ROETHKE'S "PRAISE TO THE END!"

What a great way to wing in the New Year! Whip-will of a fish strake strike! Hop skip over simple stones!

With a return to Roethke!

Last February I wrote quite an extensive appreciation of his first two books (sure, close to 60 years after they were published, but still freshly printed to my mind!), and resolved there to read the whole collected over the next few weeks, but eminently distractible as I am, left off that book and delved into other things, and didn’t pick it up again until today.

These are delving times. (Delphic too.)

I think though, the Collected is best to read this way – reading one or three of the books therein every year or so. (Perhaps this is true of all Collected)

Who knows. This evening, though, I read through all the poems of his third book in one sitting, and my mind was left a-wheelin’.

I’ve read (somewhere, somewhere) this stuff is difficult, impenetrable. I think it may be for those who are bent on nut-cracking – whose brains are critically-trained nut-crackers, who need to break through the shell of the poems to extract some Hidden Meaning. Whose minds are primed for a Literature Essay. Essayists be damned.

Here the thing is surface. No great need to penetrate, simply luxuriate in the music and images and dream- like turns of thought. Unlike the first poems, which are portraits and landscapes drawn by a master with a definite subject- thing-the-poem-is-about, these are abstract expressionism; splashed on paint; solid turned to liquid turned to air. All lively; at times childlike, nursery rhyme-like; at times, I swear, ecstatic as anything written.

A favourite passage (of many) -- from the poem Unfold! Unfold!:

By snails, by leaps of frog, I came here, spirit.
Tell me, body without skin, does a fish sweat?
I can’t crawl back through these veins,
I ache for another choice.
The cliffs! The cliffs! They fling me back.
Eternity howls in the last crags,
The field is no longer simple:
It’s a soul’s crossing time.
The dead speak noise.

Fantastic! (What I like, too, is the risk-taking. "Does a fish sweat?") Of course, themes reveal themselves, and at times abstract summations on images that drift like leaves, blow like a gale: theme statements that express the depths the man rides on, that, unlike most such summations in poems, do not distract or deflect, but enhance the reading experience – I think because they are so freshly phrased themselves:

The rings have gone with the pond.
The river’s alone with its water.
All risings
fall.

or

Sing, sing you symbols!

or

Begin with the rock;
End with water.

But for those who need to “interpret”, to paraphrase in prose what is fully alive in the poetry, I’ll leave Roethke with the last word:

Reason? That dreary shed, that hutch for grubby schoolboys!

READING ROETHKE

Here in Montreal, English is of course a minority language, and English books - particularly poetry books -- are not all that readily available. If you don't have a library card with one of the two English language universities - Concordia or McGill (and if you're not student or faculty, that can run you about $140 a year, at McGill at least), you're left with a piss-poor public library system, and a very limited assortment of bookstores. So of course I find myself ordering a lot more books that when I lived in Toronto. Balance that against the high rents in Toronto, though, and I'm still ahead of the game, financially at least.

Among the many books I ordered from Amazon last December, the one that I've been reading a lot lately has been Theodore Roethke's Collected Poems. In fact I'm enjoying it so much that over the next few weeks I intend to read it from cover to cover - perhaps the first Collected I've read that way in a long time, since perhaps T.S. Eliot's, which I read shortly after graduating from university (over 20 years ago now…). Like Eliot's, Roethke's Collected is not particularly long, running some two hundred and sixty pages. It reads more like a selected. Minor poems, major linked works, but not a weak poem to be found, so far at least. (At this point, I've almost finished the second of seven collections in the book, The Lost Son and Other Poems, first published in 1948.)

What is remarkable about Roethke is that he constructs a far-reaching and resonant dialogue from a limited - obsessively limited -- set of themes and images, practically all pastoral. I find that kind of singularity amazing in an age when we are bombarded by so many different influences from so many different directions. In times of hyper-abundance, such narrowness of focus could almost be taken as dishonest. Where Roethke is honest, where he takes risks, is in his fidelity to his subject matter (I'm sure I'm being tautological here, but being true to ones subject matter always entails great risk), his sensitivity, his vulnerability, his expression of his very real throes of manic-depressive illness, his adventurous thrust into a world of wholly subjective language. The pastoral provided a refuge and mooring place -- the beauty and archetypal qualities of plants, winds, soil, greenhouses, as well as the structured rhythms and rhyme schemes which no matter how committed he was to free verse he always returned to. Whatever Silliman may say (I honestly don't know what Silliman thinks of Roethke), no Poetry of Quietude this. Too much edginess and anxiety here; too much flight into the unknown.

In his first book, Open House (1941) Roethke establishes himself on very solid if conservative ground. Aside from a few starchy, highly compressed constructions where he tries to sum up Reality in a few words (I'm thinking of "The Adament", in particular, and a couple of others), these short poems - and those that begin his second collection -- are among his most successful and highly anthologized. I'm thinking of the title poem, "Cuttings 1 & 2", "My Papa's Waltz", & others. (For a link containing a Roethke bio and many of these, click here.)

With the longer poems that end his second collection, he departs in a forcefully subjective direction - prime referents practically being the words themselves, the language becomes suffused with subjectivity. Roethke shatters Ruskin's strictures against pathetic fallacy with abounding personifications that are never pathetic in any pitiful sense of the word, but constitute ecstatic (if arguably disturbed) mystical communions with nature.

The salt laughed and the stones;
The ferns had their ways, and the pulsing lizards,
And the new plants, still awkward in their soil,
The lovely diminutives.
I could watch! I could watch!
I saw the separateness of all things!
My heart lifted up with the great grasses;
The weeds believed me, and the nesting birds.
There were clouds making a rout of shapes crossing a
windbreak of cedars,
And a bee shaking drops from a rain-soaked honeysuckle.
The worms were delighted as wrens.
And I walked, I walked through the light air;
I moved with the morning.

-- "A Field of Light"

Any poet worth his salt will write the odd schizophrenic poem or three - poems where the images and referents are so personal, the rhythms and devices so idiosyncratic that they defy interpretation by any but the author himself (and may even be somewhat indecipherable to him... or her).
At times Roethke risks skating on his own private pond.



My meat eats me. Who waits at the gate?
Mother of quartz, your words writhe into my ear.
Renew the light, lewd whisper…

The wasp waits.
The edge cannot eat the center.
The grape glistens.
The path tells little to the serpent.
The eye comes out of the wave.
The journey from the flesh is longest.
A rose sways least.
The redeemer comes a dark way.

-- "The Shape of Fire"


While on certain levels I feel that poems like "The Shape of the Fire" may not be as
"successful" as his earlier, more accessible work, the language is tremendously evocative, the rhythms lovely, and at least impressionistically it's pretty clear what Roethke's up to. Reading and rereading these poems even for this blog, I find clarity is gained… the prevailing mystery
remains an essential part of the pleasure.

One of the great pleasures of reading a collected is coming across fine "minor" poems that don't make it into the anthologies, and seeing how they relate in the development of the poets internal dialectic and contribute to his oeuvre as a whole. Here, though, are a couple of superb ones
from the earlier period, obviously linked in theme - not minor at all to my view -- but that
I haven't yet come across in any anthology.

THE BIG WIND

Where were the greenhouses going,
Lunging into the lashing
Wind driving water
So far down the river
All the faucets stopped? -
So we drained the manure-machine
For the steam plant,
Pumping the stale mixture
Into the rusty boilers,
Watching the pressure gauge
Waver over to red,
As the seams hissed
And the live steam
Drove to the far
End of the rose-house,
Where the worst wind was,
Creaking the cypress window-frames,
Cracking so much thin glass
We stayed all night,
Stuffing the holes with burlap;
But she rode it out,
That old rose-house,
She hove into the teeth of it,
The core and pith of that ugly storm,
Plowing with her stiff prow,
Bucking into the wind-waves
That broke over the hole of her,
Flailing her sides with spray,
Flinging long strings of wet across the rooftop,
Finally veering, wearing themselves out, merely
Whistling thinly under the wind-vents;
She sailed until the calm morning,
Carrying her full cargo of roses.

The greenhouse becomes an ark, a womb, a wild horse to be broken in, transport of
romance & mystical symbol… all at once! Fantastic!

CHILD ON TOP OF A GREENHOUSE

The wind billowing out of the seat of my britches,
My feet cracking splinters of glass and dried putty,
The half-grown chrysanthemums staring up like accusers,
Up through the streaked glass, flashing with sunlight,
A few white clouds all rushing eastward,
A line of elms plunging and tossing like horses,
And everyone, everyone pointing up and shouting!

Regardless of what goes on, it's still gotta be a wonderful world that contains such poems…

SYMPATHETIC CONTRACT

John Ciardi in his anthology/critique/contemporary apology for poetry How Does a Poem Mean, describes a the sympathetic contract, the necessary bond of sympathy that must take place between poet and reader if a poem is to succeed:

"Every poem makes some demand upon the reader's sympathies. In addressing his subject, the poet takes an attitude toward it and adopts a tone he believes to be appropriate. His sense of what is appropriate, either in tone or in attitude, is of course a question of values. As such, it is obviously basic to the effect of the poem upon the reader. The reader may be right or wrong in disagreeing with the poet's values, but once such disagreement has occurred, that poem has failed for that reader. It is a question, as Robert Frost once put it, of "the way the poet takes himself and the way the poet takes his subject."

That demand upon the reader's sympathies may be made implicitly or explicitly, but there can be no poem without some sort of sympathetic contract between poet and reader."

After continuing in this vein with several pages of quotation and discussion, he challenges the reader to determine for him/herself how some 24 love poems, ranging from renaissance (Donne, Marvell, Lovelace, Herrick, Thomas Randolph) to restoration (John Dryden) to romantic + their contemporaries (Shelley, Byron, Thomas Moore, Leigh Hunt) to modern (Roethke, Nikki Giovanni, George Garrett, Diane Wakoski, Gary Snyder, Charles Bukowski, Edna St-Vincent Millay), more or less randomly juxtaposed, "ring true" … whether their tone and attitude are exactly what they profess to be. It's a hell of an interesting reading experience… one reason why, for those who haven't had the chance to peruse this book, I strongly recommend doing so. (How lucky for me the day I picked my copy off the shelves of a second hand bookstore here in Montreal…) In this selection, Shelley (in The Indian Serenade) fares pretty badly, as perhaps he was meant to with lines like

Oh, lift me from the grass!
I die! I faint! I fail!

Donne (The Good-Morrow, Song) is so focussed on the rigours of his wit that I hope for his sake he had at least one good lay --
Dryden (Ah, How Sweet It Is to Love!), hopelessly dry, all talk talk talk, I think he badly needed good a roll in the hay --
Snyder (After Work) had obviously rolled, but could have benefited from a good four-poster bed with a canopy--
Theodore Roethke (I knew a woman) - he's a marvellous fellow, I wonder though: did he really know that woman?
etc.

Richard Lovelace's poem To Amarantha, that She Would Dishevel Her Hair, conventional as it is with "Amarantha, sweet and fair/Ah braid no more that shining hair!" wins me over with a spectacular ending:

Do not then wind up that light
In ribbands, and o'ercloud in night,
Like the Sun in's early ray;
But shake your head, and scatter day!

Amarantha must have been a catch. But so, too, must have Richard.

Seems I'm focussing a lot on lays here.... My actual feelings are too complex to set down quickly , so I resort to tongue in cheek, cheek to cheek, etc.… as far as sincerity goes, however, two poems struck me as sincere to depths of their words. And these are actually, in a way, dirges:

For Jane

225 days under grass
and you know more than I.

they have long taken your blood,
you are a dry stick in a basket.

is this how it works?

in this room
the hours of love
still make shadows.

when you left
you took almost
everything.

I kneel in the nights
before tigers
that will not let me be.

what you were
will not happen again.

the tigers have found me
and I do not care.

That's by Charles Bukowski. Here, by the way, is another one by him that I very much liked:

Style

Style is the answer to everything -
a fresh way to approach a dull or
a dangerous thing.
To do a dull thing with style
is preferable to doing a dangerous thing
without it.
Joan of Arc had style.
John the Baptist.
Christ
Socrates
Caesar,
García Lorca.

Style is a difference,
a way of doing,
a way of being done.

6 herons standing quietly in a pool of water
or you, walking out of the bathroom naked
without seeing
me.

The one that affected me most deeply, however, was the last selection in the group, perhaps placed by John Ciardi as a kind of last word on the subject… as I'm getting tired (it's past 2 in the morning as I write this) I'll leave it to speak for itself…

WHAT LIPS MY LIPS HAVE KISSED
Edna St-Vincent Millay

What lips my lips have kissed, and where, and why,
I have forgotten, and what arms have lain
Under my head till morning; but the rain
Is full of ghosts tonight, that tap and sigh
Upon the glass and listen for reply,
And in my heart there stirs a quiet pain
For unremembered lads that not again
Will turn to me at midnight with a cry.

Thus in winter stands the lonely tree,
Nor knows what birds have vanished one by one,
Yet knows its boughs more silent than before:
I cannot say what loves have come and gone,
I only know that summer sang in me
A little while, that in me sings no more.