Theodore Roethke (28 page)

So, in the fourth section, the poet re-enters the everyday world, asking “How can I dream except beyond this life?” as if to apologize for the withdrawal of the previous section. The texture of Roethke's language here resembles that of “The Lost Son,” and this section parallels “The Return”:

The rhythms and diction of this fine section are well tried. In a summary passage the poet says:

This warrants attention. For the two darks are one: the eternal emptiness at either side of life. The image is close to Underhill's description of the Dark Night of the Soul, the sense of Divine Absence. But there is a strange calm here, different from the sheer terror one associates with this stage (Hopkins's “Terrible Sonnets” come to mind). Roethke's meditator rocks through temporal existence now, almost in possession of his soul again after a lifetime's yearning. The speaker then receives supernatural aid as the shade advises: “Adore and draw near. / Who knows this—/ Knows all.'”

The final section celebrates the renewal of self in a typical illumination passage, although the borrowings from Buddhism here inject a fresh note; the poet declares:

It was under the bo tree that the Buddha gained permanent enlightenment, and Roethke clearly exaggerates his own experience by comparison. Nonetheless, his language is exalted and moving. The final rhythms suggest the influence of the King James Bible and one almost reads “hath taken” for “has taken.” The concluding aphorism points to the abiding influence of Kenneth Burke; one has come to expect the final illumination to take proverbial form. As William Heyen has written of “The Abyss”: “In this poem Roethke dramatizes, for an age that has lost its faith, an individual's hard and dark mystic way to God, whose essence he best perceives when he descends into and experiences the true nature of the Divine Abyss.”
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A number of poems in “Mixed Sequence” re-create the greenhouse Eden. “Elegy,” for instance, records the death of Roethke's Aunt Tilly who, like Mnetha, Mother of Har, was an attendent nurse-spirit. She “sat with the dead when the relatives left” and “tended the infirm, the mad, the epileptic” (
CP
, p. 223). Completely selfless, “… yet she died in agony, / Her tongue, at the last, thick, black as an ox's.” In spite of a number of vivid lines, the poem lacks the unity of tone and well-wrought shape of Roethke's best work. And the passion that modified his “Elegy for Jane” is conspicuously absent here. Similarly, “Otto” is less vigorous than earlier poems that deal directly with Roethke's father; nevertheless, it gives evidence of this poet's abiding obsession with Papa. The portrait of Otto Roethke is largely anecdotal; we see the pig-headed man who
would never suffer fools gladly, who would chase poachers off his property with a shotgun, and yet who could build a “house for flowers!” (
CP
, p. 224). The poem ends with a moving remembrance of the lost paradise; the reservoir of memory is suddenly tapped, and the poet is nearly overwhelmed by nostalgia. The final couplet reveals the poet's sense of inexorable separation from his greenhouse Eden:

The quest for a childhood paradise continues in “The Chums” with a recollection of boyhood friends; some are now in prison, some are dead, and none will have read his books. The poem has a chilly undercurrent, for Roethke recalls that when he slipped on the ice they saw he “fell more than twice” and didn't help (
CP
, p. 225). Yet he is “grateful for that.”

“The Lizard” brings the poet back into the present; he sits on a Mediterranean terrace, contemplating the odd creature who, like the poet, has eaten too well. The poem is unexceptional. Its counterpart, “The Meadow Mouse,” a meditation on the capricious nature of evil, is better. The last stanza calls up a view of the universe as startling and impersonal (and cruel
because
of this impersonality) as Frost's “Design.” Roethke says:

Three lyrics of mixed quality follow. “Heard in a Violent Ward” is Roethke's effort to install himself, by association, in the exalted company of Blake, Christopher Smart, and John Clare. “The Geranium,” which follows, offers a sentimental portrait of the artist as a “sensitive man.” The subject recalls the greenhouse poems, but by comparison this poem is sloppy and self-conscious, bordering on self-parody. The poem's tone
is uncertain, as if the poet does not quite know how to present himself. The poem ends heavy-handedly, as the speaker claims to have fired his poor maid because she threw out a beloved geranium!

Most of the poems which follow, bringing “Mixed Sequence” to an end, exhibit what Keats called Negative Capability; the poet identifies with something outside of himself, losing himself completely in the object under contemplation, and thereby finding himself as well. The Emersonian doctrine of correspondences is a version of this technique of going beyond solipsistic self-consciousness. The longing for identification is, according to Stevens, the motive for metaphor; he says, “You like it under the trees in autumn, / Because everything is half dead.”
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In Roethke's “The Storm (
Forio d'Ischia)”
the lovers creep into bed with a storm whistling around their cottage; but the storm seems as much a part of them as something external:

The storm is terrifying, yet it seems a source of energy, a “violence without” which commands a necessary “violence within.”

“The Thing” and “The Pike” follow, continuing the examination of violence in the natural world. In the former, a flock of large birds annihilates a smaller bird, “the thing.” At first, they simply trailed it behind them:

The poet draws an analogy between the birds who destroy the weaker one and some picnickers who eat veal and “little larks arranged on a long platter.” The instances of violence (if one may call the picnic such) are presented without comment by the poet, starkly. He makes no value judgment. Likewise, in “The Pike” Roethke examines another dark aspect of nature, focusing on the fish which strikes from “beyond the end
of a mossy log,” disturbing the stillness of a pond (
CP
, p. 233). One could easily interpret this poem, like “The Lizard” and “The Thing” before it, as psychic allegory, reading the pond as memory that is disturbed by the fish as father. This dimension is present in a peripheral way. But Roethke seems more intent to work in the symbolist mode of Lawrence's
Birds, Beasts, and Flowers
. One thinks of poems like “Fish” and “Snake,” where Lawrence refuses to be allegorical, concentrating on the animal under his aim, fixing it with an image. He presents the thing itself, drawing the reader into the object's magnetic field. The style of Roethke's poems, with their loose lines and sensuous imagery, recalls Lawrence specifically. As La Belle says, “Roethke borrows and yet modifies some of Lawrence's most characteristic technical devices.”
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Of the last few poems in the sequence, “The Manifestation” and “The Moment” stand out as summary poems. In the former, the poet reflects:

That is, there are many points of illumination on the long journey out of the self. Roethke invokes a series of familiar metaphors for the protean self in this short lyric: tree, bird, plant (seed), and worm. In each case the organism strains to go beyond itself. Roethke then asks, adopting the tone of a professor: “Do these analogies perplex?” He offers four more examples, all of them images of motion within a larger context of rest, to make his point that the self is permanent, the transcendent self, and it must be viewed against the wider background of eternity. He concludes: “What does what it should do needs nothing more,” repeating the Scotian doctrine of Gerard Manley Hopkins—namely, that each created thing should strive to accomplish whatever its limitations permit. In the metaphysics of Duns Scotus, creation is seen as
process
or becoming. In this view, the individual self never arrives at a condition of static being; rather, being involves constant evolution or becoming, the “seed pushing itself beyond itself.” This does not contradict the final aphorism of “The Abyss,” for being
is
becoming, which is opposed to mere “doing.” One “does” the same things over and over. But being is a process, a continual widening of contexts, the ripples “winding around the waters of the world.” And this process leads, as always, to the condition of joy proclaimed in the last poem in “Mixed Sequence,” “The Moment”: “What else to say? / We end in joy” (
CP
, p. 238).

This condition of joy prepares us for the decisive final “Sequence, Sometimes Metaphysical,” where Roethke completes that long journey out of self by joining that universal dance alluded to in “Four for Sir John Davies.” Mills has said that the poems of this sequence are, “because of their formal manner, condensed in the presentation of experience.”
²⁴
The poems focus on the moment of cosmic awareness for the most part, relentless in their inward drive. The mask of Whitman falls to the side; Blake, Yeats, and earlier mystical poets hover over this sequence. Unlike the other poems of
The Far Field
, these lyrics are spare, never descriptive; the poet wants nothing to attenuate the vision. Each poem is an act of attention, a revelation. The poet strips away the appearances to behold the reality that underlies the physical world.

The first poem in the sequence, “In a Dark Time,” serves as a mystical prolegomenon to what follows. Critics have lavished attention on the poem; indeed, it was the subject of a symposium by John Crowe Ransom, Babette Deutsch, Kunitz, and Roethke himself.
²⁵
The Yeatsean cadences, the dazzling imagery and underlying passion of the poem are impressive; yet its quality as a
poem
seems debatable. As an account of a mystical experience, it is certainly fascinating.

The poem moves from the Dark Night of the Soul to the final union with the Godhead. Underbill's description of the Dark Night parallels Roethke's:

Thus, Roethke explains that, “In a dark time, the eye begins to see” (
CP
, p. 239). He meets his shadow in the shade, hears his echo in the familiar dark woods, this time an “echoing wood.” By announcing himself “A lord of nature” who nonetheless weeps before a tree, Roethke hints at an ironic undertone of this poem which must be kept in mind lest we
should value the surface of the poem too highly. The modern Romantic poet
needs
this saving edge of irony, however thin.

This seeming self-abasement gives way, in the next stanza, to a self-justification couched in Yeatsean rhetoric: “What's madness but nobility of soul / At odds with circumstance?” The persona goes on to proclaim the purity of his despair, but one wishes he had shown us his despair or made us despairing, as in “Elegy for Jane.” The speaker has come to a crossroads, a “place among the rocks,” a familiar Dantesque landscape, where one path leads to a cave (death), another up a winding path (Purgatorial Hill). The abyss presents itself.