Theodore Roethke (16 page)
First he encounters the roses, personified, “breathing in the dark.” The boiler fireman works by a single light. The weeds sleep undisturbed. Then suddenly he remembers an earlier encounter with his father. Past and present converge in a flashback:
Once I stayed all night.
The light in the morning came slowly over the white
Snow.
There were many kinds of cool
Air.
Then came steam.
Pipe-knock.
Roethke described this section as “a return to a memory of childhood that comes back almost as in a dream, after the agitation and exhaustion of the earlier actions” (
SP
, p. 38). The “pipe-knock” refers to the violent knocking of the pipes which accompanied the infusion of steam. It also calls up an image of the pipe-smoking Otto, banging his pipe against a bench. The exact meaning is unimportant here; it signals the approach of Papa:
Scurry of warm over small plants.
Ordnung! ordnung!
Papa is coming!
Indeed, Papa embodies the many aspects of the German word:
ordnung
, meaning order, power, and control. This point in “The Lost Son” inevitably recalls Eliot's
Waste Land
, which ends with the episode from the Upanishads where Thunder gives the command of “Datta, dayadhvam, damyata” or “give, sympathize, control”: all forms of giving.
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The section finishes with the night dissolving, the flowers and weeds
coming back to lifeâthe conscious worldâafter a deep sleep; the morning light returns and purifies the natural world:
A fine haze moved off the leaves;
Frost melted on far panes;
The rose, the chrysanthemum turned toward the light.
Even the hushed forms, the bent yellowy weeds
Moved in a slow up-sway.
The sensitivity to natural cycles that Roethke associates with his hero is deeply Romantic, of course. As Emerson said: “The greatest delight which the fields and woods minister, is the suggestion of an occult relation between man and the vegetable. I am not alone and unacknowledged.”
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The final section of the poem opens with a recollection, and it is untitled:
It was beginning winter,
An in-between time,
The landscape still partly brown:
The bones of weeds kept swinging in the wind
Above the blue snow.
This is the stage of the hero's “illumination.” The landscape widens for the first time, and daylight has arrivedânot a full light but a strangely muted glow representing frozen possibilities. The season is winter, traditionally the season of death and tragedy. The hero meditates, remembering a place where “The light moved slowly over the frozen field.” Toward the end of the poem the meditation turns Eliotic in the most open way, recalling “Ash Wednesday,” a poem about intense spiritual anxiety:
Was it light?
Was it light within?
Was it light within light?
Stillness becoming alive,
Yet still?
The answer will not be forthcoming at this point. One has to read the complete sequence to understand the movement backward and forward which ultimately leads to a firm sense of progress and the establishment of a new self. Roethke explained this process himself:
I believe that to go forward as a spiritual man it is necessary first to go back. Any history of the psyche (allegorical journey) is bound
to be a succession of experiences, similar yet dissimilar. There is a perpetual slipping-back, then a going-forward; but there is
some
“progress.” Are not some experiences so powerful and so profound â¦that they repeat themselves, thrust themselves upon us, again and again, with variation and change, each time bringing us close to our own most particular (and thus most universal) reality? (
SP
, p. 39)
Still, “The Lost Son” is self-contained. It fulfills the mythological round, though the hero's final resolution here remains temporary:
A lively understandable spirit
Once entertained you.
It will come again.
Be still.
Wait.
The other poems in the sequence repeat, less grandly, the same heroic journey or dwell on some particular phase of it. But “The Lost Son” remains the central poem in Roethke's canon. All his other poems must be interpreted in its light, with attention to the key symbols as they appear in this poem. The figure of Papa as father-God, the greenhouse itself, the open field, the mother-lover, and the light and wind symbols are present and active in “The Lost Son.” The later work will unfold from this poem, isolating certain points of the monomyth, widening the context and import of the individual symbols. In short, this poem is a watershed, akin to
The Waste Land
in Eliot's corpus. Shaping his version of the heroic journey, Roethke has rescued for himself one of the great myth cycles; and by linking this cycle with an initiatory rite of passage, he enables himself to write, as Kenneth Burke suggested he do, about his burdens. The autobiographical aspect lends the poem a particularity which might have gone unrealized within such a grand mythic structure; indeed, the real tension in the work is drawn between the concrete autobiographical specifics and the larger mythic frame. Overall, “The Lost Son,” together with the greenhouse poems, stands as Roethke's major contribution to modern poetry and the center of his own work.
One should recall that Kenneth Burke was all this time acting as Roethke's mentor, especially during the composition of “The Lost Son.” The poem would have been less successful without Burke's intervention, for Roethke simply did not know enough about psychology or
myth at this point to use them as deftly as he did. Burke's advice was constantly sought by the poet, and a few letters survive to reveal something of the nature of this important friendship. One letter from Burke just after he read the first draft of “The Lost Son” is especially revealing:
I agree with you that your poem is something to be emphatic about. Surely it is your farthest step in the direction of the eschatological. It gives well indeed the sense of turmoils and trammels, and vaguely balked expectation. And there are many lines that open up possibilities as one reads.
I hope that you won't mind my hanging on to this copy, for a while at least. I think I can use it in the stuff I still want to write on the search for essence. (In the next Kenyon, I think, will appear some observations from the Grammar I did of this nature on Peer Gynt and Proust; but in the Symbolic I'd like to go into the matter further and your present poem seems to me one hundred per cent the exemplar of one of the ways.)
It is interesting that you selected Eliot in particular to be furious about, in your letter. And I think the choice is quite significant. For do you not see that, for all the vast differences, you end on the vigil, the watching and waiting in silence? Eliot gives this much the traditional Christian interpretation. He could rub himself in father and mother by adding the intellectual matrix of the Church. This call beyond imagery to reason you are feeling, yet embattled to resist. You would glumly resist incorporation in some cause or movement or institution as the new parent. Hence your search for essential motives drives you back into the quandaries of adolescence (the age par excellence of waiting). The battle is a fundamental one; which is probably why one gets the feeling that this poem marks the end of one phase and the beginning of another, being thus a kind of “last poem” (hence my feeling that I can use it when on the Symbolism of the ultimate, the essentialâwhich for reasons I explain in the Kenyon excerpt, leads to imagery of
temporal
return).
You are confronting the need of a new dimension. You fear the loss of your identity whenever you attempt to incorporate it. You particularly resist Eliot because he did incorporate it (though unquestionably at great cost, as judged by the criteria of the aesthetic prevailing prior to this incorporation). So you sullenly arrest yourself, and hold yourself to the continued contemplation of that one station. Knowing the dangers of an ideational framework, you would maintain a kind of Chronic Throw-backâwhich, however
uncomfortable it may be for you, is of great interest to me in my search for the documents, since it does serve to make your poem so intensely and thoroughly an example of its kind.
I think your way of replacing Charlie was a great improvement. The only line I disliked in the poem was, “In the kingdom of bang and blab,” though I can't explain just what bothers me about it. I guess it's because it suggests to me Stuart Chase's terms for debunking whatever expressions he considers meaningless. In the bottom stanza of page 2, the beginning and ending on “hunting” seems too symmetrical to me. For my slightly lop-sided taste, it would seem better if “hunting” were brought up into the line above, thus: “By the shrunken lake hunting, in the heat of summer.” But though I agree that “hunting” should be repeated in that stanza, I can't see that a thing is gained by the repetition of “resound” in the line you inserted on page 5. The only other thing that bothered me was a question (not very strong) whether the quasi-Gothic jingles on the crawling things were wholly effective. (I mean such as the “serpents and hogs” lines on p. 4; though I see, looking again, that “crawling things” doesn't quite accurately classify the lot.)
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Typically, Roethke accepted most of the changes recommended by Burkeâalthough he wisely kept the suggestive phrase “In the kingdom of bang and blab.” Earlier letters show that Burke had full access to Roethke's rough drafts of
The Lost Son
âand we can only rejoice in this accidental crossing of two lively minds, one creative and the other critical. It is also fortunate that Roethke, who was searching for a new mentor, happened upon a man of Burke's sophistication.
The “Lost Son” sequence up to 1948 includes three moderately long poems which continue the cyclical movement established in the central poem itself: regression alternating with progression. “The Long Alley” is a tortuous poem, but an important one in the sequence. It takes up where the vigil left us with the illumination only partial. The light of summer had yet to occur. “The Long Alley” opens with images of a river, perhaps the same river where the fishing took place in “The Lost Son”; in any case, the progress of the hero seems, temporarily, more like regress:
A river glides out of the grass. A river or a serpent.
A fish floats belly upward,
Sliding through the white current,
Slowly turning,
Slowly.
The dark flows on itself. A dead mouth sings under an old tree.
The ear hears only in low places.
Remember an old sound.
Remember
Water.
(
CP
, p. 59)
The associations of father with guilt and death surface yet again. The fish is dead (father symbol), and the “dead mouth” is probably the deceased Otto buried under a tree, unwilling to let go of his son, even from the grave. Sexual guilt again accompanies the ghost of Father Fear:
This slag runs slow. What bleeds when metal breaks?
Flesh, you offend this metal. How long need the bones mourn?
Are those horns on top of the hill? Yesterday has a long look.
Cinder, slag, metal, sulphurous water, and other remnants of factory production permeate the first section of “The Long Alley.” Roethke links industrialism in its most sordid aspects to repressed or wasted sexuality, as in the third section of “The Lost Son” (“I have married my hands to perpetual agitation / I run, I run to the whistle of money”). The question, “Are those horns on top of the hill?” is sufficiently ambiguous to combine both elements of the analogy.
The hero repeats the leading question at the outset of the next section: “Lord, what do you require?” With no response forthcoming, he appeals to the goddess-mother, the feminine principle:
Come to me, milk-nose. I need a loan of the quick.
       There's no joy in soft bones.
For whom were you made, sweetness I cannot touch?
       Look what the larks do.
Luminous one, shall we meet on the bosom of God?
       Return the gaze of a pond.
The interior dialectic reappears, as before, when the hero is balked. The questions are the same in essence: how can the hero find gratification for his desires? The responses are maddening: “Look what the larks do” is unequivocal. They sing. “Return the gaze of the pond” proposes narcissism. This advice causes isolation and despair. “When the appeal fails,” says Rosemary Sullivan, “the poet is thrown back to the lonely solipsism of sexual hunger.”
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The resulting frenzy finds expression, as it did in “The Lost Son,” in nursery rhymes and riddles.
The note of despair carries over into the third section. The boy-hero
asks, “Can feathers eat me?” and reveals a terror of the natural world. He admits that he has exhausted the rich depths of memory for a time: “There's no clue in the silt.” So he enters the game of social interaction. The central stanzas of this section play on the rhythms and rhymes of childhood:
A waiting ghost warms up the dead
Until they creak their knees:
So up and away and what do we do
But barley-break and squeeze.
The children's game of barley-break continues in this fashion. In brief, it requires three couples, who pair off into three separate but contiguous squares. The couple in the middle has to catch the end couples as they attempt to cross the dangerous central zone untouched. Significantly, the middle plot is referred to as hell. Roethke played the game as a boy, but now it may well represent the frantic catch-as-catch-can adult world of sexual encounters. And the poem itself is an entry into the brutal adolescent world of partially satisfied sexual longings. “The Long Alley” focuses on that part of the mythic round concerned with winning a bride, though the myth recedes to a mere tracery behind the concrete imagery of the poet's youth.
