Canticles to the Earth

Theodore Roethke1

A couple of years ago, an American poet told me that he and his generation had rejected irony and artfulness, and were trying to write poems that would not yield much to the investigations of the practical criticism seminar. And another poet present agreed, yes, he was now looking at English poetry to decide which areas seemed most in need of renovation, and then he was going to provide experiments that would enliven these sluggish, provincial backwaters. As poets, both seemed to be infected with wrong habits of mind. They had imbibed attitudes into their writing life which properly belong to the lecturer and the anthologist: a concern with generations, with shifting fashions of style, a belief that their role was complementary and responsible to a demonstrable literary situation. For although at least one spirit of the age will probably be discernible in a poet’s work, he should not turn his brain into a butterfly net in pursuit of it.

An awareness of his own poetic process, and a trust in the possibility of his poetry, that is what a poet should attempt to preserve; and whatever else Theodore Roethke may have lacked, he did possess and nourish this faith in his own creative instincts. His current flies continuously:

Water’s my will and my way,

And the spirit runs, intermittently,

In and out of the small waves,

Runs with the intrepid shorebirds—

How graceful the small before danger!

But the most remarkable thing about this watery spirit of his is that for all its motion, it never altogether finds its final bed and course. Through one half of the work, it is contained in the strict locks of rhyme and stanzaic form; through the other, it rises and recedes in open forms like floods in broad meadows.

His first book has the quiet life of an old canal. ‘Vernal Sentiment’ would not be an unjust title for the volume. All the conflicting elements in Roethke’s make-up are toned down and contained in well-behaved couplets and quatrains. The sense of fun is coy, the sense of natural forces explicit and the sense of form a bit monotonous. It is partly a case of the young man putting a hand across his daimon’s mouth, for although the first poem calls:

My secrets cry aloud.

I have no need for tongue.

My heart keeps open house,

My doors are widely swung

we have to read the whole book to believe it. Indeed the life’s work is neatly bracketed by the first and last lines of this collected volume. We move from ‘My secrets cry aloud’ to ‘With that he hitched his pants and humped away,’ and between the rhetoric and the rumbustiousness the true achievement is located.

That achievement arrives from the boundaries of Roethke’s experience: childhood and death are elements in which his best work lives. And love. He grew up in Michigan among his father’s extensive greenhouses: ‘They were to me, I realize now, both heaven and hell, a kind of tropics created in the savage climate of Michigan, where austere German-Americans turned their love of order and their terrifying efficiency into something truly beautiful. It was a universe, several worlds, which, even as a child, one worried about and struggled to keep alive.’

Growth, minute and multifarious life, became Roethke’s theme. His second collection, The Lost Son, contained the famous greenhouse poems, a repossession of the childhood Eden. Now the free, nervous notation of natural process issues in a sense of unity with cosmic energies and in quiet intimations of order and delight. They are acts of faith made in some state of grace:

I can hear, underground, that sucking and sobbing,

In my veins, in my bones I feel it,—

The small waters seeping upward,

The tight grains parting at last.

When sprouts break out,

Slippery as fish,

I quail, lean to beginnings, sheath-wet.

Such celebration, however, was prelude to disturbance and desperation. Out of Eden man takes his way, and beyond the garden life is riotous; chaos replaces correspondence, consciousness thwarts communion, the light of the world fades in the shadow of death. Until the final serenity and acceptance of all things in a dance of flux, which comes in the posthumous The Far Field, Roethke’s work is driven in two opposite directions by his fall into manhood.

In the final poems of The Lost Son volume and in all the work of Praise to the End there is an apocalyptic straining towards unity. These are large, sectioned poems, ghosted by the rhythms of nursery rhyme. You feel that the archetypal properties are being manipulated a bit arbitrarily, that the staccato syntax is for effect rather than effective and that in general the sense of fractured relations between the man and his physical and metaphysical elements is deliberately shrouded. These poems are more like constructs for the inarticulate than raids upon it. Yet despite the occasional echo of Dylan Thomas, they retain the authentic Roethke note, the note of energy and quest:

Everything’s closer. Is this a cage?

The chill’s gone from the moon.

Only the woods are alive.

I can’t marry the dirt.

In direct contrast to these wandering tides of the spirit, there follows a series of tightly controlled and elaborately argued meditations and love poems. After the fidgety metres and the surrealism, he begins to contain his impulses to affirmation in a rapid, iambic line which owes much to Raleigh and Sir John Davies, even though in a moment of exuberance he declares:

I take this cadence from a man named Yeats,

I take it, and I give it back again.

The poems tend to have a strict shape and lively rhythm (‘the shapes a bright container can contain!’) and deal with the possibility of momentary order, harmony and illumination. Love and lyric are modes of staying the confusion and fencing off emptiness. Within the glass walls of the poem, something of the old paradisal harmony can be feigned:

Dream of a woman, and a dream of death:

The light air takes my being’s breath away;

I look on white, and it turns into gray—

When will that creature give me back my breath?

I live near the abyss. I hope to stay

Until my eyes look at a brighter sun

As the thick shade of the long night comes on.

There is a curious split in Roethke’s work between the long Whitmanesque cataloguing poem, which works towards resolution by accumulating significant and related phenomena, and this other brisk, traditional artefact that dances to its own familiar music. Perhaps the explanation lies in Roethke’s constant natural urge to praise, to maintain or recapture ecstasy.

The more relaxed and loaded form includes his best poems, all of which exhale something of a Franciscan love of every living thing, and invoke the notion of a divine unity working through them. They are canticles to the earth, if you like, written in a line that has exchanged its ‘barbaric yawp’ for a more civil note of benediction. On the other hand, when he is not in full possession of his emotion, when tranquillity is missing, then he employs the artificer’s resources of metre, stanza and rhyme to conduct himself and the poem towards a provisional statement. The stanzaic poems always sound as if they are attempting something. The best Roethke, the praise poetry, always gives the impression that the lines came ripe and easy as windfalls.

Ripeness is all in the latest work, which appeared in this country two years after his death. In one of the poems he mentions ‘that sweet man, John Clare’, and one is reminded how both poets lived near the abyss but resolved extreme experience into something infinitely gentle. In the light of their last days, ‘all’s a scattering, a shining’. Their suffering breeds something larger than masochism. Roethke reflects when his field-mouse departs for the hazard of the fields:

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.

He is outside movements and generations, and his work is a true growth. He seems destined to grudging notice because he echoed the voices of other poets, or because people have grown afraid of the gentle note that was his own, but the Collected Poems are there, a true poet’s testament:

Pain wanders through my bones like a lost fire;

What burns me now? Desire, desire, desire.

 

Listener, 1968