Theodore Roethke (18 page)

The last two sections of “The Shape of the Fire” celebrate the momentary recovery of the past, that prenatal paradise where

Not surprisingly, the poem (and
The Lost Son
) ends inside a greenhouse. The flowerheads are illuminated with the sunlight; the rose awakens, rising from its bed “Still as a child in its first loneliness.” And the hero rejoices in the knowledge that he has gained by the underworld descent. Light, as ever, is the symbol of grace abounding. The hero has accomplished his journey. Having sustained the ordeals of his rite of passage, he is reborn, spiritually, coming to know

This paradisiacal image appropriately completes
The Lost Son
, which is his most essential writing, the center of his work, and the book that informs the poetry which follows in the next fifteen years. As Louis Martz puts it, “Roethke never surpassed the achievement of
The Lost Son
, though many of his later poems are filled to the same brim. In these green images Roethke reached the center of his memory and found his wholly individual idiom.”
²⁶

CHAPTER NINE FROM THE KINGDOM OF BANG AND BLAB

Thus, what we need is an irrational language with a new vocabulary, something like what modern art is trying to find for an expression of the subconscious
.

Otto Rank
, Beyond Psychology;
copied by Roethke into his notebooks
.

What a whelm of proverbs, Mr. Pinch!

Roethke, “Praise to the End!”

With the publication of
The Lost Son
, Roethke emerged from relative obscurity, attracting public attention on both sides of the Atlantic. Critics praised his adventurous new methods, so he was encouraged to press on with the “Lost Son” sequence, evolving what Rank called an “irrational language.” The next two books followed quickly,
Praise to the End!
coming in 1951 and
The Waking
in 1953. The same techniques of associational logic and infantile language witnessed in
The Lost Son
are now given full play; indeed, Roethke takes his poetry to the very edge of intelligibility, using the same general mythos of the regressive journey as an organizing principle. The continuing sequence occupies the whole of
Praise to the End!
and finishes with “O, Thou Opening, O” in
The Waking
. Together with the greenhouse poems, the “Lost Son” sequence represents the emotional center of his work.

Finishing his job at Bennington in 1948, Roethke went back to Penn State for a final term, then moved to the University of Washington in Seattle, where he stayed until his death in 1963. He lost the company of Kenneth
Burke but now gained the emotional support of his new department chairman, Robert Heilman. The critical brilliance of Arnold Stein also was at hand. In short, he felt ready to begin again the regressive journey. The first poems he wrote in Washington recapitulate the primal experiences already encountered by the lost son. But the regions of the poet's mind which they explore are a labyrinth into which the reader must venture, unlike Theseus, without a thread to unravel.

“Where Knock Is Open Wide” resumes the “Lost Son” sequence in
Praise to the End!
, taking its title from Christopher Smart's
Song to David
(Part 77). The poet takes the infantile language utilized in earlier poems a step further. Father, mother, pets, and the usual nursery rhymes are here:

The echo of Joyce's
Portrait of the Artist
is deliberate; that novel begins: “Once upon a time and a very good time it was there was a moocow coming down along the road and this moocow that was coming down the road met a nicens little boy named baby tuckoo….”
¹
The technique is identical. Both writers understand the potential for nuance and ambiguity inherent in so-called baby-talk. But whereas baby-talk in
A Portrait of the Artist
leads rapidly forward into maturity, Roethke's language presses backward.

The title is suggestive. As Ralph J. Mills, Jr., has noticed, “Roethke's piece, which presents the sensations and thoughts of earliest childhood, seems to use the line from Smart to imply birth and entry into the world.”
²
Indeed, the hero has regressed back into the womb, and his rebirth into a strange and woeful world is the subject of this poem. The first section ends with this inquiry:

The association of father and fish (sperm) has become familiar by now; the lost son's psychic fishing has turned up another recollection of Otto. The hint of reincarnation of the father
in
the son may help to explain “Everything has been twice,” as well as the connection with “papa-seed.”

Like Smart, Roethke darts from reference to reference, constantly altering rhythms to suggest the infant's short span of attention. The poet thwarts any attempt at linear coherence, imitating a child's way of thinking. The second section becomes directly autobiographical when Uncle Charlie, whom Roethke disliked, enters the drama. Until he killed himself, Charlie had shared ownership of the greenhouse in Saginaw with Otto. This suicide fascinated Roethke at odd moments throughout his life, and perhaps it underlies these stanzas:

“They'll jump on his belly” is a child's version of hell, unlike the tortures reserved for suicides in Canto 13 of Dante's
Inferno
.

The wildly exaggerated fears of childhood absorb the hero in the third section of the poem; he cries out to God (father) for assistance in a language full of obscure puns and private imagery:

This may be the child's prayer for birth, for the synethesia of “I hear flowers” suggests a very early stage of development where sight and hearing have yet to be distinguished; indeed, “A ghost can't whistle” is almost a plea for incarnation. “Hello happy hands” points out the guiltless masturbatory joys of an infant's world, where desire and gratification follow as the night the day.

Section Four recalls the stage of return and reunion with Papa in “The Lost Son.” As before, it follows a “chaos-passage” and some kind of
partial illumination. The pattern is all too familiar now. But the unexpected occurs as the boy remembers a fishing trip with his father that ended in humiliation:

No single experience is more classic in American boyhood than the fishing trip with one's father. And few themes dominate the literature of American Romanticism more than that of man—or boy—against nature. One could follow the theme in its various manifestations from James Fenimore Cooper, Mark Twain, and Thoreau through Hemingway's “Nick Adams” stories and James Dickey's
Deliverance
. In Roethke's vignette, the reality of experience shatters the idealized myth. The poet's technique, as we have seen, is mimetic; the first stanza approximates the fitful nature of memory. The lines jerk along, omitting the usual connectives which render speech intelligible. In the second stanza the sensitive child confronts the father, who discourages any manner of sympathy with the creature. But the child reads things differently. He sees the father as asserting his authority and feels afraid, quashed. The father, in this scene, lacks understanding; for him, a fact is a fact: “Bullheads have whiskers. / And they bite.” Yet the child is offended. No reconciliation can follow immediately from this harsh recollection. Instead, the hero conjures images of the father-florist's death, mingling affection, wonder, and grief. He feels separation and isolation, not atonement:

This is one of the few poems in the “Lost Son” sequence in which regression does not lead to some form of progression, to some insight
or illumination. After a frightening portrait of the dead father in the fifth section of “Where Knock is Open Wide”—“He was all whitey bones / And skin like paper”—the child concludes, grimly:

From this unfruitful meditation on the father, Roethke proceeds to a four-part poem on the mother. “I Need, I Need” opens with a re-creation of the infantile mentality seen in the oral stage:

The title bears close resemblance to Blake's inscription “I Want! I Want!” for the ninth design in his series
For Children: The Gates of Paradise
(1793), which traces a man's progress from infancy to adulthood.
³
“I Need, I Need” goes a step further than the prenatal imagery of the first section of “Where Knock Is Open Wide.” Now, the child is certainly born; all desires will not be gratified instantly; hence, need arises. The womb world of continuous nutrition is removed: “I can't taste my mother.” From this point onward, some needs will be met and some will not: “The Trouble is with No and Yes / As you can see I guess I guess.” And so, desire becomes wish in the childlike rhyming of the second section:

The brief third section reveals the deep craving for Papa which a mother's love cannot satisfy:

The son (“sun”) needs more. While the father, like God, remains “in a cloud,” the son is separated from him. So he turns to the earth for help:

The child-hero returns to the natural world, where the elements, fire and ice, respond: “It's a dear life I can touch.” The poem ends with the lines: “I know another fire. / Has roots.” The fire in the root is sexual desire, the need suggested by the title.

“Bring the Day!” follows, adapting the faintly perceived insights of the two previous poems. The nursery jingles that open the poem set the celebratory tone:

In this magical world the herrings sing to each other, whispers become kisses, and the grasses and wind offer sympathetic advice. The hero feels assimilated into the natural process (“When I stand, I'm almost a tree”). The poem ends on a note of joyous expectation:

The image of the self-as-tree is central to the poem that follows, “Give Way, Ye Gates.” Malkoff associates this phase of the child's development with Freud's anal-aggressive category: “the struggle toward individuality is taken up more aggressively; the child is now less dependent upon others than before, and he is that much less threatened by separation from them….”
⁴
Now the slightly older hero tries to put down roots; he revives the oedipal dream and courts his mother, hoping to supplant the
dead father. The mother is also a religious symbol (blue being the Virgin's color): “Mother of blue and the many changes of hay.” The son informs her: “We're king and queen of the right ground. / I'll risk the winter for you.” Further on, he makes the lover's proposal of union: “We'll swinge the instant!” The peculiar word “swinge” combines “swing” and “singe” in a vivid way, creating a nexus of erotic possibilities. Later still, he is explicit: