Theodore Roethke (7 page)

The great Romantic model for the creative process, which flows and does not freeze, is the botanical organism. It was the German Romantic J. G. Herder who drew attention to the metaphoric potential in the life cycle of the plant: “With what marvellous diligence a plant refines alien liquors into parts of its own finer self, grows, loves …then ages, gradually loses its capacity to respond to stimuli and to renew its power, dies….”
¹⁷
The famous dialectical triad of Hegel is a version of this metaphor, the refinement of two contrarieties into a higher third. Blake's version of this idea was copied by Roethke several times into his notebooks:
“Without contraries is no progression.” Another time we find Roethke paraphrasing Blake: “A great deal of art arises out of opposition.” And in Roethke's teaching notes: “Poetry [achieves] an integration of experience—what Richards called ‘organization.' A fusion of all the forces of man.” He defines poetry as “form that culminates in Unity of Being.” And he describes the part played by the poet's eye in Emersonian terms: “The eye, of course, is not enough. But the outer eye serves the inner eye, that's the point.” The “inner eye,” which the imagination uses to see into the heart of things and to perceive the essential unity in disparate experience, must be kept open: “Every attempt to minimize or ridicule the free use of the imagination is a little murder of human life.”
¹⁸

So Roethke engaged in a life-long defense of the imagination. His struggle was against the chaos symbolized by the jungle aspects of his greenhouse Eden, the threat of “fifty summers in motion at once” (
CP
, p. 38). The poem is that momentary stay against confusion celebrated by Robert Frost; as the plant turns air, light, water, and mineral earth (the four primary elements) into a single, vital form, so the poet transforms the diverse materials of his life into a new whole. As T. S. Eliot says:

The Romantic imagination is linked by necessity to the concept of organic form.

Finally, the Romantics were evangelical visionaries, and this is an important part of their poetics. Wordsworth believed he was granted “an internal brightness” that was “shared by none.” He took for his mission to speak “of what in man is human or divine.” “I would impart it, I would spread it wide, / Immortal in the world which is to come.”
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Wordsworth took Milton for his bardic model, the poet whom the Romantics generally regarded as their father. American Romantics, like Roethke, more often look to Emerson or to the Whitman who called into the future:

The idea of salvation underlies this poetics, and Roethke writes directly in this tradition; his poetry is secular religion or, in Carlyle's phrase, natural supernaturalism. Art is what gives “shape to a random joy,” Roethke writes, and “Being myself, I sing / The soul's immediate joy” (
CP
, pp. 124, 126). Every Romantic poet has his particular revelation to impart; nonetheless, “He is the poet,” says Emerson, “who sees through the flowing vest the firm nature, and can declare it.”
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Thus, in the poem “Four for Sir John Davies” Roethke says to all poets: “Summon a vision and declare it pure.” In the magnificent last lines of his poem, he rejoices in poetry's redemptive powers: “Who rise from flesh to spirit know the fall: / The word outleaps the world, and light is all” (
CP
, p. 107).

CHAPTER FOUR IN LANGUAGE STRICT AND PURE

I burned my life, that I might find

A passion wholly of the mind
,

Thought divorced from mind and bone
,

Ecstasy come to breath alone
.

I broke my life, to seek relief

From the flawed light of low and grief
.

Louise Bogan, “The Alchemist”

Roethke came to his expressive poetics rather indirectly. As has been suggested, one could hardly avoid Romantic ideas anyway; they were in the air. Yet the reaction to Romanticism had set in with T. E. Hulme, Pound, and Eliot. Auden appeared in 1930 with a new brand of anti-Romantic sentiment that deeply affected Americans like Bogan and Kunitz. The tightly structured, witty, “neo-Metaphysical” lyric came into fashion, and Roethke adopted this mode. Nevertheless, though less well realized, the themes of his early poems are much the same as those of his later work. The main themes—the need to establish a firm sense of self and the discovery of a correspondence between internal and external realities—dominate
Open House
. The book fails on many counts, and only a few of the lyrics suggest that Roethke was a potentially important poet.
Open House
would be of little interest today if Roethke had not later gone beyond the slick, cautious writing that characterizes this early work.

The book has all the usual faults of first efforts. It is self-consciously clever, derivative, and unevenly textured in spite of at least ten years of sustained attention that went into its making. Roethke had simply gone down
the wrong path, relying too heavily on his masters and ignoring or repressing the genuine impulses of originality that would occasionally surface, especially in the poems of the late thirties. The first poem in
Open House
is the title poem, which has become a minor anthology piece. The tone of the first stanza is assertive, a bit strident, but it stays in the mind:

The poet promises a great deal here, and the heavily end-stopped lines draw attention to the promissory element. Yet the next stanza goes even further as Roethke claims a greater capacity for honesty than can be taken seriously:

The final stanza grasps a theme Roethke would cultivate in later years, that of the relation between language and experience:

Although the poem is technically accomplished, showing off Roethke's perfect musical sense and mastery of form, the speaker sounds like a poseur. Too many abstractions in the second and third stanzas wear away at the original effect of the conceit established in the first. Taken as the title poem, one might argue with Richard Blessing that “an open house suggests informality, a kind of unstructured, free-floating gathering in which guests come and go pretty much as they please.”
¹
If so, the title is misleading.

Karl Malkoff divines a remarkably complicated ground plan for
Open House
;
he isolates the theme of selfhood and suggests that the five parts of the book explore the definition of self and view it from various angles.
²
But I must again agree with Blessing, who warns that this is overly complicated. Applying Occam's razor, let us assume that these were the best poems on hand when Roethke submitted the manuscript to Knopf. They group naturally into categories, but this matters very little. In
Open House
there is none of the overall singleness of voice and vision that pervades his later books. Still, Roethke looked back on his first volume with a certain affection: “It took me ten years to complete one little book, and now some of the things in it seem to creak. Still, I like about ten pieces in it” (
SL
, p.16).

Among the best of these lyrics is “Feud,” which begins:

The poem opens a Freudian vein, and the method mimics the psychoanalytic. The subject is the separation of the self from ghosts of the family which persist in the unconscious long after they should have been subdued; Roethke argues, the “spirit starves / Until the dead have been subdued.” If this were true, we would have none of Roethke's later poems. “Feud,” with its wish to escape or suppress the past, points to Roethke's fundamental early mistake. Nobody can run away from home; the mature man makes his peace with old ghosts. The oblique nature of this poem, which remains impersonal on the surface because of its second person subject, is symptomatic. The poet controls his powerful emotions by driving a wedge between language and experience.

“Prognosis” continues the psychoanalytical theme, this time dealing with the image of Mother:

The confrontation with Mother, for Roethke, was less important than that with Father, “Papa”; yet some of the finest passages in the
Praise to the End
!
sequence exploit the obvious Oedipal connections. Of the poems in
Open House
dealing with family or childhood memories, “The Premonition” comes closest to Roethke's later, more direct poetry:

The poem begins with a memory, recalling a bright scene from childhood—an opening reminiscent of Wordsworth. The field, the boy with his father, and the river would become dominant symbols in Roethke's later work. The manner is straightforward, less clipped and strained than other poems in
Open House
, again foreshadowing the later style. A luminous image ends the poem with a memory of how, as the father

The image has become a symbol of mortality. One line alludes to Donne's “Bracelet of bright haire about the bone” in “The Relique,” a technique of allusion that Roethke favored through his career.
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Most of the poems in Section I can be called competent lyrics in the metaphysical style; they are full of conceits, compressed images, and intellectual flexing. Irony and wit predominate, and the range of allusion is considerable. La Belle tracks down references to Elinor Wylie, Bogan, Hopkins, Donne, and Dickinson, among others. Nonetheless, the content has a strong Romantic bias. When Roethke, in “The Signals,” claims
that “Sometimes the blood is privileged to guess / The things the eye or hand cannot possess,” he expresses a basic Romantic idea, one popularized by D. H. Lawrence, whose work Roethke had been teaching throughout the thirties. And the strong influence of Emily Dickinson (which amounts to parody in Roethke's “No Bird”) suggests that from the beginning he was writing in the mainstream of American Romanticism.

“The Adamant,” which closes the first section of
Open House
, has many admirers, including Yvor Winters, who called this poem “one of the best things in the book and in recent poetry.”
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However, the rhythmical naiveté alone would be enough to condemn this poem; the intellectual naiveté apparent in the first stanza adds insult to injury:

In this case, truth is undone. Objections notwithstanding,' Roethke remained proud of this poem to the end.

In the second section, Roethke shifts the center of gravity from the inner world (a cloudy chamber indeed) to the outer, but the switch is deceptive. A close reading reveals the subtle dialectic established between the inner and outer worlds of self and nature. It is a Romantic dialectic, and Emersonian formulation. “The Light Comes Brighter” is the first poem in the section, set in early spring. As signs of green life begin to show through the frost covering, a direct link forms between inner and outer weather—a technique that Roethke will continue to use in later poems. The influence of Robert Frost is obvious in these poems, especially in “Slow Season” and “Mid-Country Blow,” which are full of simple natural description: