
later in his article he goes on to say:
Appropriately enough, "North American Sequence"
begins in a condition of spiritual emptiness and
torpor. The poet is at the nadir, sunk in a world
of the senses, tormented by a hypersensitive awareness of physical and moral decay.13
"North American Sequence" is composed of six poems, the
first of which is "The Longing," a poem in three parts
whose very title reflects the searching, struggling attitude of the poet.
Part one shows the poet to be exper-
iencing a time of "sensual emptiness" when nothing excites.
Since the senses, and most of all sight, were of extreme
importance to Roethke, this lack of sensation is produced
by a spiritual wasteland.
The imagery here is especially
reminiscent of the ash-heap wasteland in The Great Gatsby.
-'•^Part II, "Love Poems," which is not a sequence,
will not be considered in this paper.
-^^"Roethke's Last Poems," 0£. cit,, p, 120.
17
18
RoetW^e says in part one:
In a bleak time, when a week of rain is a year.
The slag-heaps fume at the edge of the raw cities:
The gulls wheel over their singular garbage;
The great trees no longer shimmer;
Not even the soot dances (p. 18?).^^
In part two of the poem Roethke seems to imagine or
dream of sensations in his longing, so much does he wish
them, and words he used over and over in his earlier
poetry reappear: rose, flame, light, bud, naked.
The
poet in his mental struggle empathizes with his dreams:
The light cries out, and I am there to hear—
I'd be beyond; I'd be beyond the moon.
Bare as a bud, and naked as a worm (p. l88).
In Roethke's poetry inanimate objects frequently cry
out, reflecting the poet's empathy with all of nature;
in this instance the light "cries out."
In part three
the poet, in the Whitmanesque catalog tradition, lists
those things that he wishes to be a part of. He begins:
I would with the fish, the blackening salmon, and
the mad lemmings.
The children dancing, the flowers widening (p. l88).
and then he seems to achieve or foresee a coming-out of
the darkness and catch a glimpse of the realm of pure
delight:
A leaf, I would love the leaves, delighting in the
redolent disorder of this mortal life.
This ambush, this silence.
Where shadow can change into flame,
and the dark be forgotten (p. l88).
l^All quotes from The Far Field are from Collected
Poems (New York, I966).
19
Roethke always struggled to overcome the darkness and
find the realm of light, of "pure spirit."
The darkness,
the night, was necessary, but only as a precursor, a
harbinger of the light.
More will be said later about
darkness as a symbol.
The second poem, and a well-known later poem, is
"Meditation at Oyster River."
In his article, "A Green-
house Eden," Louis L, Martz attempts to explain the method
involved in the poem and whole sequence:
The method of exploration followed in all these
poems is basically the same as that found in
'Meditation at Oyster River" and the other poems
of that later sequence: it consists of arousing,
first, a flurry of images, as in one of those old
glass spheres where one used to shake up a storm
of snowflakes, and then watch them settle down
around a clear landscape; or as in that poem by
Frost where the speaker, watching the waters in
a well, sees, or thinks he sees, a flash of truth
at the bottom. The method may be found at work
withiii the purview of a whole sequence, or within
a poem in the sequence, or within a section of a
poem in the sequence.15
Part one, of four parts, is a beautifully effective description of night's coming on the river,
Roethke's care-
fully trained eye and ear sensitively record many details of the setting; he was ever attuned to nature:
The wind slackens, light as a moth fanning a stone:
A twilight wind, light as a child's breath
Turning not a leaf, not a ripple (p. I90).
But in the sleep of the night, the poet is afraid, and
•^^Theodore Roethke, op. cit., p. 31.
20
death appears "Among the shy beasts," the animals at the
river.
Yet in his desire the poet asserts: "With these
would I be," and with even more, "with water."
The
poet wishes to be a part of nature in spite of death's
presence.
Once again aware of the hour of coming darkness,
his empathy with the river's surroundings returns:
The flesh takes on the pure poise of the spirit.
Acquires, for a time, the sandpiper's insouciance.
The hummingbird's surety, the kingfisher's cunning—
I shift on my rock, and I think (p. I91).
He thinks of spring's coming and the first thaw.
Then
in the time of a daily cycle, the poet is reminded of
another cycle, that of the changing seasons.
In part
four the poet connects the dusk with the dawn, periods
of change, periods of nature's rhythm:
Now, in this waning of light,
I rock with the motion of morning (p. I9I).
Roethke then concludes the poem by saying:
In the first of the moon.
All's a scattering,
A shining (p. 192).
The time of coming dark becomes a time of "shining," a
time of light, for the poet has realized in the dusk
hour "the pure poise of the spirit."
He has seen and
learned something of his place in the scheme of things
and expresses this, aptly, in part three when he refers
to "In this hour,/
In this first heaven of knowing."
21
The third poem of the sequence is "Journey to the
Interior."
Once again the title alone suggests a striv-
ing, and the first line of this three-part poem leaves
no doubt the journey is more than merely a physical one.
The poem begins:
In the long journey out of the self.
There are many detours, washed-out interrupted
raw places
Where the shale slides dangerously
And the back wheels hang almost over the edge
At the sudden veering, the moment of turning (p. 193).
The remainder of part one continues to describe a strenuous physical journey through rough badlands, a journey
that is both literal and symbolic.
In part two of
"Journey to the Interior" more of the journey is described, some of it on the rough roads, some on highways.
Roethke again lists the myriad details of the event—
animals, weather, a town, and plant life.
Then the flash
of scenes lulls the poet to meditation; time ceases,
"time folds/ Into a long moment." And then the poet becomes again one with nature, in empathy with nature, in
what is now a mental journey, a mental struggling over
harsh roads:
And I hear the lichen speak.
And the ivy advance with its white lizard
feet (p. 194).
The third and last part of the poem is compact and complex.
In the quiet time of dusk the flesh is lulled to
sleep, and the poet's soul, the "interior," becomes
:
I
evident. Within him are both dark and light or light
22
(the light of revelation) within darkness, and death
too is found there. But it is at that moment when he
is at one with himself and nature that he hears the allimportant song, the answers he seeks from the dead:
As a blind man, lifting a curtain, knov/s it is
morning,
I know this change:
On one side of silence there is no smile;
But when I breathe with the birds,
The spirit of wrath becomes the spirit of blessing.
And the dead begin from their dark to sing in my
sleep (p. 195).
The fourth poem, which is in five parts, is "The
Long Waters," in part one of which the poet once again
expresses his desire for the realm of change and the
inner realm of the soul. This desire for change, for
empathy with pure being, occurs again and again in
Roethke's poetry.
The realm of change, of struggle, is
closely allied to rhythms and cycles in nature and to
an extent with the dance in Yeats. Thus Roethke speaks
of his desire for things both physical and subjective,
the subjective being an empathy with nature, with:
The unsinging fields where no lungs breathe.
Where light is stone (p. I96).
The final lines of this stanza describe a coastal setting
where fresh and salt water meet.
In part two the poet's contemplation of this
cyclic aspect of life causes him to think of death. He
asks protection from "the worm's advance and retreat."
23
But in the face of death he also contemplates the beauty
present: "Feeling, I still delight in my last fall."
Part three is simpler and more direct.
Here Roethke is
cataloging or enumerating what he sees in the place of
the long waters, an estuary.
The picture is one of decay
and desolation, which links this part with part two. The
desolate estuary has reminded Roethke of death, and again
the physical and the symbolic and subjective are joined.
Part four describes the "landlocked bay" in the
early morning, when all would seem to be quiet and peaceful, but the scene is still one of a foreboding desolation.
The waves are smooth, graceful, and gentle, but
an ominous atmosphere pervades:
V/here impulse no longer dictates, nor the
darkening shadow,
A vulnerable place,
Cv.rrounded by sand, broken shells, the
wreckage of water (p. 197).
At the beginning of part five it is again evening, and
the setting has sparked anew desire within him.
Then
again the cyclic rhythm of life asserts itself:
I see in the advancing and retreating waters
The shape that came from my sleep, weeping (p. I98).
The latter portion of part five unites and sums up the
whole poem.
The poet has returned from another visionary
and spiritual journey:
I, who came back from the depths laughing too loudly.
Become another thing;
Ify eyes extend beyond the farthest bloom of the waves;
I lose and find myself in the long water;
24
I am gathered together once again;
I embrace the world (p. I98).
This poem and "Meditation at Oyster River" are thus
similar in approach, content, and technique.
The long fifth poem of the sequence is the title
poem of the volume, "The Far Field."
Once again the
journeying, striving theme is made clear early in this
four-part poem.
In this poem, says Louis Martz, "the
mind recovers completely its early sense of unity with
natural things."
It begins quite plainly:
of journeys repeatedly."
"I dream
In this short first part the
poet drives along a peninsula until he is off the highway, and even off the rubble of what is perhaps an old
trail; he drives until he is stuck in sand and snow and
can go no further.
This physical journey symbolizes
his journey within, to "the interior" of his soul, pushing to mental and spiritual limits in his search for
answers.
The long second part is really quite compact, for
in it Roethke manages to describe the far, secluded field.
What also becomes evident is that the physical field is a
microcosm and a symbol of eternity.
Early in this part
there are images of death: "tin cans, tires, rusted pipes,
broken machinery," a dead rat, and a cat with its entrails
•*-^"A Greenhouse Eden," ibid., p. 17.
blown out by the niglit watchman. But the poet is quick
to point out:
25
"my grief was not excessive," since in
the far field are all the birds with their varying colors
and songs. Then there are references to reincarnation,
still another type of cycle. All is there in the far
field—eternity, timeless cycles:
I learned not to fear infinity.
The far field, the windy cliffs of forever.
The dying of time in the white light of
tomorrow (p. 200).
In part three a river again catches the poet's eye.
Though it is not perfectly clear from the poem, the
river seems to remind him again of death:
I have come to a still, but not a deep center
A point outside the glittering current (p. 201).
This may refer to the point of death. But death seems
only another part of a cycle, a cycle which could lead
only to rebirth.
Perhaps this is why Roethke says:
I am renewed by death, thought of my death.
The dry scent of a dying garden in
September (p. 201).
Almost a nutshell condensation of Roethke's
philosophy, part four is concise and powerful. The
reader discovers that not only is the far field a
microcosm, but also man himself, in this instance the
poet.
This can be better understood when one remembers
Roethke's intense empathy with all of nature; he tends
to become himself the things he sees and hears. • In this
trip to the far field Roethke thus discovers his own
26
immensity and kinship with all of existence:
A man faced with his own immensity
Wakes all the waves, all their loose wandering fire.
•
.
.
.
He is the end of things, the final man.
All finite things reveal infinitude:
.
.
.
.
Silence of water above a sunken tree:
The pure serene of memory in one man,—
A ripple widening from a single stone
Winding around the waters of the world (p. 201).
Many physical trips have been taken in these
poems—Oyster River, the landlocked estuary, the far
field—each different in purely physical terms.
But each
is also, on a symbolic level, a journey, a struggle, into
the soul, into the "final man."
That is where Roethke
finds his answers, but of course he sees these answers in
the world about him.
The world to him is a symbol of the
soul; explain man and nature, he would say, and you have explained the soul.
The final,poem in the first sequence, "The Rose,"
is the longest and, like "The Far Field," is also in four
parts.
Roethke is always quick to make location clear.
The setting is once again the landlocked estuary of "The
Long Waters," and dusk is falling.
It becomes clear
that times and places of change are important to
Roethke, perhaps because of what they reveal, perhaps
because they are indicative of the rhythm and cycle in
nature.
One recalls the frequent references to dusk and
dawn in this whole sequence.
In the first part of "The
Rose" there are two types of change present:
the
estuary where salt and fresh water meet and the coming
of darkness.
The poet ponders the dark and silence:
I svray outside myself
Into the darkening currents (p. 202),
Part two begins by describing the rhythm of a
ship, and as a ship, says Roethke, so "Our motion continues."
But in contrast is the wild sea rose he finds
at the edge of the sea; it, unlike him, is stable, an
absolute in nature.
The rose seems akin to the eremite
star of Keats and Frost, or, as Mart? suggests in his
article, to various of Eliot's rose :>
,es. And then
in his contemplation the roses draw h n;i back to childhood and his father's huge greenhouses and roses, and he
recalls that even then the roses "seemed to flow toward
me, to beckon me, only a child, out of myself."
Part
two is concluded with two weighty lines, one of Roethke's
incisive questions, set apart:
What need for heaven, then.
With that man, and those roses (p. 203)?
In part three the poet neglects for a moment the
rose and seeks to answer the question he poses in this
part's first line, a question whose relevance he makes
clear in the poem's culminating fourth part:
they tell us, sound and silence?"
"What do
Roethke then enumer-
ates many "American sounds," but returns to the "twittering of swallows above water."
When that sound, symbolic-
ally a sound of the spirit, causes light to enter the
27
28
sleeping soul and "the mind remembers all," then, he
concludes, "Beautiful my desire, and the place of my
desire,"
His striving for an understanding of man,
nature, the universe, the soul, is then fulfilled.
The
remainder of part three emphasizes that there are really
two types of sounds, those heard by the ears and those
heard by the soul.
The physical sounds, it seems, evoke
the latter, which take the form of light entering the
soul,
"I think of the rock singing, and light making
its own silence," the poet says.
These are soul sounds
or, to use the title of a current song, the sounds of
silence, of a meditative mind.
In part four, perhaps the most powerful portion
of any of these poems and certainly one of the most beautiful and moving, Roethke returns to his rose:
Near this rose, in this grove of sun-parched,
wind-warped madronas.
Among the half-dead trees, I came upon the true
ease of myself.
As if another man appeared out of the depths of
my being.
And I stood outside myself.
Beyond becoming and perishing,
A Something wholly other.
As if I swayed out on the wildest wave alive.
And yet was still.
And I rejoiced in being what I was:
.
.
.
.
And in this rose, this rose in the sea-wind.
Rooted in stone, keeping the whole of light.
Gathering to itself sound and silence-Mine and the sea-wind's (p. 205).
Indeed the rose's presence has so moved him that he is
29
two men, one presumably his physical self, the other
his soul-self.
The rhythmic image is also present again;
the other self is in perfect empathy with nature and thus
"dances" to her timeless cadences.
He was motionless
physically, yet his soul was alive and vibrant.
The rose
thus seems to be a symbol for man and Roethke himself,
for it keeps "the whole of light," which is what Roethke
most diligently seeks.
Light here seems to include both
sound and silence, the world physical and metaphysical,
object and symbol.
It is obvious the poems of the "North American
Sequence" are diverse, yet united by common themes.
Each of the six poems "takes place" in a nature setting
and often includes a journey.
In each poem, too, the
symbolic parallels of the physical aescriptions are made
clear; i.e., it is evident that the real purpose in
these poems is to explore man's inner self, his soul.
In effect, Roethke shows the reader that nature is
really but a symbol of man's soul, that v/hen one truly
perceives nature he concomitantly learns of his own self.
Thus the journey and exploration in each of these poems
is a journey into the poet's own self and, by extension,
into the self or soul of all men.
The second major section of Roethke's book, "Mixed
Sequence," consists of seventeen poems, almost three times
the number in "North American Sequence"; yet all but a
couple of the poems are much shorter; only five are
30
divided into numbered parts. And whereas each poem in
"North American Sequence" could be termed major, most
in "Mixed Sequence" are minor.
Tone and content in this
sequence are varied; thus the adjective "mixed" is
appropriate.
The first poem, "The Abyss," is quite long, consisting of five parts, and is the major poem of the
sequence.
John Wain describes it briefly in his article:
"The Abyss," for instance, a very moving poem which
describes the dark downward journey into the pit of
a mental breakdown, has a definitely religious tinge
in the sections that describe the slow, wavering.
but joyful ascent back to stability and freedom.17
Roethke used the word "abyss" in at least one other earlier poem, "The Pure Fury," in Words for the Wind:
I live near the abyss. I hope to stay
Until mj'- eyes look at a brighter sun
As th^ thick shade of the long night comes on (p. I58).
The edge of the abyss is another of those points of
change, like dusk or dawn:
here it is the edge between
darkness and light, or their symbolic equivalent.
In
his article, "Roethke's Last Poems," Ralph J, Mills describes the edge as "that precarious border in Roethke's
poems between ecstasy and the void."-^^
In the above pas-
sage the abyss is associated with "the long night," which
17"The Monocle of My Sea-Faced Uncle," Ibid.,
p. 72.
l^Ibid,, p. 127.
could be death itself, the dark night of the soul,
31
the unknown, or the place of internal struggling and
agony before the light."^^ Roethke's ambiguity is frequently hard to resolve.
Part one of the poem implies that the abyss is
ever near, a present possibility, if not a present
reality:
And the abyss? the abyss?
The abyss you can't miss:
It lis right where you are—
A step down the stair (p. 219).
In part two the poet indicates that he has had a brush
with death, and "the terrible hunger for objects quails
me."
He even evokes the great enumerator:
"Be with me.
Whitman, maker of catalogues." Death would appear to be
one part of the abyss which faces the poet, and with the
coming of death he loses his grasp upon objects and loftiness of thought.
He becomes a lowly creature:
A furred caterpillar crawls down a string.
My symbol]
For I have moved closer to death, lived with
death (p. 220).
Part three, brilliant and beautiful, reveals more
about the abyss. In this part, too, Roethke tells of the
agony of his learning and struggle:
Too much reality can be a dazzle, a surfeit;
Too close immediacy an exhaustion:
% h e dark night of the soul as it functions in
Roethke's poetry will be further explained in the discussion of "In a Dark Time" in "Sequence, Sometimes
Metaphysical."
32
As when the door swings open in a florist's
storeroom—
The rush of smells strikes like a cold fire, the
throat freezes.
And we turn back to the heat of August,
Chastened.
So the abyss—
The slippery cold heights.
After the blinding misery.
The climbing, the endless turning.
Strike like a fire,
A terrible violence of creation,
A flash into the burning heart of the abominable;
Yet if we wait, unafraid, beyond the fearful instant.
The burning lake turns into a forest pool.
The fire subsides into rings of water,
A sunlit silence (p. 221).
The abyss in this passage is a time of purgation, "the
pure fury" of the spirit, the place beyond the pale of
death, of mere worldly phenomena.
If the violence and
agony of the abyss are endured a sv/eetness will unfold.
This concept brings to mind the final lines of "The Lost
Son":
A lively understandable spirit
Once entertained you.
It will come again.
Be still.
Wait (p. 85).
The "sunlit silence," the light, does not, however, come
painlessly.
Pure reality seems too much to bear.
In
part three it is so pure, so condensed, so unbearably
strong, that it becomes black, takes the form of the
abyss.
But endured for a time, it resolves itself, its
fires die, and the white light of silence is revealed.
In part four the poet begins by acknowledging his
desire for dreams and the realm of meditation.
He
desires only pure being where "Kiiowing slows for
moment/ And not-knowing enters, silent,"
the realm of pure empathy.
a
.> '
He dosires
In his exploration of his
soul he nears the vital truths he desires, yet paradoxically the realm of darkness, the abyss, is also the
place of the quiet light where the conflicts are resolved.
The further he enters into the darkness, the
nearer he comes to the still light of the center:
I rock between dark and dark,
Ify soul nearly my ov/n,
Ify dead selves singing.
And I embrace this calm—
Such quiet under the small leaves]—
Near the stem, whiter at root,
A luminous stillness (p. 221).
The final portion of the poem, part five, is
short and moderately joyful.
It would seem that the
poet has resolved the problems of the abyss and emerged
into the desired realm of pure "being."
saying, "I thirst by day.
He begins by
I watch by night."
This
statement recalls the poems of "North American Sequence,"
and the lines that follow bear this out.
These last lines
of the poem are joyous, a soul's singing:
I am most immoderately married:
The Lord God has taken my heaviness away;
I have merged, like the bird, with the bright day.
And my thought flies to the place by the bo-tree.
Being, not doing, is my first joy (p. 222).
Whatever the problems of the abyss they have been, at
least for a time, resolved.
The abyss is thus no simple, clearly defined image
34
or symbol.
It becomes a symbol for all times of trial,
whether death, the contemplation of man's place in reality,
or the searchings of the soul.
It is the place where a
man is stripped of all pretense and sham, where man is
faced with being itself and discovers the resulting
"luminous stillness."
The abyss can be experienced at
any time, many times, and under different circumstances,
for it is the shade that is ever with us.
The second poem of this sequence, called simply
"Elegy," is much shorter than "The Abyss" and altogether
different in content.
The person eulogized is a woman
named Aunt Tilly, and again Roethke is listing information
about her.
In "Elegy," a poem of five irregular stanzas,
he has picked those various qualities that best illustrate
Tilly's character.
In direct contrast to "The Abyss," the
\;
r"
description in this poem is direct, simple, and delicately
Jf
r"
r
revealing:
I recall how she harried the children away all the
late summer
From the one beautiful thing in her yard, the
peach-tree;
How she kept the wizened, the fallen, the misshapen
for herself.
And picked and pickled the best, to be left on
rickety doorsteps (p. 223).
Aunt Tilly was at harmony with being:
Sighs, sighs, who says they have sequence?
Between the spirit and the flesh—what war?
She never knew (p. 223).
The next poem is "Otto," which consists of four
nearly regular stanzas, three of eleven lines and the
['
r
last of nine.
The poerr is a reminiscence of Otto and
of other figures of th
35
.oyts past, including his father.
Otto was a Prussian florist, probably a worker in the
Roethke greenhouses, and is also the name of Roethke»s
father.
In stanza one we leam Otto is a direct man,
not given to subtleties.
"He potted plants as if he hated
them," but the result was that the plants always grew and
"their bloom extended him."
He apparently put much of
himself into his work and, like Aunt Tilly, loved life.
Stanza two reinforces this idea. The poet here relates
a story of what Otto did to two poachers he once caught.
After firing a warning shot he walked up to and slapped
them both:
It was no random act, for those two men
Had slaughtered game, and cut young fir trees
down (p, 224),
Otto had the reverence for life, which Roethke deeply
valued.
Stanza three explores the local group of Germans
who were florists, which would include Otto.
Roethke
questions why they built so many greenhouses. Yet they
were violent men too; they killed cats who came too near
their pheasant runs:
Who loves the small can be both saint and boor,
(And some grow out of shape, their seed impure;)
The Indians loved him, and the Polish poor (p. 225).
The last stanza laments the lost world of his father and
the other German florists.
recalls the scene.
It is the coming of dawn which
Dawn and dusk are Roethke's times of
trial.
The poem thus laments "lost, violent souls" of
the past, roan close to nature.
Otto is like Aunt Tilly,
and the qualities Roethke admires in them are those he
values in all people.
The next poems are somevrhat miscellaneous in
nature.
"The Chums" is a wistful recollection of past
friends and their sisters. The only notable connection
betv/een this minor poem and the,previous tv70 poems is
that all three are reminiscences about people.
"The
Lizard" is a more significant poem and the first of the
sequence about an animal, and is one of many excellent
poems about various types of animal life.
In "The
Lizard" Roethke relates an encounter with a lizard on
a terrace, and once again he provides all the necessary
and relevant detail.
Then he is led to the crux of the
matter:
To whom does this terrace belong?—
With its limestone crumbling into fine greyish dust.
Its bevy of bees, and its wind-beaten rickety
sunchairs.
Not to me, but this lizard.
Older than I, or the cockroach (p, 226),
The lizard is at one with his environment, and it is his
by right of his being there the longest.
This simple
meeting again shows Roethke's extreme sensitivity to
nature,
"The Meadow Mouse" is even more empathetic, reflecting the poet's own suffering with nature's animals.
The poem is in two irregular parts, the first telling
about the finding of a baby field mouse.
37
The poet brings
it home with him, feeds it, and gives it a shoe-box home,
hoping the little fellow will be even unafraid by then:
Do I imagine he no longer trembles
When I come close to him?
He seems no longer to tremble (p. 227).
But one morning (perhaps the next after it was found) the
box is empty, and the poet questions the mode of its going,
fearing danger from the hawk, owl, shrike, snake, or tomcat.
Then the tiny mouse's danger causes him to think of
all helpless creatures; their struggles are in effect his:
I think of the nestling fallen into the deep grass.
The turtle gasping in the dusty rubble of the highway.
The paralytic stunned in the tub, and the water rising-All things innocent, hapless, forsaken (p. 227).
The next poem is "Heard in a Violent Ward," and
is another short, minor poem.
It best explains itself.
The poets mentioned are some of Roethke's favorites:
In heaven, too.
You'd be institutionalized.
But that's all right,—
If they let you eat and swear
With the likes of Blake,
And Christopher Smart,
And that sweet man, John Clare (p. 228).
Being a violent, vital part of things was always important
to Roethke,
"The Geranium" illustrates another facet of
Roethke's empathy with nature, this time with plant life.
The humor of the poem is itself deeply touching.
The
poet stuck the bedraggled plant out by the garbage can
once, but the pitiful sight made him bring it back in:
38
She looked so limp and bedraggled.
So foolish and trusting, like a sick poodle.
Or a wizened aster in late September,
I brought her back in again
For a new routine (p. 228).
The poor plant had lived too long on "gin, bobbie pins,
half-smoked cigars, dead beer."
But it apparently en-
dured until the maid threw it out:
Near the end, she seemed almost to hear m e —
And that was scary—
So when that snuffling cretin of a maid
Threw her, pot and all, into the trash-can,
I said nothing.
'k,
But I sacked the presumptuous hag the next week,
I was that lonely (p. 228).
Roethke was like Albert Schweitzer in his intensive
reverence for life.
Nothing was too insignificant or
humble for either of them.
The "mixed" quality of the sequence is further
illustrated by other poems that it contains.
"On the
Quay" is concerned with nature's fury on the oceans.
"The Storm" also discusses nature's fury, this time in
a more substantial three-part poem.
Part one describes
the storm's coming, employing once again detailed enumeration.
All the people have taken shelter; "There is one
light on the mountain."
Part two contains a beautifully
realistic description of the growing storm and its effects.
Finally the poet himself and "the last watcher" are driven
indoors by the fury, able only then to breathe more easily, while the storm's increase moves "the cardplayers
39
closer/
To their cards, their anisette."
In part three the storm's ultimate fury is anticipated and even strongly hoped for.
He and presumably
his wife are in bed, lying "closer to the gritty pillow,"
waiting it out.
But the poet is hoping:
For the great last leap of the wave over the
breakwater.
The flat boom on the beach of the towering sea-swell.
The sudden shudder as the jutting sea-cliff collapses.
And the hurricane drives the dead straw into the
living pine-tree (p. 231).
The poet, it would seem, gets the same thrill from the
storm's pure fury that he gets from the still contemplations of dusk.
The raging is what Roethke desired; he
heard the storm without and felt its timeless raging
within.
"The Thing" reveals still another and more ominous
side of nature.
The setting is a picnic, V7ith more than
one person present.
During the picnic a "thing," pre-
sumably a bird of some sort, is seen being chased by
some other birds, "the implacable swift pursuers."
The
thing escapes for a minute in the sun, but the pursuers
regain the trail.
Then one by one they strike:
Until there was nothing left.
Not even feathers from so far away (p. 232).
The poet then turns again to the picnic.
This small tab-
leau illustrates the life-death cycle in nature.
There
is, of course, a touch of regret and sadness in the small,
though tragic, situation, for its implications spread like
. _
rippies from a stone throv/n in water. This struggle
for survival is universal, affecting all life forms.
This the poet realizes and the last line hints: "And
the blue air darkened." A hush of regret had settled
over the poet's thoughts.
The theme in the next poem, "The Pike," is similar to that in "The Thing." Roethke first describes a
peaceful setting, which translated symbolically is much
like the still part of the soul:
The river turns.
Leaving a place for the eye to rest,
A furred, a rocky pool,
A bottom of water (p. 233).
Roethke then catalogs the many wonders he sees there,
thinking:
I lean, and love these manifold shapes.
Until, out from a dark cove.
From beyond the end of a mossy log.
With one sinuous ripple, then a rush,
A thrashing-up of the whole pool.
The pike strikes (p. 233).
The pike is the violent reality that forces us to leave
our dreams and meditations. It also represents the wild
viciousness of nature, the fury one finds even in the
realm of contemplation. Thus in one simple, universal
setting both the peaceful and the violent interest, as
at dusk and da\m when light and darkness conflict.
In contrast to the violence and tragedy of the
past several poems, "All Morning" comes as a pleasant,
joyous change, a change similar to the joyous ending of
40
'Ifn\
«1
^ JL
II
The Abyss.
In this poem, rich with detail, the sub-
ject is birds, and the poet first concentrates with considerable exactness on two varieties that frequent his
yard: the wood pigeon and the Stellar jay.
One knows
that Roethke must have been intimately familiar with
these birds.
Then wrens, chickadees, ducks, humming
birds, and gulls are mentioned as other visitors to the
yard.
"A delirium of birds]"
Roethke describes them.
But it is then that he makes his discovery, and Whitmanesque detail again assails the reader:
It is neither spring nor summer: it is Alv/ays,
With towhees, finches, chickadees, California
quail, wood doves.
With wrens, sparrows, juncos, cedar waxwings,
flickers.
With Baltimore orioles, Michigan bobolinks.
And those birds forever dead.
The passenger pigeon, the great auk, the Carolina
paraquet.
All birds remembered, 0 never forgotten]
All in my yard, of a perpetual Sunday,
All morning] All morning] (p. 235).
Much as Roethke becomes an Everyman in his evening contemplations, so does one bird in its almost helpless
empathy with its surroundings become the symbol of all
birds past and present.
How beautifully and inextricably
linked are the creatures of nature, a factor influencing
in part Roethke's expression of joy.
"The Manifestation" is a short, but neatly turned,
poem.
It praises merely being, the same joy Roethke ex-
presses in "All Morning":
^2
the tree becoming
Green, a bird tipping the topmost bough,
A seed pushing itself beyond itself.
The mole making its way through darkest
ground (p. 238).
These are the sorts of activities the pedestrian eye
sees as nothing more than everyday occurrences; to
Roethke they were the very essence of being itself.
The simplest activity was a marvel in itself.
Roethke
lists other common occurrences, then points out that
doing the natural thing is all that can be asked of us:
What does v;hat it should do needs nothing more.
The body moves, though slovfly, toward desire.
We come to something without knowing why (p. 235).
This humble, unpretentious attitude gave Roethke the rare
joie de vivre he found in everything.
The manifestation
of being itself is the light one finds as he arises from
the agony of the abyss.
Like "The Manifestation," the next poem, "Song" is
short and seemingly simple, but the questions asked in the
poem are typically Roethkean and fundamental and their
answers ambiguous and provocative.
The answers themselves
seem to be born of anguish and experience.
Roethke's ears, eyes, and mind at work.
They show
The first ques-
tion the poet asks is "From whence cometh song?" and the
answers:
From
From
From
The tear is of
the tear, far away.
the hound giving tongue.
the quarry's weak cry (p. 236).
a distant sorrovi, perhaps, the hound's bay
43
the song of the hunter, and the cry of the weak the
anguish of "all things innocent, hapless, forsaken."
The second question is "From whence, love?"
And
the three answers:
From the dirt in the street.
From the bolt, stuck in its groove.
From the cur at my feet (p. 236).
This is Roethke's perceptive, enumerative way of saying
that love is where one finds it; love is everywhere.
How
simple and unpretentious are these sources of love, not
Platonic, but material.
"Whence, death?" is the short, trenchant, final
question.
And the answers are:
Prom dire hell's mouth.
From the ghost without breath.
The wind shifting south (p. 236).
The abyss is one form of hell; the breathless ghost is
merely a state of lifelessness.
The shifting wind implies
in terms of the previous poems a time of change, such as
dusk and dawn.
Death is not an end, but a part of the
endless cycle.
"The Tranced" is a poem in five numbered stanzas,
each of five lines.
Again first person plural is used,
•as in "The Manifestation" and "The Storm," but again the
antecedents of the pronoun are not perfectly clear,
though the people in the poem are probably the poet and
his wife.
On the simplest level the tranced are held
by a flame's magic, but symbolically by being itself.
thoughts of the soul, the quiet light. Entranced by
the flame (stanza one) the abode of "The Questioner,"
probably an equivalent for God, is questioned. Then
the poet asks:
When we abide yet go
Do we do more than we know
Or is the body but a motion in a shoe (p. 237)?
He seems to be saying, "Is the body the end of all, or in
the realm of contemplation are we more than we seem, a
person outside of the motion in a shoe?" The body abides,
but thoughts fly in meditation.
Stanza two begins:
The edge of heaven was sharper than a sword;
Divinity itself malign, absurd (p. 237).
Roethke is saying here that the edge of heaven, the time
and place of change, the edge of the abyss, is almost
more than we can bear. Even Divinity itself suffers and
becomes distorted at the edge, the becoming. But in
spite of this, the poet says:
love-longing of a kind
Rose up within the mind.
Rose up and fell like an erratic wind (p. 237).
Roethke v;as never able to escape desire and the longing
for the far fields; it flowed within him like his pulsing
blood. And here again is the image of the dance, the
heart of being, the object of Roethke's search. Stanza
three describes further the paradoxical abiding, yet
going:
45
We struggled out of sensuality;
Going, we stayed; and night turned into day (p. 237).
The struggle and striving are evident. The realm of contemplation, of the soul, has been penetrated.
The scene
is one of light, if not of implied joy and freedom. The
tone is similar to that evident when the poet arose from
the abyss in part five of "The Abyss."
In part four the tranced become the vision. "Subject and object sang and danced as one." The state of
becoming is past for a moment, and purity of experience
prevails:
Slowly we moved between
The unseen and the seen.
Our bodies light, and lighted by the moon (p. 237).
For a moment they exist in a dual nature, as both soul
and body. Yet even the soul self has its struggle, an
agony of self-realization.
"Our small souls hid from
their small agonies." But the "love-longing," Roethke
says, is a rising, implying that the abyss can be risen
from, that the struggles are not forever:
Being, we came to be
Part of eternity.
And what died with us was the will to die (p. 238).
The struggle and agony are to he_, and that accomplished,
eternity becomes a reality.
The world's pressures are
then bearable, though death has not been cheated.
Roethke, it seems here, fears that death is the end of
all.
He is not sure; he fights the thought; but he does
46
not welcome death, not a man who derived so much pleasure
from the senses.
The final poem of "Mixed Sequence" is "The
Moment," and it climaxes the entire sequence, as indeed
it should.
It is similar in tone to the concluding part
of "The Abyss." The poem is the exaltation after a
struggle; it culminates all the struggles of this sequence, of "North American Sequence," and of the striving
in other of Roethke's poems. "The Moment" refers to that
moment of pure realization of soul or being, the glimpse
of eternity witnessed in the previous poem.
It begins,
"We passed the ice of pain." For a moment, at any rate,
the struggles of the self and the agony have been culminated, so much so that the "we" are one with even the
abys s:
The wide, the bleak abyss
Shifted with our slov; kiss (p. 238).
Stanza two of the poem shows the struggle also to be one
between the relative human situation and the absolute:
Space struggled with time;
The gong of midnight struck
The naked absolute (p. 238).
The moment was a realization of the absolute and thus of
eternity, a state of empathy:
within."
"All flowed: without,
No more need be said:
What else to say?
We end in joy (p. 238).
So from the darkness of the first poem of the sequence.
47
"The Abyss," we come to the state of pure joy in the last
poem.
At first glance the poems of the "mixed sequence"
may seem to be a hodge-podge of unrelated elements. It
is true that they are not always closely related in content, theme, and style, but certain threads of thought
and other similarities do help unify them.
For instance,
all of the poems are connected with some aspect of nature:
people ("Elegy," "Otto," "The Chums," "Heard in a Violent
Ward," "The Tranced," and "The Moment"); animals ("The
Lizard," "The Meadow Mouse," "The Thing," "The Pike," and
"All Morning"); and elements of all ("The Abyss," "The
Manifestation," and "Song"),
The totality of these ele-
ments together comprise the absolute, i,e., are symbols
for the absolute; they are v:hat Roethke searched for and.
found in Lhe far field of his mind.
Taken as a whole
these poems explore the meaning of the absolute and
illustrate Roethke's effort to resolve the struggle between the body and soul, the relative and absolute.
Each
of these poems functions both literally and symbolically.
In short, they reflect stages of Roethke's own rising
from the abyss.
There is love ("Elegy," "The Meadow
Mouse," "The Geranium"—human, animal, plant); violence
("Heard in a Violent Ward," "The Storm," "The Pike"-human, nature, animal); and joy ("All Morning," "The
Tranced," and "The Moment").
These poems actually
48
overlap in a very complex m.anner.
One might also note from the discussion of the
poems how poems of similar subject matter are grouped
together, such as people in "Elegy," "Otto," and "The
Chums" and violence in "On the Quay," "The Storm," "The
Thing," and "The Pike."
In reality, despite its title,
"Mixed Sequence," this is far from any random grouping
of poems.
Roethke seems to follow a very careful pro-
gression from "The Abyss" to "The Moment."
In between
are steps along the often agonizing, sometimes joyous,
way.
Each poem thus characterizes an element of the
over-all mental journey.
:i
nit-
nl
CM
r'<l
CHAPTER III
THE "METAPHTSICAL" SEQUENCE
The final sequence of the book is twelve poems
titled "Sequence, Sometimes Metaphysical."
These poems
represent the culmination of a long and distinguished
career.
According to Ralph J. Mills:
The "Long Waters" and the visionary lyrics of
"Sequence, Sometimes Metaphysical" exemplify the
last stage in the long metamorphosis of the self
that Roethke attained in his poetry. This fundamental theme gave his work unity and yet never
restricted the astonishing variety, inventions,
and artistry of which he was capable.20
And in his article "Roethke's Last Poems" he says:
The spare, and more formal, character of the lyrics
in "Sequence, Sometimes Metaphysical" parallels the
further stage of visionary experience they embody,
for at this point the focus of activity is almost
entirely inv/ard or spiritual and considerations of
externc'.l reality are, at best, secondary.21
The first poem is doubtless the best knoi'jn of
this sequence, and perhaps the best knovm of the entire
volume.
"In a Dark Time" was the poem discussed in a
symposium, which appeared in The Contemporary Poet as
Artist and Critic, and was first published in I96I in
New World Writing" (XIX), both edited by Anthony Ostroff,
This discussion thus appeared about three years before
The Far Field was published.
It included comments by
^ 20
Contemporary American Poetry (New York, I965),
p. 70.
2^Theodore Roethke, op. cit., pp. II6-II7.
49
T
50
Jolin Crowe Ransom, Babette Deutsch, and Stanley Kunitz,
and a reply by Roethke himself.
"In a Dark Time" is
undoubtedly the most important poem of the sequence.
It is in four regular stanzas of six lines each, with
lines generally iambic pentameter.
The poem originally
appeared with each st.iza numbered, but in The Far Field
the numbers have been removed to, probably, the betterment of the poem.
"In a Dark Time" is similar in many
ways to "The Abyss," and the dark time and the abyss
are similar symbols.
First of all, it is apparent in
this and similar poems, such as "The Abyss," that the
dark time is Roethke's own "dark night of the soul."
In
poems as early as "The Lost Son Sequence" there are hints
of this experience, but there are few doubts in "Sequence,
Sometimes Metaphysical" and "In a Dark Time."
In his
article "The Poetic Shape of Death," Frederick J. Hoffman
explains the dark time:
The "dark time" has several applications: to the
darkness of "underness" which he found everywhere;
to the darkness of despair that came to him v/hen
he found that he had alone both to define and to
defend himself; and, of course, to the time of
death, of what he calls "the deepening shade" and
"the echoing wood."22
Then as if to tidy up any speculative and pedantic loose
ends, Roethke himself confirms in a couple of articles
the truth of this assertion, in one of which he remarks:
22lbid., p. 111.
I take the central experience to be fairly common:
to break from the bondage of the self, from the
barriers of the "real" world, to come as close to
God as possible.^-J
51
Thus it is evident this poem reflects Roethke's dark
night of the soul.
"Open Letter" was an attempt by Roethke to explain
the "Lost Son" sequence.
Owing to some overlapping of
themes in this sequence and the three in The Far Field
some of the comments he made then are still valid with
respect to his last poetry.
And a few of his remarks in
"Open Letter" are particularly arresting in light of "The
Abyss" and "In a Dark Time":
Some of these pieces, then^ begin in the mire;
as if man is no more than a shape writhing from the
old rock. This may be due, in part, to the Michigan from which I come. Sometimes one gets the
feeling that not even the animals have been there
before; but the marsh, the mire, the Void, is
always there, immediate and terrifying. It is a
splendid place for schooling in the spirit. It is
America.
None the less, in spite of all the muck and
welter, the dark, the dreck of these poems, I count
myself among the happy poets.24
This explains much of the striving and agony in Roethke's
poems.
In "The Vigil," part four of "Four for Sir John
Davies," he puts it another way:
reach the white and warm."
"We dared the dark to
That statement is almost the
essence of Roethke's poetry.
23The Contemporary Poet as Artist and Critic, ed.
Anthony Ostroff (Boston, 1964), p. 49.
24
On the Poet and His Craft, op. cit., p. 40.
_,
52
The statement from "Open Letter" also explains
the seeming light in darkness, joy in agony paradox of
many of his poems.
The joy is not the agony, nor is the
light the darkness, but the former are derived from the
latter.
When darkness and agony have been fairly met,
then come light and joy.
But in the becoming the two
are often so complexly mingled they seem one. Within
the focus of the mind's eye, so to speak, they cannot
be immediately resolved and thus made to seem one. As
Yeats said, in a different context, "How can v^e know the
dancer from the dance?"
The darkness and light are not
the same, but in the whirl of striving and becoming, they
blur and confuse.
Roethke begins the poem with this same paradox:
"In a dark time the eye begins to see," as much as to
say that hard as it may be the goal m3y be reached only
through struggle. Ralph J. Mills comments on this need
for the negative experience:
in the last poems, where the intention to achieve
mystical illumination is more sustained, this negative experience becomes more terrifying and, if
it is possible, more purposive.25
In line two Roethke says: "I meet my shadow in the deepening shade."
In his reply (to the symposium) on this poem
he explains the shade is his "Other," perhaps his soul
25"Roethke's Last Poems," 0£. cit., p. 119.
self.
In the remainder of the stanza the poet tries
to explain the feeling of this "meeting."
In stanza two
the agony becomes clearer:
The day's on fire]
I know the purity of pure despair,
Ify shadow pinned against a sweating wall.
That place among the rocks—is it a cave.
Or winding path? The edge is what I have (p. 239).
Roethke said, "the day is on fire" referred to a mental
fire which was "the ultimate burning of revelation."
The
question, however, implies that much remains to be learned.
His comments on "the edge" are quite revealing.
"The cave
and winding path are older than history. And the edge—
27
the terrible abyss—equally old." . At this point despair still prevails.
III*
Stanza three describes a time of conflict and up••::!•
heaval.
"A steady storm of correspondences!" it begins.-
: ;.t;
till 11
The poet is forced to find meaning in the surface level
of things, to go beyond the merely obvious.
Most of
in
Roethke's poetry is an attempt to do this:
A man goes far to find out what he i s —
Death of the self in a long, tear?( -s night.
All natural shapes blazing unnatui ."^ light (p. 239).
The self that dies is the human, anima3 self, that the
soul self—the corresponding mental self—might be revealed.
p.
50.
The unnatural light is undoubtedly the revealed
26 See The Contemporary Poet a^^ A r t i s t and C r i t i c ,
27
"^'Ibid. See also the notes on "the edge" in the
discussion of "The Abyss."
iii<Mi|i|i|iMi|i|i|iMiiU
light of the correspondence of "natural" things.
54
Stanza four begins by reaffirming this paradoxical condition.
desire."
"Dark, dark my light, and darker my
Then the poet even questions his own identity.
"Which I is I?"
he asks.
Which is the real, the self
or the "shade?"
Then he concludes:
A fallen man, I climb out of my fear.
The mind enters itself, and God the mind.
And one is One, free in the .tearing wind (p. 239).
There is a resolution of some sort, though the exact
meaning of this conclusion is ambiguous.
The climbing
out could certainly have references to a mental abyss,
in this instance fear.
Even Roethke's comments are not
much help on the last two lines, though the conflict is
at least resolved.
The mind "enters itself," ceases to
be in conflict with itself.
There is a oneness with
Divinity and the resulting joy of freedom; as if Roethke
is saying with Paul in his letter to the Romans, "The
night is far spent, the day is at hand: let us therefore
cast off the v;orks of darkness, and let us put on the
armour of light."
But the word "tearing" is ambiguous;
it certainly does not connote perfect peace.
Roethke
seems to imply that the condition of oneness is in itself
one of trial or tension.
planation:
Ralph J. Mills offers this ex-
"The 'tearing wind' is obviously the breath
of spiritual force we have often noticed; at this instant
55
it is, understandably, at its strongest."^^
The second poem of this sequence is "In Evening
Air," a poem in four numbered stanzas.
"A dark theme
keeps me here," he begins, and the meaning of this
should be clear in light of the previous discussion.
The implication is again that the desired state of
light, dance, and song has not been realized:
Waking's my care-I'll make a broken music, or I'll die (p. 240).
The idea of waking in Roethke's poetry is complex.
has two poems with the title "The Waking."
He
It would
appear, however, the idea of waking is similar to his
feeling or sense of becoming.
Waking and becoming are
as similar as the abyss and the dark time.
The point of
the two lines is, though, that song is integral to being,
or that death is preferable to existence without song,
however "broken":
Make me, 0 Lord, a last, a simple thing
Time cannot overwhelm (p. 240).
In stanza two the poet asks to be made timeless.
He ex-
presses the same idea in "A Walk in Late Summer," from
Words for the Wind:
It lies upon us to undo the lie
Of living merely in the realm of time (p, 179).
This is another of Roethke's many struggles.
In the
28"Roethke's Last Poems," 0£. cit., p. 130.
latter part of the stanza he tells that this undoing
56
once occurred when "A bud broke to a rose," when he
achieved a state of pure empathy.
In stanza three a tree disappears as darkness
comes on and the poet embraces the night, "a dear proximity."
Part four brings to mind "The Tranced," for here
again the poet, though this time alone, stares into "a
low fire" and watches the shifting patterns on a wall:
I see, in evening air.
How slowly dark comes down on what \ie do (p. 240).
These final lines are cryptic, but it seems that night
here is more friend than foe, especially in view of the
previous stanza where it is called "a dear proximity."
Roethke is apparently lamenting the v/eariness that comes
from too much doing.
In Frost's words, "I am overtired/
Of the great harvest I myself desired."
And this also
recalls again the final line of "The Abyss":
not doing, is my first joy."
"Being,
In short, there is a tone
of weltschmertz; the poet merely wishes to be.
"The Sequel" is another poem in four regular,
numbered stanzas or parts.
The title may refer to the
previous two poems, perhaps only to "In Evening Air,"
or to still other poems:
Was I too glib about eternal things.
An intimate of air and all its songs (p. 24l)?
He begins with this question, and in the remainder of
this stanza Roethke wonders about conclusions he has
57
previously reached and things he has done:
I thought I knew the truth;
Of grief I died, but no one knew my death (p. 24l).
The poet envisions in stanza two "a body dancing in the
wind,/ A shape called up out of my natural mind."
Then
he and other of nature's creatures dance "under a dancing
moon":
And on the coming of the outrageous dawn.
We danced together, we danced on and on (p. 24l)t
Roethke is describing pure ecstasy and empathy, the dance
of being, explaining how it is in a dancing soul.
And
later in the poem the dance acquires sensual characteristics.
"Morning's a motion in a happy mind" begins stanza
three.
Here, hov/ever, the poem becomes, as Roethke's
-•I
poems so often do, complex and ambiguous, for Roethke be-r
gins referring to a "she," which is apparently the wraith
II *t
'J
I'll
with which he was dancing in stanza two.
Ralph J. Mills
explains the figure in his article "Roethke's Last Poems":
Roethke begins "The Sequel" as a poem of selfquestioning, queries his motives, the character of
his experience; but soon he sees "a body dancing in
the wind" which distracts his attention. This is a
figure of more than one meaning: first, his guide,
his Beatrice, who appears frequently in love poems
and other earlier lyrics; second, the anlma or scr;l_,
which is a female principle in the male (see "The
Restored" in this sequence, where it has a poem \
itself). The figure heralds another spiritual av, :ening and engages the poet in a dance of universal celebration that continues into "The Restored" and
reaches a climax in "Once More, the Round."29
29ibid., p. 131.
58
Stanza one mentions "wild longings of the insatiate
blood," which gives the poem definite sensuous overtones.
He says later in part three, "I gave her body full and
grave farewell," v/hich is also obviously sensual. Another paradox occurs as the coming day begins in darkness:
A light leaf on a tree, she swayed av/ay
To the dark beginnings of another day (p. 24l),
This might be a reference to dawn, but probably means
that the lost sensuality produces a form of mental darkness, a loss of sensual pleasure and joy.
The loss is seen, in stanza four, to be more, however, than merely the loss of one sensual or sexual experience.
"All waters waver, and all fires fail,"
Roethke says in line two of the stanza.
mental fires, but fires of the body.
He does not mean
This point becomes
clearer in the last two lines:
I feel the autumn fail—all that slow fire
Denied in me, who has denied desire (p. 242).
Being denied, desire—sensual and sexual—fails.
"The
Sequel" is a natural adjunct to the more metaphysical
strivings in "In a Dark Time."
The title of the next poem, "The Motion," immediately recalls the last poem and the dance.
The dance
is a symbol of the cyclic and rhythmic quality of nature.
Pure dance or motion is the essence of being.
"The soul
has many motions, body one," he begins, indicating the
111
limitless quality of the spirit or mind.
But the one
59
motion of the body, lust, keeps the mind alive and engenders love:
By lust alone we keep the mind alive.
And grieve into the certainty of love (p. 243).
Body may have but one motion, but it isn't to be underestimated.
Love is doubtless, to Roethke, sensual in
nature, thus capable of causing grief (in light of the
last poem).
In stanza two, of the four numbered stanzas,
Roethke begins, "Love begets love. This torment is my
joy."
Never far from struggle and anguish he faces the
paradox.
He seems to question whether or not it can be
avoided, once permitted:
What vje put down, must we take up again?
I dare embrace. By striding, I remain (p. 243).
It is agony, but he cannot let it go.
Roethke speaks
more optimistically of love in stanza three.
the loved know love's a faring-forth?"
"Who but
he asks.
The
syntax in this and the next stanza, which are largely
one sentence, is complex and ambiguous, but the "faringforth" is apparently:
this final certitude.
This reach beyond this death, this act of love
In which all creatures share, and thereby live (p. 243).
Love is the moment of eternity; through love we live.
The last stanza is even more cryptic, becoming
more metaphysical.
The implication is that the motion
60
operates both in the physical and spiritual realms, thus
linking this stanza to the first.
The ecstasy on a phys-
ical level thus becomes ecstasy on a metaphysical level,
the essence of being.
He concludes, "O, motion, 0,
our chance is still to be]"
"Infirmity" comprises six regular stanzas of six
lines each.
The infirmity is age and the nearness of
death, but the poem is not pessimistic.
According to
W. D. Snodgrass in "The Anguish of Concreteness,"
"Roethke accurately predicts his own death, clearly longing for it."^
Again a struggle is involved, this time
between body and spirit, spirit being victorious:
I stare and sta,re into a deepening pool
And tell myself my image cannot die (p. 244).
The deepening pool is further revelation that comes with
" 'I
ii>i
'.;>
age, revelations that appear in the "inner eye" (line 2 ) .
Stanza one concludes, "Oh, to be something else, yet
still to be]" This may reflect the conflict between
body and spirit.
The implication is that loss of the
body would leave the pure spirit, but would mean at the
same time loss of being as physical presence.
In stanza two Roethke describes more of his physical decay, but asks Christ to praise it since it means
he is coming nearer to spirit:
30Ibid., p. 85.
61
Sweet Christ, rejoice in my infirmity;
There's little left I care to call my ov/n.
Today they drained the fluid from a knee
And pumped a shoulder full of cortisone (p. 244).
Further development of the decay process is given in
stanza three:
Light on its rounds, a pure extreme of light
Breaks on me as my meager flesh breaks down (p. 244).
The decay of one is the realization of the other. And
death is only once:
death."
"I am son and father of my only
In content stanza four is similar to stanza
three, both describing the coming of aging and death:
Dead to myself, and all I hold most dear,
I move beyond the reach of wind and fire (p. 244).
He is beyond their reach because he is becoming spirit.
Stanza five leaves the implication that at death
iij
there is a loss of consciousness, though one is still
spirit.
""I
Roethke does not dread this state, but it would
seem to preclude further the joys of the mind.
He
I-1
approaches purity of spirit and the state of empathy,
but death, it seems, is the end of consciousness:
My ears still hear the bird when all is still;
My soul is still my soul, and still the Son.
And knowing this, I am not yet undone (p. 244).
"Eternity's not easily come by," he says in the last
stanza.
Apparently death is not equal to eternity.
One
must strive and endure the agony of "becoming" to realize
that moment of pure empathy that is eternity:
i;
62
When opposites come suddenly in place,
I teach my eyes to hear, my ears to see
How body from spirit slowly does unwind
Until we are pure spirit at the end (p. 244).
Roethke never ceased striving to understand the "unwinding" and the nature of these opposites.
"The Decision" is a shorter poem in two stanzas.
Roethke never says, but the concern expressed in the
poem probably involves death.
Since Roethke usually
juxtaposes similar poems in a sequence, this assumption
is safe, for "Infirmity" is at least partly concerned
with death's coming.
In stanza one the poet is v7orried
about the unseen:
What shakes the eye but the invisible?
Running from God's the longest race of all (p. 245).
It is the metaphysical that shakes us most strongly.
Objects and sounds in the mind we cannot escape.
Roethke
mentions other sounds from his youxh that he was never
•I
able to escape.
>
"Which is the way?" he cries in stanza two, for
this is the decision he must make.
Death is approaching,
"The line of my horizon's growing thin]"
the situation asserts itself:
The agony of
I cry to the dread black.
The shifting shade, the cinders at my back.
Which is the way? I ask, and turn to go.
As a man turns to face on-coming snovr (p. 245).
The journey is perilous, but he has faced the situation
before.
These lines recall strongly "The Waking," from
The Waking:
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
I feel my fate in what I cannot fear.
I learn by going where I have to go (p. 124).
63
This may be Roethke's own decision about the question.
Of course, this poem also recalls "The Abyss" and "In
a Dark Time."
The vray is not clear, but he is resolved
to the struggle to find out.
The struggle of "Infirmity" and "The Decision" is
continued in "The Marrow," a poem of four regular stanzas.
I
Stanza one reflects a discontent \ilth
"mortal life":
From a burnt pine the sharp speech of a crow
Tells me my drinking breeds a will to die.
What's the worst portion in this mortal life?
A pensive mistress, and a yelping wife (p. 246).
|
I
He finds thwarted love most unbearable and perhaps turns
|
I
to drinking as a partial substitute.
battle continues in stanza two.
The life-death
In contemplation "One
white face chimmers brighter than the sun."
doubtedly Goa in his metaphysical realm.
This is un-
But the poet
knows "One look too close can take my soul away."
The
state of "pure spirit in the end" implies that death has
taken place, and he is thus cautious about the prospects.
He is aging, and now "Pain wanders through my bones like
a lost fire;" the fire, he explains, is "Desire, desire,
desire."
He desires more confrontation with sensual ex-
perience and love, knowing death will terminate the prospects.
In stanza three the poet shows signs of anxiety
concerning the state of pure spirit and the realm of God.
God-head above my God, are you there still?" he cries,
6^
wanting to be assured before the time comes. And wishing
to be understood in his agonies, he says:
Lord, hear me out, and hear me out this day:
From me to Thee's a long and terrible v/ay (p. 246).
The tone here is one both of urgency and frustration,
with implications of the "dark night of the soul."
The
struggle to unwind body and spirit is no easy one.
Nearing the state of pure spirit, he says in stanza
four, "I have slain my will, and still I live."
This re-
mark comes in contrast to stanza tv70, vfhere he says desire
r
remains.
There is, of course, a subtle difference between
\
I
desire and will, and perhaps he is.saying in stanza four
i
I
f
that in spite of desire's presence he has conquered his
i|
will.
!|
Yet this has not brought on death.
this stanza almost comes as a
I would be near; I shut
I bleed my bones, their
Upon that God who knov/s
The rest of
desire for the end:
"
my eyes to see;
marrow to bestow
what I would know (p. 246).
In this act of consecration Roethke reveals his desire
for God's knowledge, though it is doubtful this is the
implication of the desire in stanza two.
He will give
the very essence of his self to the One who knov;s all,
an act v;hich may be contemplative or simply one culminated
at the point of death.
"I Waited" is a symbolic confrontation with death
as the poet vacillates at the point.
In contemplation
Roethke approaches the pale of death, beyond which lie
»
!
]
j
some fearful unlmovms.
Stanzas one and two tell of the
poet standing in a field, the far field, no doubt.
65
But
something is ominous about the situation:
I waited for the vfind to move the dust;
But no wind came (p. 24?).
This atmosphere in the field, vmich stifled his senses,
stirred him to deep meditation and pure empathy with the
surroundings.
Roethke describes the setting, then
remarks:
And I became all that I looked upon.
I dazzled in the dazzle of a stone (p. 24?).
This is a perfectly direct statement of empathy, perhaps
!
Roethke's clearest.
Then in stanza three he is shocked back into
reality a la knocking on the door in Macbeth.
"And then
11
a jackass brayed.
A lizard leaped my foot."
He is again
confronted with the physical and for a moment shaken from
the metaphysical:
I we.nt, not looking back.
I was afraid (p. 247).
The fear came from his nearness in the field to pure
In stanza four the poet pro-
ceeds "Through a rocky gorge" to "a small plateau," and:
Below, the bright sea was, the level waves.
And all the v/inds came toward me.
I was glad (p. 247),
He was glad because his physical senses were rejuvenated
by the wind, and he was thus reassured of his physical
presence.
11
j
I moved like some heat-v/eary animal.
spirit, and thus to death.
i!
He was glad he was not dead and "pure spirit
at the end."
"The Tree, The Bird" is a short poem in three
irregular stanzas.
The message and tone are joy.
The
longer first stanza describes a midnight setting, and
once again the poet is in a state of empathy with his
surroundings, as beautifully indicated by the opening
lines:
Uprose, uprose, the stony fields uprose.
And every snail dipped toward me its pure horn (p. 248).
The remainder of the stanza describes the dark setting and
the willow tree, and the poet as a leaf of this tree, a
part of the setting.
Then the bird sings loudly from the
tree, but the poet says, "I could not bear its song."
Why, one might ask, and Roethke gives a partial answer.
"How deep the mother-root of that still cry]" The bird,
like the pc?t^ becomes a part of the tree and sings the
tree's song, the song of pure spirit.
The roots of the
bird and the poet thus become the roots of the tree, in
metaphysical, not physical, terms.
Thus the cry is one
of pure spirit, the soul in nature, and this causes the
same dread the poet felt in "I Waited."
Confronted
with spirit, he is also confronted with death.
Stanza three describes further the coming realization of spirit.
The bird is taking wing, like his soul
and body, and thus becomes a symbol for their struggle,
their striving:
I
67
Thus I endure this last pure stretch of joy.
The dire dimension of a final thing (p. 248).
From the agony of the struggle comes the ultimate part,
joy—joy in the face of death.
In "The Restored" the poet pictures his own soul
dancing "In a hand like a bowl."
Ralph J. Mills com-
ments on the soul in his article "Roethke's Last Poems":
Within the evolutionary scheme of Roethke's
poetry, the scheme which traces the course of the
emergent self, there is a simultaneous development
of what is variously called soul or spirit, which
we might say is the inner or ruling principle of
the self. The term "self" appears to embrace and
unite both the physical and spiritual components
of the individual into a whole of particular identity. The spirit is perhaps the bloom, the last
and highest glory of the self and so becomes the
guiding and motivating principle in his experience,
its ascent on the scale of being. 31
!'
Then the soul tells him she cannot fly because she only
'
has one wing, and the poet becomes distraught:
.
\
;
•
'
When I raged, when I wailed,
And my reason failed,
That delicate thing
Grew back a ne\i wing,
And danced, at high noon.
On a hot, dusty stone.
In the still point of light
Of my last midnight (p. 249).
The message seems clear: once resolved to our fate,
resolved to its mysteries, we then embody, through our
souls, the spirit and empathy we truly desire.
The last
midnight probably refers to the last dark night of the
31lt)id.3 p. 117.
;
68
spirit, one's final acceptance before death,
"The Right Thing" is a song of joy, a carefree
interlude from the poet's., agonies. The point the poet
makes and repeats four times is simply, "The right thing
happens to the happy men."
This recalls reason's fail-
ing in the previous poem:
Let others probe the mystery if they can.
Time-harried prisoners of Shall and Will-The right thing happens to the happy man (p. 250).
To be happy and joyous—that is enough, for the:
Child of the dark, he can out leap the sun.
His being single, and that being all (p. 2 5 0 ) —
or:
I
I!
Takes to himself what mystery he can.
I'
And, praising change as the slow night comes on.
Wills what he would, surrendering his will
Till mystery is no more: No more he can.
The right thing happens to the happy man (p. 250).
The poet here is in harmony with existence.
He has lived
•
I
his life to know, but he will not let the unlearned mysteries dismay him, for the right thing will happen anyway
if he is happy.
The final poem of the sequence is a short one,
"Once More, the Round."
It is a resolution of all
struggles:
What's greater. Pebble or Pond?
What can be knov/n? The Unknov/n.
J^ true self runs toward a Hill
More] 0 More] visible (p. 251).
Objects have been translated into Diety and are thus
|
capitalized.
69
The poet becomes the spirit, unwrapt
from body:
And I dance with William Blake
For love, for Love's sake;
And everything comes to One,
As we dance on, dance on, dance on (p. 251).
We come to One again, as at the end of the first poem
of the sequence, "In a Dark Time," and all is now the
"pure fury," the dance Roethke loved so well.
In this last sequence Roethke has handled some
complex subjects, has faced unflinchingly both physical
life and ultimate realities.
He was not desirous of the
end, the man vrho so loved his senses, but he was resolved
to it.
It is quite evident by now that The Far Field is
in several ways the culmination of Roethke's work.
First,
it doubtless represents the finest and most mature examples of his poetic expression.
Many of the poems in
The Far Field represent a control and sophistication
that come only with years of practice.
The last sequences
also represent a culmination of his work in this direction.
"North American Sequence" and "Sequence, Sometimes Metaphysical" are probably as fine stylistically as "The Lost
Son" sequence, and they certainly represent a further
step in Roethke's thematic, mental, strivings.
The
struggle begun in the "Lost Son" sequence is clearly
resolved in the sequences of The Far Field.
"The Lost
70
Son" sequence explores a young man's "dark beginnings";
The Far Field carries these searchings forward into the
realm of the metaphysical.
The Far Field thus objectifies a continuance and
resolution of the struggles and strivings Roethke commenced in Open House, his first volume.
The progression
was increasingly metaphysical; struggles to understand
the physical and immediate slowly became struggles to
comprehend the spiritual.
Roethke's emphasis shifted
from his physical self to this soul or spiritual self.
The Far Field then is the culmination of Roethke's metaphysical strivings.
It is safe to say that without some knowledge of
Roethke's earlier poetry and earlier agonies, one cannot
gain a complete appreciation of The Far Field.
Nearly
all Roethke's poetry manifests the same preoccupations,
imagery, and symbolism.
All his poetry seems singularly
directed to discovering the metaphysical truths he expressed in The Far Field.
This is, however, the very
objection some critics have directed at his poetry:
it is too narrov; in scope.
So what on the one hand makes
The Far Field significant is, on the other, the reason
Roethke is not of the stature of a Yeats, Stevens, or
Frost.
It has been my purpose in this paper, however, to
explain the wholeness of Roethke's work, particularly as
• 71
it is manifested in his poetic sequences, his most significant contribution to poetry.
It should be clear
how all his work is unified to produce a complete and
meaningful whole.
Roethke did not merely create problems
and ask questions; he also offered his ovm personal solutions to many of his questions.
Perhaps the scope of his
strivings and searchings was limited, but the intense
concentration he devotes to his struggles is astonishing.
This devotion is clearly exemplified in the poetry of
The Far Field, the volume in vrhich Roethke expresses his
final answers.
This paper serves then as a guide to all
of Roethke's work, but particularly to his final strivings, resolutions, and answers.
Roethke's place as one of the great American poets
seems assured; he already seems to be gaining ground in .
the eyes of critics.
Though he is still largely unknown
to the public, he has a vigorous selected following.
And whereas he will never be considered on a par \i±th
Yeats, Auden, Frost, Stevens, Cummings, or Eliot, he
nevertheless is firmly grounded within the next line of
great poets.
And it might be added that he is consider-
ably more readable than, say, Eliot, Stevens, or Cummings,
v/hose poetry bristles with difficulties.
In short, he
deserves more general recognition than he has yet claimed.
Theodore Roethke is intensely fresh, vital, and
moving.
His art is original and distinctive, and his
h-
72
voice pre-eminently human; and for these reasons, too,
he deserves a permanent place in American poetry.
His
struggles and strivings are in reality ours as well, and
should not be forgotten.
In the final stanza of "The
Dying Man" (Words for the Wind) Roethke gave a hint of
what those who would follow him to the far field would
find, a statement which would make a fitting epitaph:
The edges of the summit still appal
When we brood on the dead or the beloved;
Nor can imagination do it all
In this last place of light: he dares to live
Who stops being a bird, yet beats his wings
Against the immense immeasurable emptiness of
things (p. 190).
[ I
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