Theodore Roethke (23 page)

The underlying mystical nature of the eros described in “The Partners” comes to the surface in “The Wraith” as the poet contemplates the symbolical aspect of the love act:

Eros is an affirmation of being against non-being, “the lonely pastures of the dead” which lie at either end of life. The two lovers “take arms” against the threat of non-being; it is a brilliant pun as well. This is the private passion given public expression that recalls the later Yeats. A key line in “The Wraith” soon follows: “The flesh can make the spirit visible.” This realization serves to reconcile the Platonic body-spirit
schism. Not surprisingly, Roethke had been reading at this time the theologian Paul Tillich's
The Courage To Be
, in which Tillich defines courage as self-affirmation
in spite of
non-being. His vision of eros embodies a kind of mutual self-affirmation, as when Roethke's partners “Took arms against their own obscurity.” These lovers take arms literally and figuratively to ward off threatening ghosts.

Tillich exercised a subtle, but profound, influence on the later Roethke, who drew on
The Courage To Be
for ideas and corroboration of his own instincts. Tillich's basic existentialism supports Roethke's conclusion to the Davies sequence, “The Vigil,” where the central motif is that of Dante's ascent through purgatory. The point here is that Dante believed in this vision of ascent. The first stanza ends with a question and an answer:

The coincidence, that Roethke's wife was also Beatrice, allows the poet to ground the sequence in myth and autobiography at the same time. The advice to “Summon a vision and declare it pure” parallels Tillich, who urges creativity as one sure way of overcoming the threat of non-being: “Spiritual self-affirmation occurs in every moment in which man lives creatively in various spheres of meaning.”
¹³
This self-affirmation extends beyond the artist, says Tillich, to whomever participates spontaneously in response to a creative vision: “Everyone who lives creatively in meanings affirms himself as a participant in these meanings.” Ontological anxiety is the result of noncreativity, which is nonparticipation in the lively dance of the universe summoned by Davies and affirmed by Roethke. The last lines of the sequence document the rewards of joining in the dance, culminating in the possibility of mystical union: “Who rise from flesh to spirit know the fall: / The word outleaps the world, and light is all.” For a poet, especially, the gnostic leap from logos into pure light, from word to otherworld, has a particular richness of meaning.

“The Waking” serves as an epilogue to “Four for Sir John Davies,” although it is a separate poem in its own right, as well as the title poem for the book. Blessing has written with special sensitivity about this poem: “a poem celebrating the ‘always' that falls away whenever we near it and one which finds its only steadiness in the ‘shaking' by which the world advances.”
¹⁴
The poem is a villanelle, a highly wrought form, and one dependent upon two brilliant refrain lines. It is carefully contrived around these lines, which must come together as a final couplet
and
bring the poem to a conclusion! Each stanza, in turn, takes the refrain
lines and slightly alters or extends their meaning. Indeed, the form itself dictates a tentative approach toward experience, for each refrain line, end stopped and seemingly final in its expression, is abruptly given a new color by its successive contexts. The reader engages in the
process
of art with the poet, testing each line as one tests a proposition, inching gradually toward some resolution, which is never really final. The poem's subject, in effect, is the Romantic dialectic, the movement toward synthesis which, in turn, gives one another thesis to begin with once more. Hegel's triadic way of reasoning acknowledges the ineluctable nature of truth. The
process
takes precedence over the result, as in “The Waking.” Roethke's final stanza summarizes the poem's content and opens the way for new work, for the poet must always move toward that “always” which is near:

Here, Roethke embraces many of his key paradoxes: one must learn by going (the reverse of what is usual); one must wake to sleep (the gradual awakening of the spirit); movement steadies the uncertain man; and things must not be taken for what they seem (Plato's paradox), for what falls away, i.e., the physical world, is always at hand in the ideal world of spiritual reality that lies behind and sustains it.

In
Words for the Wind
, published in 1958, Roethke preserved his favorite poems and adds some new ones. There are five sections: “Lighter Pieces and Poems for Children,” “Love Poems,” “Voices and Creatures,” “The Dying Man,” and “Meditations of an Old Woman.” There are no real departures in this volume, merely extensions and elaborations. I shall treat them briefly.

The lighter pieces are weakest; Roethke was by reputation a witty man, an amusing colleague and friend, but his poems for children and his light verse generally are dull. “Reply to a Lady Editor” seems to me his only successful venture in this realm. The second section, the love poems written to his wife, contains this poet's least interesting work in this genre; the Woman addressed or conjured in these poems tends more toward the Jungian archetype than toward Beatrice O'Connell. And this damages the poetry as love poetry.

The woman encountered in “The Dream,” for instance, is a wraith. “She came toward me in the flowing air, / A shape of change, encircled by its fire” (
CP
, p. 119). Of course, the title does not lead one to expect
more than a ghost, but the loss of “that anguish of concreteness” can be felt. Roethke seems to forget his own maxim: “The flesh can make the spirit visible” (
CP
, p. 106). The same problem weakens the other poems in this section: “All the Earth, All the Air,” “She,” “The Voice,” “The Other,” and “The Swan” are prone to abstraction; the poet loses that grip on the particulars of reality that invigorates his best writing.

The two most engaging poems in the book are, nonetheless, love poems; “Words for the Wind” and “I Knew a Woman” both transport the image of Woman into fresh areas of experience, the first one being a celebration of marital love, the second having a seriocomic tone with few parallels elsewhere in Roethke's work. Both were written shortly after the poet's marriage, and they reveal his luminous sense of participation in the dance, “Celebrating the marriage,” as Wallace Stevens said, “Of flesh and air.”
¹⁵

“Words for the Wind” happens to have been Roethke's favorite poem. “For those who are interested in such matters,” he wrote in an anthology called
Poet's Choice
, “the poem is an epithalamion to a bride seventeen years younger. W. H. Auden had given us his house, in Forio, Ischia, for several months. … I was able to move outside myself—for me sometimes a violent dislocation—and express a joy in another, in others: I mean Beatrice O'Connell, and the Italian people, their world, their Mediterranean.”
¹⁶
The poem is a paean to the beloved, written in a strong three-beat line reminiscent of Yeats; part of its success derives from the regular meter working against slant rhymes (odd/glad, down/own, beak/ back). The first stanza sets the spirited tone, which never lets up:

Familiar themes crop up: the dancing which keeps the poet steady in the universe (“Motion can keep me still”); the way the spirit reveals itself in the shape of the beloved (“The wind's white with her name”); and the fact that the spirit stays after the material world has gone (“What falls away will fall; / All things bring me to love”). The last stanza contains Roethke's summary statement about love:

Roethke's readings in modern existential theology included the work of Martin Buber, author of
I and Thou;
he conceived of his relationship with Beatrice in these holy terms. The lover of “Words for the Wind” has an I-Thou affection for his wife, affirming his own being in the presence of another's. Buber explains:

This passage is a perfect gloss to “Words for the Wind,” for the poet-lover, a further extension of the lost son, learns to live in the light of another, to “see and suffer” himself “in another being, at last.”

“I Knew a Woman” combines innuendo and wit in a way unique to this poem. It begins with a mask: the innocent lover who cannot but praise his love extravagantly: “Of her choice virtues only gods should speak, / Or English poets who grew up on Greek” (
CP
, p. 127). The next two stanzas develop a series of witty or “metaphysical” conceits; for instance, he compares two lovers to a sickle and rake (punning on rake) in the act of mowing (which has sexual connotations):

This particular conceit alludes to Marvell's “The Mower's Song,” and Roethke, like Marvell, “brings new life to the convention-ridden pastoral love lyric through the injection into his poem of the intellectualized sensuality of metaphysical wit.”
¹⁸
In a similar vein, Roethke picks up metaphors from Ben Jonson in the next stanza, continuing the verbal play until the last, more serious, stanza in which the larger meaning of eros falls under scrutiny:

The poet demands a great deal from his readers here, shifting ruthlessly from concrete particulars to abstract statements, making huge leaps of intuition. As in “The Waking,” the subject is the dynamic quality of experience, the
process
of reality, man's “martyrdom” to natural cycles. The word “martyr” must be read ironically, for though a martyr dies, he is reborn to greater glory; likewise, the lover gives up himself to his beloved's “motion,” gives up his “freedom,” and learns what eternity means. Like mystics, in fact, lovers seem to participate in the eternal while still being in the temporal. The great success of this poem derives from the opening levity which distracts the reader
away
from the serious content until he is swept into the rhythm so completely that he becomes, in effect, a “martyr to a motion” not his own.

The desire to transcend the flesh dominates most of the love poems in
Words for the Wind:
an intimation of the mysticism to come in
The Far Field
. Indeed, in “The Sententious Man” Roethke scorns those lovers who refuse to go beyond the material world, remarking: “True lechers love the flesh, and that is all” (
CP
, p. 131). The truest lovers hear the cry of the spirit behind the flesh:

The identification of the beloved with a rose and the lover with a lion is traditional. The lion is “in his strength and wholeness …the only creature potentially able to attain Perfection.”
¹⁹
The rose represents the highest form of spiritual reality. The same poem, a short one, hauls into its sphere a number of other classic mystical symbols, such as the alchemical “philosopher's stone”: “I know the motion of the deepest stone. / Each one's himself, yet each one's everyone.” The philosopher's stone, in hermetic lore, cannot be found; it must be
made
, like a poem. All things are contained within it, as Boehme explained: