Theodore Roethke (24 page)

Still, “The Sententious Man” fails as a poem, for in spite of its procession of mystical symbols, it has no center, no deep image at its source. It lacks the organic unity found in most of Roethke's better poems. Whereas “I Knew a Woman” blends a comic with a serious note, this poem is either heavy-handed (“Is pain a promise? I was schooled in pain”) or forcedly comic (“I'm tired of brooding on my neighbor's soul; / My friends become more Christian, year by year”). The title does not redeem the poem: it should be called “The Sententious Poet.”

“The Pure Fury” fails in the same way and shows Roethke's inability to write
about
ideas:

Apart from the appalling contortion of the last rhyme and the unsuccessful mixture of general and particular statements, Roethke has merely borrowed some ideas from
The Courage to Be:

When Shakespeare turned North's translation of Plutarch's
Lives
into poetry, as he did in
Antony and Cleopatra
, he transformed the general descriptions of his original into terse, image-laden verse. Roethke has scarcely altered Tillich, except to butcher his abstractions into serviceable pentameters.

“The Renewal” contains some philosophical material, but this time the poet makes a poem of his ideas. He resurrects the “Lost Son” imagery to good effect; the self-as-tree returns: “I teach my sighs to lengthen into songs, / Yet, like a tree, endure the shift of things” (
CP
, p. 135). The ghost of Otto Roethke blows in with the wind: “The night wind rises. Does my father live?” But this time the son remains unshaken by such threats. “Love alters all,” and the poet-protagonist feels secure in this new steadiness. “The Renewal” becomes, ultimately, a meditation on the power of love to freshen the sense of self—to affirm being in spite of non-being. The question arises, “Will the self, lost, be found again?” And the last stanza confirms what we might expect: love brings on a renewal of the self through mystic illumination of that self: “Illumination brought to such a pitch,” says the poet, “I find that love, and I am everywhere.” The mystic always gives up selfhood in the mundane sense of that term; he now finds himself, the
self
, everywhere, a kind of collective
consciousness
.

The section entitled “Voices and Creatures” finds the poet plagued by many of the old guilts; the ghosts return as “grey sheep” at the beginning of “The Exorcism”:

The “Father of flowers” is Otto, and he calls from a cloud as before. The second part of this poem is livelier:

This is the same “bug-riddled foliage” where the lost son hunted. In short, this poem is a later footnote to that central work, “The Lost Son.”

“The Song” recalls “the small voice of a child, / Close, yet far away”
(
CP
, p. 146). As usual, the past will not let go. The poet's old selves, imperfect and fragmented, come running back to him, as in “The Exorcism.” And so the speaker in “The Small” complains, “The dead will not lie still” (
CP
, p. 148). The guilt called up by these ghosts provokes a morbid speculation in “Elegy” (ostensibly written for Dylan Thomas):

Perhaps the most vivid poem in this section is “A Walk in Late Summer,” with its visionary last stanza:

The language, though tending toward abstraction, is redeemed by the ingenious word play (the quibble on “lie” and the ambiguity of “Existence moves toward a certain end”). A singular intensity unites the whole. The poet links the mystical rose with the end of existence and the task for lovers: to unmake time.

The three animal poems that complete “Voices and Creatures” show Roethke's continuing obsession with the lower ranges of the phylogenetic scale. In “Snake,” “Slug,” and “The Siskins,” the poet wishes to become like the creatures under contemplation. After describing the snake, for instance, he says:

In “Slug” he says, “I'm sure I've been a toad, one time or another” (
CP
, p. 151). And in “The Siskins” he merely leans forward, rapt in meditation, as the tiny birds skip over the flowers as “Light as seed blowing off
thistles!” (
CP
, p. 152). This typically Romantic desire to identify with the natural world is ubiquitous in Roethke, and these animal poems remind us, especially, of Keats or of D. H. Lawrence, whose “Snake” may have been the inspiration for Roethke's poem of the same title. In these animal poems, the poet returns to the concrete world of
The Lost Son
, which gives this work a vitality missing in the philosophical poems. Instead of making general statements, Roethke (like Lawrence) embodies aspects of his own personality in the animals he writes about. These poems, slight as they are, point toward the fine sequences which bring
Words for the Wind
to a conclusion.

“The Dying Man (In Memoriam: W. B. Yeats)” is Roethke's homage to the master. As before, the lesson of the mask is practiced, especially in the opening section, “His Words,” where the great Irishman speaks for himself:

The soul, we are told, has been cured in the sun and may be of no further use, yet “What's done is yet to come.” The logic of this seems tenuous, only becoming intelligible with the proverbial aid of “Eternity is Now.” Time, seen from the mystical viewpoint, is not linear but circular. At the center of the great wheel lies the hub, Eliot's “still point of the turning world,” signified by the rose. The pressures of imminent death bring this paradox into focus; as in
East Coker
, the poet discovers his beginning in his end.

In “What Now?”—the second section—the poet asks, “What's beating at the gate?” He wants to know what lies beyond physical life now, as the voices of Roethke and Yeats come together in a single mask:

Vision of the physical world blurs, which allows the speaker to transfer his attention from the beloved to God. But in the third section, “The Wall,” an old ghost materializes: Papa. “A ghost comes out of the unconscious mind / To grope my sill. …” Using symbol clusters encountered earlier, Roethke associates the ghost of father with a wall, something which obscures, divides, or encloses. He also associates the wall with the mystical Dark Night of the Soul, and he calls himself “A spirit raging at the visible,” a line glossed by a phrase from the Davies sequence: “The visible obscures.” Reality, in the Platonic sense, lies behind the material world, behind the wall, behind the visible reflections of truth which prevent us from encountering the real thing, that Ultimate Truth which Roethke names “a dazzling dark behind the sun.”

“The Exulting” recalls the ecstasy passages of the “Lost Son” sequence. The poet declares: “I love the world; I want more than the world / Or after-image of the inner eye.” He had worked out this concept in an earlier notebook, saying that “The eye, of course, is not enough. But the outer eye serves the inner eye, that's the point.”
²²
As usual, illumination occurs in connection with
positive
images of the father, and this poem is no exception. The idea here is that each son
becomes
his father as he supplants him, which is a spin-off of the oedipal myth.

“They Sing, They Sing” takes the lost son one step further in his journey; we encounter the apotheosis of Woman and a return to the dance, which, as a metaphor, is almost interchangeable with singing. The new woman-image includes vestiges of mother, moon, and earth goddesses:

This Woman resembles Robert Graves's White Goddess, who combines the triple qualities of mother, bride, and killer-hag,
²³
or the traditional Greek goddess of three aspects: Artemis (the night-huntress), Hecate (moon), and Persephone (Queen of Hades). Roethke owned
The White
Goddess
and knew it well; his later work often invokes the symbol of the moon when alluding to the feminine principle, especially as it suggests his Muse. The woman in the above stanza is partly mother, tied to the dolphin image taken from Yeats, although the beast who cries out has associations with the beloved of “Words for the Wind” (“She frolicks like a beast”).

The inspired last stanza of “They Sing, They Sing” (which brings “The Dying Man” to a close) sums up Roethke's thoroughly Romantic belief in the necessity of the quest for self-affirmation in spite of the non-being which threatens from without:

The lengthening of the ultimate line to an alexandrine gives extra weight to the final image. As Tillich said, “Emptiness and loss of meaning are expressions of the threat of non-being to the spiritual life. This threat is implied in man's finitude and actualized by man's estrangement. It can be described in terms of doubt, its creative and its destructive function in man's spiritual life. Man is able to ask because he is separated
from
, while participating
in
, what he is asking about.”
²⁴
One must
dare
to beat one's wings against the emptiness, accepting doubt as a condition of life. As Tillich continues, “One takes the risk of going astray and the anxiety of this risk upon oneself.” So one avoids the extreme situation “until it becomes unavoidable and the despair of truth becomes complete.” This unavoidable task for the modern writer is always the affirmation of being in spite of non-being. Roethke accepts this responsibility and, in doing so, places himself beside his older contemporary Wallace Stevens, who concludes the “Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction” with a great affirmation: “I have not but I am and as I am, I am.”
²⁵
This stance should not be mistaken for the self-absorption of Blake's Ulro; it is the self-affirmation of the man-as-artist, beholding what he has created, including his
self
, and declaring its purity. As Roethke would come to say in a very late poem, “The Abyss,” “Being, not doing, is my first joy” (
CP
, p. 222).

The last part of
Words for the Wind
contains the five sections of the “Meditations of an Old Woman.” They resemble in form and manner the poems of
Praise to the End!
—although Roethke exchanges the mask of the lost son for that of an old woman, for whom the poet's mother, Helen Roethke, provided the model. The familiar motif of the journey
recurs: the literal journey is a ride on a bus, but the movement toward death is explicit. Like all Roethke's journeys, regression plays a part in the poem's direction. The heroine achieves partial illuminations, like the lost son, but she slips back toward that final apocalypse in death.