| More Roethke Poems. . .
From The Shape of
The Fire,
1
What's this? A dish for fat lips.
Who says? A nameless stranger.
Is he a bird or a tree? Not everyone can tell.
2
Where's the eye?
The eye's in the sty.
The ear's not here
Beneath the hair.
When I took off my clothes
To find a nose,
There was only one shoe
For the waltz of To,
The pinch of Where.
And after many different poems, written
in another style or vein, we come to "Praise
To The End" (1951), which continues the tone and voice of "The
Lost Son":
1
It's dark in this wood, soft mocker,
For whom have I swelled like a seed?
What a bone-ache I have.
Father of intentions, I'm down to my skin at last.
It's a great day for
the mice,
Pickle-me, tickle-me, close stems.
Bumpkin, he can dance alone.
Ooh, ooh, I'm a duke of eels.
A bit earlier in the
same book, from the poem
"Where Knock Is Open Wide":
A kitten can
Bite with his feet;
Papa and Mamma
Have more teeth.
Sit and play
Under the rocker
Until the cows
All have puppies
From the poem,
"O Lull Me, Lull Me":
1
One sigh stretches heaven.
In this, the diocese of mice,
Who's bishop of breathing?
. . .
Tell me, great lords of
sting,
Is it time to think?
When I say things fond,
I hear singing,
O my love's light as a duck
On a moon-forgotten wave!
. . .
The tone, the style,
continue in his next book, "The
Waking" (1953), but
soon a new voice appears; it is serious, unchildlike, confident, firm:
First, a bit more of the same::
O Thou Opening, O
1
I'll make it, but it may take me.
The rat's my phase.
My left side's tender.
Read me the stream. . . .
and in
"The Visitant" an adult
sexual tone
appears:
Slow, slow as a fish
she came,
Slow as a fish coming forward,
Swaying in a long wave;
Her skirts not touching a leaf,
Her white arms reaching toward me.
In this book can be
found the
very fine, "Elegy
For Jane, My Student, Thrown by a Horse"—a girl from Bennington,
but written and read while teaching at Washington, and I remember him
somberly laying it on our class.
It is followed by "Old Lady's Winter
Words," where we find an early
appearance of Roethke's female persona, not a sexual object, but another
kind of person—lonely, old. It is almost as though his personality
has split and he bids this new one to come forward and speak:
. . .Once I was sweet with
the light of myself,
A self-delighting creature,
Leaning over a rock,
My hair between me and the sun,
The waves rippling near me.
My feet remember the earth,
The loam heaved me
That way and this.
My looks had a voice;
I was careless in growing.
If I were a young man,
I could roll in the dust of a fine rage.
Now we come to the first of the magnificent
late poems, these written in
Yeatean stanzas, with rhymed pentameter. "Four for Sir John
Davies,"
and I begin as I should at the beginning:
1. The Dance
Is that dance slowing in the mind of man
That made him think the universe could hum?
The great wheel turns its axle when it can;
I need a place to sing, and dancing-room,
And I have made a promise to my ears
I'll sing and whistle romping with the bears.
. . .
A caged bear rarely
does the same thing twice
In the same way: O watch his body sway!—
this animal remembering to be gay.
. . .
and the last stanza
from part 1:
I take this cadence
from a man named Yeats;
I take it, and I give it back again:
For other tunes and other wanton beats
Have tossed my heart and fiddle through my brain,
Yes, I was dancing-mad, and how
That came to be the bears and Yeats would know.
The lines have become longer, the
"I" of the poet more detached from the early Joycean self, and
now he is a member of the large fraternity of poets (among them Yeats, Blake, and
Auden), and in no way in his own mind now inferior to them. He is
poetically (and sexually) m ature. It is time to show the
world what he can do. Random great lines and pairs of lines from this
singular poem follow:
I gave her kisses back,
and woke a ghost.
O what lewd music crept into our ears!
The body and the soul know how to play
In that dark world where gods have lost their way.
. . .
3. The Wraith
Did each become the other in that play?
She laughed me out, and then she laughed me in;
In the deep middle of ourselves we lay;
When glory failed, we
danced upon a pin.
The valley rocked beneath the granite hill;
Our souls looked forth, and the great day stood still.
and the wonderful
ending, "4.
The Vigil,"
the fourth and concluding stanza:
The world is for the
living. Who are they?
We dared the dark to reach the white and warm.
She was the wind when wind was in my way;
Alive at noon, I perished in her form.
Who rise from flesh to spirit know the fall:
The word outleaps the world, and love is all.
The last couplet has a
Shakespearean ring. If Roethke had written no
more than this poem, his reputation would be secure—right up there with
the Metaphysical Poets he increasingly came to admire, resemble, and compete with
(at least in his own mind). Ah, but he wrote more.
Words for
The Wind (1958)
begins with an odd mix of old-seeming poems and barroom rhymes that come
close to doggerel. Part II is titled "Love
Poems." In a
way, all love poems are the same. They are written by an accomplished poet
(often young) to an anonymous lover, usually a woman. They are timeless. And there is
always the possibility they are mere exercises in set forms, the love
object manufactured or highly abstracted.
It is tempting to find
biographical parallels and to say, for instance, these were written to his
Beatrice, whom he married. Best not make this assumption, I think.
Whatever, whomever, they are wonderful and meant to be enjoyed. Often they
are lewd, a bit obscene. Well, love poems ought to be, or else they are
something else.
from the
title poem, its last stanza:
I kiss
her moving mouth,
Her swart hilarious skin;
She breaks my breath in half;
She frolicks like a beast;
And I dance round and round,
A fond and foolish man,
And see and suffer myself
In another being, at last.
and now the
wonderful,
"I Knew
a Woman"
I knew a woman, lovely in her bones,
When small birds sighed, she would sigh back at them.
Ah, when she moved, she moved more ways than one:
The shapes a bright container can contain!
Of her choice virtues only gods should speak,
Or English poets who grew up on Greek
(I'd have them sing in chorus, cheek to cheek.)
How well her
wishes went! She stroked my chin,
She taught me Turn, and Counter-turn, and Stand;
She taught me Touch, that undulant white skin. . . .
. . .
Love likes a
gander, and adores a goose:
Her full lips pursed, the errant note to seize;
She played it quick, she played it light and loose;
My eyes, they dazzled at her flowing knees;
Her several parts could keep a pure repose,
Or one hip quiver with a mobile nose
(She moved in circles, and those circles moved).
. .
.
These old
bones live to learn her wanton ways:
(I measure time by how a body sways.)
Pornography?
Sure. But not by today's standards. "The
Sensualist" is
another such poem, metrically quite good, but I won't quote it. (Go seek
it out!)
Here's a
taste of "The
Dying Man. In Memoriam: W. B. Yeats,"
l. His
Words
I heard a
dying man
Say to his gathered kin,
"My soul's hung out to dry,
Like a fresh-salted skin;
I doubt I'll use it again.
"What's
done is yet to come;
The flesh deserts the bone,
But a kiss widens the rose;
I know, as the dying know,
Eternity is now.
. . .
["]I am
that final thing.
A man learning to sing."
We skip now to:
5. They Sing, They
Sing
All women
loved dance in a dying light—
The moon's my mother; how I love the moon!
and a few
other great lines:
O sweet
field far ahead, I hear your birds,
They wing, they sing, but still in minor thirds.
. .
.
The vision
moves, yet remains the same.
In heaven's praise, I dread the thing I am.
and the
final three lines of the third stanza of Part 5:
In this last
place of light: he dares to live
Who stops being a bird, yet beats his wings
Against the immense immeasurable emptiness of things.
Part V. of Words
for The Wind is titled "Meditations of an Old Woman"
and
"The First Meditation" of this long poem begins,
l
On love's worst ugly day,
The weeds hiss at the edge of the field,
The small winds make their chilly indictments.
Elsewhere, in houses, even pails can be sad;
While stones loosen on the obscure hillside,
And a tree tilts from its roots,
Toppling down an embankment. . . .
Quickly
Roethke establishes the mood and measure of the woman's day, and it is
bleak, obscure, violent. She asks,
"How
can I rest in the days of my slowness?
I've become a strange piece of flesh. . . .
I need an
old crone's knowing. . . .
Often I
think of myself as riding—
Alone, on a bus through western country.
I sit above the back wheels, where the jolts are hardest. . . .
All
journeys, I think, are the same. . .
.
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and from
Part 4:
I have gone
into the waste lonely places
Behind the eye; the lost acres at the edge of smoky cities. . . .
and
concludes with these not entirely convincing lines:
In such times, lacking a god,
I am still happy.
Words for
the Wind ends
with the very fine poem, very Roethkean in its title, "What
Can I Tell My Bones?"
In a world
always late afternoon,
In the circular smells of a slow wind,
I listen to the weeds' vesperal whine,
Longing for absolutes that never come.
. . .
The
poem is very complex, bringing together dissimilar images from the poet's
long past. His unique form
of compression resists paraphrase. The poem makes a major statement, and I quote
a single lyrical stanza
that forms a kind of epiphany for the old woman, the poet, and their
collective long
suffering.
It deserves to be read slowly in its entirety::
The sun! The
sun! And all we can become!
And the time ripe for running to the moon!
In the long fields, I leave my father's eye;
And shake the secrets from my deepest bones;
My spirit rises with the rising wind;
I'm thick with leaves and tender as a dove,
I take the liberties a short life permits—
I seek my own meekness;
I recover my tenderness by long looking.
By midnight I love everything alive.
Who took the darkness from the air?
I'm wet with another life.
Yea, I have gone and stayed.
What came to
me vaguely is now clear,
As if released by a spirit,
Or agency outside me.
Unprayed for,
And final.
In 1961
Roethke published I
Am! Says The Lamb.
It is a book of light poems aimed not entirely at children and their
mothers, a precursor some might say to Dr. Seuss, who no doubt knew of
Roethke's work and was influenced by it. The thin volume is not important
in terms of the poet's progression and accomplishments, and serves almost
as a diversion and respite from the wide mood swings he was
suffering from, around this time. Perhaps these poems represent a
exuberant
return from the dark personal depths.
Whatever, they in no way foreshadow the high
seriousness of his final volume, The
Far Field
(1963),
published the same year as his death. He had seen the first draft to
his publisher and was planning on making some changes. We will never know
what those would be.
It is a
major work, a work right up there with Yeats, Stevens, andhis
friend, Thomas—
all those
poets he admired. He loved thinking of himself as playing in the Big
Leagues, and by now he assuredly was.
The
Far Field begins
with "North
American Sequence," and
immediately we note the longer poetic line, the lack of exclamation
marks, all those semi-colons with which he was ending his unemjambed lines
The poetic first-person is still present, but that presence enters the poem late and
seems subdued, suppressed. He identifies with natural objects still, but
less passionately and with more philosophical and personal distance; this
makes for better poetry, I think, or poetry that gives up much of its
seeming spontaneity for a mood of philosophical detachment and repose.
The new long
line becomes a natural form of expression for Roethke—looser
but still disciplined as only a practiced poet can handle it. And he has come to grips with himself and the Pacific Northwest, his home
for so many years, where he has sometimes felt a stranger. He can embrace all that is
found in the countryside and be as
one with it, or as nearly so as it is possible to become without
succumbing to the pathetic fallacy in a pathetic way. (Not he!)
Meditation
At Oyster River
1
Over the low barnacled, elephant-colored rocks,
Come the first tide-ripples, moving, almost without sound, toward me,
Running along the narrow furrows of the shore, the rows of dead clam
shells,
Then a runnel behind me, creeping closer,
Alive with tiny striped fish, and young crabs climbing in and out of the
water.
At moments
it is almost Whitmanesque; for instance, the opening of Part 3:
I
would with the fish, the blackening salmon, and the mad lemmings,
The children dancing, the flowers widening.
Who sighs from far away?
I would
unlearn the lingo of exasperation, all the distortions of malice and
hatred;
I would believe my pain: and the eye quiet on the growing rose;
I would delight in my hands, the branch singing, altering the excessive
birds;
I long for the imperishable quiet at the heart of form;
Wow! Is this
Roethke? I would have never guessed.
The homage to Whitman is made
explicit in a pair of lines from "A
Mixed Sequence,"
a little bit later in this volume, when he says, "Be
with me, Whitman, maker of catalogues;/For the world invades me again,/And
once more the tongues begin babbling./And the terrible hunger for objects
quails me:"
Two pretty good poems later,
we come to the title poem, "The
Far Field," which,
in the light of the poet's recent death, probably takes on an elegiac tone it might not otherwise have. And note the return of the bat image,
first encountered in the first line of his first book of poems, quoted
above. We have in
a way come round, or, rather, Roethke has, but how he has grown:
THE FAR
FIELD
1
I dream of journeys repeatedly:
Of flying like a bat deep into a burrowing tunnel,
Of driving alone, without luggage, out a long peninsula,
The road lined with snow-laden second growth,
A fine dry snow ticking the windshield,
Alternate snow and sleet, no on-coming traffic,
And no lights behind, in the blurred side-mirror,
The road changing from glazed tarface to a rubble of stone,
Ending at last in a hopeless sand-rut,
Where the car stalls,
Churning in a snowdrift
Until the headlights darken.
2
At the field's end, in the corner missed by the mower,
Where the turf drops off into a grass-hidden culvert,
Haunt of the cat-bird, nesting-place of the field-mouse,
. . .
I suffered
for birds, for young rabbits caught in the mower,
My grief was not excessive.
For to come upon warblers in early May
Was to forget time and death:
. . .
I learned
not to fear infinity,
The far field, the windy cliffs of forever,
The dying of time in the white light of tomorrow,
The wheel turning away from itself,
The sprawl of the wave,
The on-coming water.
. . .
from Part 4
A man
faced with his own immensity
Wakes all the waves, all their loose wandering fire.
The murmur of the absolute, the why
Of being born fails on his naked ears.
His spirit moves like monumental wind
That gentles on a sunny blue plateau.
He is the end of things, the final man.
It is tempting to read
into this posthumously published poem some final personal resolution and
acceptance of death, but I won't, and caution against such an
interpretation, satisfying as it might be, along with a kind of
resurgent pantheism to accompany his seeming Pacific Northwest
acceptance of regional flora and fauna. These may all be poetic devices,
used in the same way the Metaphysical Poets of yore did in their poems
of both earthly and heavenly aspirations.
Similarly, the love poems
that appear in bunches in his late books may indeed be inspired by real
women, particularly, his younger wife, Beatrice, but again they may be
trumped-up cases required for the writing of important poems. He was,
after all, a teacher of the craft of writing of poetry, and cognizant of
the practical benefits of such exercises and the fine poetry they can produce.
It is an odd but important
collection, bringing together more of what we've happily read before, in
earlier books, but new stuff, too—wonderful new poems from a major poet.
Perhaps some have been drawn from the reservoir of his copious notebooks, where many
poems germinated over the years.
But, enough; back to
the poems themselves.
There are more love
poems, but the ones seemingly directed at Beatrice are strangely
contrite and the sexuality is muted. True, he can still call her, "my
lively writher," but he is more concerned that she "live
out your life/Without hate, without grief," when he is "undone,/When
I am no one." This seems more to
be a clear presage of what is in store for them than a resigned recognition of their great age
differences. ("Wish For a Young Wife.)
This is followed by
Section III, and its lead poem, "The
Abyss." It begins with echoes from the
early poems—short lines, the
childlike voice and vision:
1
Is the stair here?
Where's the stair?
'The stair's right there,
But it goes nowhere.
and
a different kind of nature imagery, in Part 2:
I'm no
longer a bird dipping a beak into rippling water
But a mole winding through the earth,
A night-fishing otter.
in Part 4 he asks:
Do we move
toward God, or merely another condition?
By the salt waves I hear a river's undersong,
In a place of mottled clouds, a thin morning mist and evening.
I rock between dark and dark, My soul nearly my own. . . .
and back
in the greenhouse of his Michigan boyhood, amid stems and white roots,
he hears "A
luminous stillness." We
needn't ask what it is.
The next
poem is "Otto,"
whom we know to be his father; if
there is any doubt, Roethke identifies him quickly as "a
Prussian who learned early to be rude." The
poet is "a
sleepless child/Watching the waking of my father's world.—O world so far away! O my lost world?" The
lines make me think of D. H. Lawrence's poem "Piano" and Thomas
Wolfe's long fiction, but they
are distinctly Ted Roethke.
Though
there are several fine, mature poems at the end of this last book, all
deserving to be read, the one that most people remark about is in "Section
IV, Sequence, Sometimes Metaphysical."
It is the first poem there, not a long one, titled, "In a Dark
Time."
Roethke had many dark times, but this one stands out. As with
the Sir John Davies poems, it is in rhymed iambic pentameter,
which in a way says it is delivered to the ages. It is metaphysical in
nature,
clearly. (I can quote only part of it here.)
In a dark
time, the eye begins to see,
I meet my shadow in the deepening shade;
I hear my echo in the echoing wood--
A lord of nature weeping to a tree.
I live between the heron and the wren,
Beast of the hill and serpents of the den.
What's
madness but nobility of soul
At odds with circumstance? The day's on fire!
I know the purity of pure despair,
My shadow pinned against a sweating wall.
. . .
A man goes
far to find out what he is—
Death of the self in a long, tearless night,
All natural shapes blazing unnatural light.
Dark, dark
my light, and darker my desire,
My soul, like some heat-maddened summer fly,
Keeps buzzing at the sill. Which I is I?
A fallen man, I climb out of my fear.
The mind enters itself, and God the mind,
And one is One, free in the tearing wind.
It doesn't
get any better than this. Shakespeare and Donne might agree.
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