Theodore Roethke (15 page)

The answers he receives, as if given by an oracle, are cryptic:

One can only guess at the meaning of these lines. Perhaps “lee to the wind” means “shelter from the strongest currents; protect youself.” Roethke commonly associates the wind with spirit (
Spiritus
), but this advice is unspecific. Likewise, the moon's response cannot be pinned down with any ease. Traditionally, the moon is a feminine principle, whereas the eel is likely to be male. It makes sense that one should recommend the other. The salt, as one might expect, offers the sea as a possible direction to move in. One associates the sea with prelapsarian consciousness, that timeless state that precedes birth and follows death. The sea also is a womb, the source of all being, and perhaps, the void. Its polysemous nature as a symbol detracts from the salt's advice to “look by the sea.” In any case, these cryptic suggestions are of little use to the hero; the “kingdom of bang and blab” is the waking world, where hints are necessarily oblique, where the true logos cannot be heard or recognized for all the noise.

The poem picks up in rhythm as the regressive journey gets underway, as the hunt begins:

The imagery recalls the wilderness of Eliade's description. The hero must cross a bridge—another commonplace symbol in regressive journeys. Eliade writes: “The symbolism of the funerary bridge is universally disseminated and extends far beyond the bounds of shamanic ideology and mythology. This symbolism is linked, on the one hand, with the myth of a bridge (or tree, vine, etc.) that once connected earth and heaven and by means of which human beings effortlessly communicated with the gods; on the other hand, it is related to the initiatory symbolism of the ‘strait gate' or of a ‘paradoxical passage.'”
¹¹
Clearly, the latter instance applies here.

Suddenly Roethke intrudes a twisted nursery rhyme, one of his own invention modeled after Mother Goose. The jingle depicts a gnomic figure that is bigger than a rat, “less than a leg,” and feels like an eel in catskin rolled in grease:

The hero seems to be moving backward, into the arena of childhood, where such fantasies are common; he has also entered the realm of dream, where monsters are not infrequent. The regressive journey is well under way. This is the stage of Campbell's monomyth where “unfamiliar yet strangely intimate forces” exist ambiguously as threats (tests) or magical aids (helpers).

The second section of “The Lost Son” is called “The Pit,” corresponding to what Campbell marks off as “the nadir of the mythological round.” Again, the title of the section gives a sign. The nursery is left behind, and the language shifts to a more appropriate rhythm as the hero dips into the nether regions of the unconscious. One thinks of the Australian initiands, covered with branches, calling out for help. Roethke employs a question-answer dialectic, but again, the answers are Delphic riddles:

The three questions all relate to the identity of the hero. Where are his roots? Who put flesh on his bones? Who made the inanimate clay (dirt) animate? The answers are never direct, but always suggestive. La Belle singles out Blake's
Book of Thel
as a source, for Thel's motto begins: “Does the Eagle know what is in the pit? / Or wilt thou go ask the Mole?”
¹²
In other words, if you want to find out about the unconscious, the realm of instincts, ask somebody who lives there. The “slime of a wet nest” is threatening, an image at once suggesting birth and decay, as does Mother Mildew. And with this word of caution, the hero moves on: “Nibble again, fish nerves.” He has slid back on the scale of creation to a point where, more like a protozoan than a human, he inhabits a world of pure instinct.

The trials which attend the hero on his descent follow in the next section, “The Gibber.” The title points to chaos, “Gibberish.” But a gibber, in working-class slang, is also a key. As in traditional initiation ceremonies, the goal of these trials is the dissolution of the old identity, the fracturing of ties with father and mother. One primary way of breaking down the old identity and starting over is the symbolic regression to the womb, a version of the backward journey examined by Eliade in
Myth and Reality
:
“The
regressus ad uterum
is accomplished in order that the beneficiary shall be born into a new mode of being or be regenerated. From the structuralist point of view, the return to the womb corresponds to the reversion of the Universe to the ‘chaotic' or embryonic state. The prenatal darkness corresponds to the Night before Creation and to the darkness of the initiation hut.” So regression involves a disintegration of the established order (and identity) in an attempt to regain the limbo of the womb, the chaos that precedes creation. Relating this to myth, Eliade says the regression usually features “a hero being swallowed by a sea monster and emerging victorious after breaking through the monster's belly, or initiatory passage through
vagina dentata
, or the dangerous descent into a cave or crevice assimilated to the mouth or the
uterus of Mother Earth.”
¹³
Roethke uses the latter at the outset of “The Gibber” where the hero overlooks the
vagina dentata
(toothed gate):

These stanzas point to the hero's anxiety, which is partly sexual (“Dogs of the groin”) and partly filial (sun as father, moon as mother). Roethke's sense of guilt dominates the passage. An unsympathetic nature (represented by weeds, snakes, briars) calls out to the hero: Die.

So the regression gets fully underway:

The change in line length alters the pace of the poem, and in a radical way Roethke takes up the dream language which characterizes the later poems in the “Lost Son” sequence. The hero presses down into the semicoherent limbo which is like an uneasy calm before a storm. It is a premonition stage. The central reference here is from Job, the only direct quotation in the poem. Job's intensely searching question reveals his isolation from God: “Hath the rain a father?” (Job 38:28); it has the same effect of Christ's mournful “God, my God, hast thou forsaken me?” The answer, for Roethke, is “yes.” The father cannot be denied, just as the lost son cannot deny Otto, who gave him life and who controls its atmosphere as he controls the greenhouse temperature. Roethke's Father here, both Otto and God, is
Yahweh
, not the softer and ethereal
Elohim
. This Father has to be placated, assuaged. He demands sacrifice and obedience. And one look from his powerful figure is enough to drain all
natural (sexual) impulses: “His look drained the stones.” The regression to the womb remains more a wish than a realization: “Rub me in father and mother.” Yet the return is underway, for the language becomes less rational as the hero drops further backward into his past.

The final goal of regression, Eliade concludes, is “to cure oneself of time.”
¹⁴
By slipping back far enough, one arrives eventually at the point where time began. By retracing steps, the source of creation is encountered. The hero of Roethke's poem aspires to this condition in the next segment of “The Gibber”:

Again, the poet avoids making much literal sense. Words like “gliding,” “beckoning,” “poised,” and “dreamily” suggest a feminine principle in contrast to Father Fear in the preceding segment. Like all women figures in Roethke, this one is vague; she may be mother or lover, perhaps both. She may well represent the desire of the quester, in Campbell's terms, for union—or reunion—with the goddess-mother of the world. In any case, the experience, conjured in dream imagery, leads to a release of energy, both psychic and verbal. The poet's own tongue kisses his lips awake.

The next stanzas, which bring “The Gibber” to an end, signal the break-up of the old self; the method recalls the Elizabethan rant (as Roethke himself pointed out in his “Open Letter”):

The poem continues in this vein, wherein the hero declares that his old self is in tatters. The leitmotif is destruction; the ground “unstills” itself under the hero's feet; his body is consumed in flames: “All the windows are burning!” But, in the midst of this crumbling of the old order (“Goodbye, goodbye, old stones, the time-order is going”), a glimpse of the new one can be discerned. The hero asks, “Do the bones cast out their fire?” and “Is the seed leaving the old bed?” The sexual imagery recalls the initiatory rite of passage described by Eliade, where the initiand learns about sex for the first time. But Roethke's hero rebels, momentarily, and cries: “I want the old rage, the lash of primordial milk!” He wants to regress still further before going forward. The conflict present in the hero's unconscious finds curious expression in the lines:

The two words are, perhaps, in opposition,
money
being an artificial and negative term and
water
representing life and renewal. On the other hand, Roethke might have agreed with Wallace Stevens, who said that “poetry is a kind of money.” In any case, the line, “I run, I run to the whistle of money,” which precedes the couplet, sets up a negative context for the word
money
, helping us to delimit the possible range of meaning.

This section as a whole ends with a partial annihilation of the old self, and Roethke once again uses the question-answer dialectic that often reappears at crucial moments in the “Lost Son” sequence. The hero's undoing seems complete in the last stanza:

The color white nearly always anticipates a redemption scene in Roethke. White is also associated with regeneration, the realm of Blake's Generation, where sexual reproduction guarantees a kind of eternity—but hardly a redemption. The “dark swirl” of the hero may be the abyss of timelessness. Having descended the memory scale and re-encountered many primal images, the hero has burnt up some of his past, the unwanted self, the memories that persist and inhibit free access to the present. The ashes point to the burning up of the old self. Now the hero must bring a new self before the Father for reconciliation—atonement.

On the barest literal level, the boy has simply run away into a wild landscape, had some nightmarish hallucinations, and probably masturbated.
In the next section, “The Return,” the literal aspect of the poem reasserts itself. We come out of the shadowy regions of the unconscious, although the mythic pattern remains consistent. The stage in the mono-myth where the hero reunites with the father-creator fits “The Return.” The boy straggles back from his adventures in the dark wood and returns to the greenhouse womb: