Theodore Roethke (26 page)

Indeed, the apocalypse that Roethke conjures in
The Far Field
has its closest ancestor in
Sea-Drift
in which Whitman receives “The word final, superior to all” offered up by the sea: “Death, death, death, death, death.”
⁵

The Far Field
is made up of four sections: “North American Sequence,” “Love Poems,” “Mixed Sequence,” and “Sequence, Sometimes Metaphysical.” Especially in the first section, there is a fresh expansiveness, hinted at earlier, but now in full strength. For the most part, the mask of Whitman replaces Yeats, allowing the poet freedom to catalogue as many “things” as he pleases. The open-ended meter permits Roethke's incredible verbal energy to spill over; after the tight forms of
Words for the Wind, The Far Field
breathes easily. The meditative genre dominates this last book as the poet perfects the techniques of “The Dying Man” and “Meditations of an Old Woman.” Yet there is no real departure in subject matter; the myth of the lost son, with its personal symbology, is once again rehearsed. It is also extended. The long journey out of the self is, Roethke would have us believe, accomplished. The mystical ascent from flesh to spirit begun in the Davies sequence—up Purgatorial Hill—
reaches a conclusion in this last volume, which is Roethke's
Paradise
The final shape of Roethke's career remains uncannily perfect.

“North American Sequence” records a poet's attempt to transcend the sensual world, but not by denying it. In lines which recall many of the greenhouse poems, “The Longing” surveys

As Mills says, “The poet is at the nadir, sunk in a world of the senses, tormented by a hypersensitive awareness of physical and moral decay.”
⁶
The poet wants to know “How to transcend this emptiness?” The meaning of the title becomes clear toward the end of the poem; he says, “I would with the fish, the blackening salmon, and the mad lemmings, / The children dancing, the flowers widening.” And, still later “I long for the imperishable quiet at the heart of form.” This is the poet's ultimate goal, the direction of his meditations. Nevertheless, in this first poem, the longings appear contradictory; nature partakes of no recognizable form; Roethke sees, instead, the Heraclitean flux.

Hugh B. Staples sees “The Longing” as an overture to the “North American Sequence”:

The allusion to Eliot is important, for in “The Longing” Roethke confronts his precursor directly, asking if “Old men should be explorers?” The themes that Staples singles out are also the focus of the
Quartets
, of course. Eliot's final vision of the mystical rose, the symbol in which all
paradoxes find resolution, parallels Roethke's concluding poem, “The Rose.”

In “Meditation at Oyster River” Roethke begins the quest for Illumination of the Self, which Underhill divides into three phases:

Clarity of vision marks the opening section of the “Meditation at Oyster River”:

The mask of Whitman is much in evidence; the seaside imagery consciously echoes such poems as “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking,” “As I Ebb'd with the Ocean of Life,” or “On the Beach at Night,” all of which represent stages of Whitman's own mystical journey. The catalogues of natural details suggest that heightening of perception which Underhill mentions. It is part of the prelude to the discovery of the “transcendental self” or the “self-beyond-self,” the self which Roethke said “persists like a dying star.”

The poet, in his meditation, seeks out the “pure moment” (which recalls Wordsworth's “spots of time”), the point of intersection of the timeless with time (Eliot's preoccupation in “The Dry Salvages”), the point of equilibrium which prepares the way for final illumination:

The poem ends with an illumination not unlike that of “A Field of Light” from
The Lost Son
as the poet declares: “I rock with the motion of morning.” In effect, identification has taken place. The inner and outer realms come into Emersonian alignment.

“Journey to the Interior” is a key poem in the “North American Sequence”; it recalls the earlier descents into infernal regions and becomes, as it were, a temporary detour in the long journey out of the self. As Roethke puts it,

The metaphorical nature of the journey is given immediate prominence, but the details rapidly make the car trip across the American West the poem's literal setting; Roethke evokes the local spirit of the Teton Mountains and the grassy plains with a rich panoply of images. In the final section the poet has a minor illumination, the sense of his “body thinking” (a wonderful version of Eliot's “felt thought”); he reports, “I have known the heart of the sun.” And this knowlege must now be repossessed.

At the beginning of “The Long Waters,” which follows, the poet disparages the physical “world of the dog,” the lowest rung on the mystical ladder. He admits to a certain “foolishness with God” and an inordinate desire for “the peaks, the black ravines, the rolling mists”—all the extremes of experience (
CP
, p. 196). Invoking Blake's nurse Mnetha, Mother of Har, Roethke looks for that balance in nature provided by the anima, the feminine principle. The advice offered by the salt in
The Lost Son
—“Look by the sea”—is once again followed; the poet returns to the water's edge:

The seaside stirs up memories of a place “Where impulse no longer dictates, nor the darkening shadow,” the paradise before the fall into creation. Roethke's symbols of redemption—wind and stone—recur as, in the last stanza, he pictures a childhood idyll:

He concludes, not by rejecting the physical world completely, but by absorbing it in Whitmanesque fashion: “I embrace the world.” The progress we have seen from revulsion at the world to a vigorous acceptance opens the way for the title poem.

“The Far Field” gathers in summary fashion many of the smaller illuminations gained by the lost son thus far. It tells us nothing new about Roethke, nor does it widen his mythos; rather, like Yeats's “Circus Animals' Desertion,” the poem enumerates old themes. It is the work of a poet bringing his career to a focus. Its subject is the self-beyond-self, the self which persists eternally, illumined by years of meditation. As before, the journey motif sets the poem in motion, and, as in the “Journey to the Interior,” a car trip lends a note of realism to what might easily be a wholly metaphorical venture. We learn quickly that the journey is not taking place now; the poem is a
dream
of journeys. It is a record of the soul's progress from flesh to spirit, likened to

This lonely passage through a stormy night by car is the contemporary counterpart to the more traditional image of the ship at sea in a great storm (as in Hopkins's “Wreck of the Deutschland”). The sense of human frailty against the violent strength of natural forces has always been a good subject for poetry (one recalls Roethke's own previous poem on this theme, “Big Wind”). The terror of being stalled in a snowdrift is unrelieved at the end of the first section.

Switching the scene to the open field near the greenhouse, and simultaneously dipping into memory, the poet revisits a familiar Roethkean landscape where, “at the field's end,”

He recollects his childhood through the next long section of the poem, resurrecting the sensitive young boy who suffers for the animals and fishes; but there is some distance now in the voice that says:

These are traditional Romantic sentiments, yet Roethke's lyricism gives them new life. The portrait of a young boy follows, one who lies down in the silt of a slowly moving stream and puts his fingers into an empty shell, thinking, “Once I was something like this, mindless, / Or perhaps with another mind, less peculiar.” A believer in reincarnation, the boy straddles a wet log with his skinny knees and thinks:

Sullivan finds the tone of this passage hard to assess, calling it serious and nostalgic.
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But far from indulging in sentimental longing for a previous state, the poet remains strangely detached, alluding to this time when he “learned not to fear infinity.” She does, however, notice the underlying playfulness which is characteristic of Roethke at his best, and this is perhaps the most illusive quality in his work.

In the third section Roethke isolates and develops the associations of death and water that conclude the previous section; it is a meditation on death. The recollected past gives way to the present as the adult persona appears to be literally and figuratively in midstream. “I feel a weightless change,” he says, “a moving forward / As of water quickening before a narrowing channel / Before the banks converge.” The tree (self) now “retreats into its own shadow,” which suggests that the speaker, in meditation, is tunneling inward. One remembers the ghostly voice from “The Lost Son”: “Dark hollows said, lee to the wind.” The speaker in “The Far Field” moves into an eddy, taking shelter from the force of the current. Again alluding to Eliot's
Quartets
, he says: “I have come to a still, but not a deep center, / A point outside the glittering current.” Here is another of Roethke's irresolute resolutions. Yet there is paradoxically a sense of renewal in mortality:

The sense of death as a passage provokes this optimism. Roethke savors that taste of the eternal that he finds in the temporal dimension, those little clues which go everywhere around us largely undetected. He catalogues them, much in the same way as did Whitman or, again, Eliot, in passages like the following: