Theodore Roethke (20 page)

The poet describes and criticizes the regressive method itself in the last two lines quoted above; he has relied upon instinct alone, successfully, but the gills are “beginning to cry.” The poetics of descent contains within it the need for reversal.

The speaker-hero then loses himself in a world of things that cries out for sensory recognition, unleashing “That anguish of concreteness!”—one of Roethke's most evocative phrases. This anguish accompanies a deep joy, as the hero says: “I proclaim once more a condition of joy.” But one interesting aspect of this nearly mystical rapture is Roethke's firm grip on the material world; he never gives himself quite over to transcendental reality, though he sways in that direction at many points.
Love
, however, remains the subject of the poet's declamation in this poem, and—in Augustine's great phrase—love calls us to the things of this world. Says Roethke's hero in amazement: “Behold, in the lout's eye, / Love.”

The concluding section takes us to a lakeside, the familiar pond of memory. Above it, bats weave among willows, veering out over the still water. A fish leaps and disturbs the moonlit image on the water's skin:

And the hero queries: “Who untied the tree?” It was someone he met before he lived, no doubt the Father himself, who let loose the son (symbolized
by the tree) into creation, his fallen state. The language of this section is, like the title itself (which comes from Oothoon's lament in
Visions of the Daughters of Albion
), Blakean throughout. This poem foreshadows the magnificent love poems of Roethke's last two major books,
Words for the Wind
and
The Far Field
. For the step beyond self-love (where Onan reigns unchallenged) and true love, which reaches out to the Other, is the subject of Blake's
Visions
, just as the hero of Roethke's poem finally understands, “We never enter / Alone.”

Although “I Cry, Love! Love!” points toward a resolution of the hero's dilemma, which began with the father's death and prompted his descent into the unconscious, this poem did not provide a strong ending to the sequence. Roethke therefore added a further poem in his next book,
The Waking
. “O, Thou Opening, O” offers a summary of all previous illuminations, all of which take the form of aphorisms or proverbs (after Burke's advice). Even the poet seems dazzled by the process:

We should recall that the “Lost Son” sequence, like Wordsworth's
Prelude
, recounts the “growth of a poet's mind.” As such, the language of the sequence takes on new interest, for the poems represent not only a psychic but a philological delving as well. As Emerson writes in “The Poet,” “the poet is the Namer or Language-maker, naming things sometimes after their appearance, sometimes after their essence…. The poets made all the words, and therefore language is the archives of history.”
¹²
Every word was once a brilliant picture, Emerson goes on to say, with emphasis on the primacy of imagery. What Roethke has been doing in these poems can be seen as “naming” in Emerson's sense; the hero attempts to recover the past in his language, in his imagery. He names the original pictures; he reaches back into origins of language in primitive rhymes and nonsense syllables. And the hero-poet's growth is reflected in the growing sophistication of diction and verbal agility, culminating in “Dazzle me, dizzy aphorist.” For, as Norman O. Brown has said, “Aphorism is the form of eternity.”

We see the poet as dizzy aphorist again in the second section of “O, Thou Opening, O”—which is a curious thing indeed. It is prose, of a very unique kind:

This “pelludious Jesus-shimmer over all things” is the result of the poet's “naming,” his repossession of the original picture-language, the “light's broken speech revived.” Roethke's method parallels that of Joyce in
Finnegans Wake
, of which Harry Levin has written: “We used to lament that words were such a shadowy approximation of objective reality. We have learned to look upon them as objects of immediate apprehension, more real in themselves than their penumbras of meaning.”
¹³
Joyce, by conceding the priority of the word to its object, refreshes our sense of language as an artistic medium. And so does Roethke.

The prose section continues, multiplying the religious associations with phrases such as, “I'm tired of all that, Bag-Foot. I can hear small angels anytime.” Like Blake, Roethke prefers to make his own myths rather than be enslaved by another man's. Religions in their institutional forms never interested Roethke, who was nonetheless a deeply religious man. The hero of Roethke's poem rejects the worn-out dogmas of old Bag-Foot (another father figure). He rages against all authority derived from power (Bag-Foot is Big-Foot or God). “Who ever said God sang in your fat shape?” he questions, and we are aware of Otto's presence behind the mask of God. This is the stage of separation; the hero finally understands: “A son has many fathers.”

The final section testifies to the wisdom accumulated throughout the long sequence. The hero apprehends fresh possibilities, saying:

All of these will be part of the life to come: ecstatic identification with nature, physical love, and the joy of song. These intimations of future happiness bring on a profound release:

Self-discovery has led to self-acceptance: “I am my faces.” One of the last lines in the poem is the aphorism, “Going is knowing,” which looks forward to the beautiful villanelle, “The Waking,” from which the book's title is drawn. “I learn by going where I have to go” is the refrain of that poem—a summarizing proverb which directs the hero out of the dark wood toward the field of light. The heroic journey is a long and arduous one, but it
must
be undertaken. One learns by going. There is no other way.

Looking back at the sequence as a whole, one marvels at Roethke's achievement. “The Lost Son” itself remains the center of the whirlpool, catching all manner of flotsam and jetsam in its spiral. The other poems emanate from this focus, where nearly all of Roethke's major symbols are present and active. Although obscurity often frustrates the reader (and
Finnegans Wake
again comes to mind), the rewards of persistence are considerable. After several readings, the sequence becomes more intelligible; the symbols begin to inform each other, and the strange dream imagery coheres. If one keeps the basic myth of the hero's initiatory journey in mind, the more opaque passages will not obstruct one's progress. For this sequence is Roethke's contribution to Romantic quest literature; the quest is interiorized, turning the hero's motion inward, allowing Roethke full possession of Freudian and Jungian insights.

The poems dealing with infancy and childhood tend to be the most difficult, employing the ancient technique of regression. The poems of adolescence often imitate patterns associated with rites of passage, provoking a great deal of tension as the hero crosses various thresholds. The sequence, taken as a whole, is Roethke's most original achievement, if not
quite
his best (priority still belongs to the greenhouse poems). Yet one must not overlook the therapeutic effect of these poems on the developing artist; they became, in effect, a psychic autobiography in which the poet recovered, in a Freudian sense, his own lost past. To go forward, the poet had first to go backward. He had to confront reality without an intervening mirror, taking experience for his own text, transforming himself into the New Perseus described by Geoffrey Hartman. After writing the “Lost Son” poems, Roethke felt much freer from the bondage of his past and, especially, of his guilt over the death of Otto Roethke. These poems, stretching from
The Lost Son
to
The Waking
, demonstrate once more that an important common ground exists between poetry and psychoanalysis.

PART THREE THE LONG JOURNEY OUT OF THE SELF

CHAPTER TEN THE LESSON OF THE MASK

“Put off that mask of burning gold

With emerald eyes.”

“O no, my dear, you make so bold

To find if hearts be wild and wise
,

And yet not cold.”

“But lest you are my enemy
,

I must enquire.”

“O no, my dear, let all that be;

What matter, so there is but fire

In you, in me?”

Yeats, “The Mask”

The main subject of Romantic poetry has continued to be the growth of the poet's mind. Wordsworth, while preaching against the self-absorption of the Solitary in
The Excursion
, remains at the source of this modern tradition, and the hero of his
Prelude
stands as a prototype for the Romantic poet: a man alone with himself, on the skirts of society, deeply aware of the gulf between self and nature, and dedicated to the redeeming powers of the imagination. The Romantic poet, like the Archangel Michael in Book 12
of Paradise Lost
, offers us “a paradise within,” an inner Eden wherein seer and seen are one. The saving movement is first inward toward self-discovery, then outward, beyond the individual mind. This progress depends upon Blake's dialectic of contraries, what Harold Bloom calls the “antithetical quest,” and what Roethke began in
The Waking
and continue
until his death. One version of this quest arises in Yeats's doctrine of the masks, an ancient idea given new expression, which Roethke adopted in what I call his middle period.

Blake, too, realized the pitfalls of self-absorption, that most dangerous side effect of self-discovery. He named this side effect the Spectre of Urthona—embodied in the last of his epics,
Jerusalem
—and went so far as to claim that if man would build the earthly, paradisiacal city of Golgonooza, he must relinquish selfhood altogether. He prays:

The imagination can win autonomy only by extinguishing the self, Blake argues. The poet must escape from the prison of self-consciousness if he will be saved.

Yeats, who writes in the same tradition as Blake and, in fact, was one of his first editors, thought the doctrine of the mask could be of use in liberating the imagination from the strictures of selfhood. As Richard Ellmann has said, “The doctrine of the mask is so complex and so central in Yeats that we can hardly attend to it too closely.”
²
He goes on:

One finds a wide-ranging variety of masks in Yeats's verse, from the wandering Oisin of his “Celtic Twilight” phase to the revolutionary nationalist Owen Aherne and his contrary, the mystical philosopher Michael Robartes. Often his masks are versions of the self, the embittered lover of “No Second Troy” or the “smiling public man” of “Among School Children.” A poet
always
has a persona, but the more conscious
he is of this fact, Yeats thought, the better. For literature participates in that realm of play where the conditional “as if” holds first place.

For an artist, especially the poet, the mask demands that willing suspension of disbelief not demanded of, say, a priest at the communion table. It demands the possibility that one can move outside of the narrow self-consciousness that Blake decried. It may require self-annihilation. But the artist, like the religious convert, understands that one must first be lost in order to be found; one has to make Roethke's “long journey out of the self.” As Campbell says,