Theodore Roethke (21 page)
If one recalls the struggle of the lost son to come to some sense of self, it is doubly impressive that Roethke should have learned the lesson of the mask and sought a way
out
of this self. However, the “Lost Son” period (1943â1953) seems to have worn Roethke down; having probed his past life so deeply, further work in this direction seemed unlikely to yield much more. Perhaps the near unintelligibility of parts of
Praise to the End!
worried him; he wanted to be read and understood. For whatever reason, Roethke changed his course again. He began an arduous process of self-transcendence, first by reaching out to someone with love, then by meditation and mysticism.
In another way, these new directions are a logical extension of his autobiographical mythos. Roethke merely extends the self discovered in
The Lost Son
and
Praise to the End!
to include adult patterns of behavior. He brings the hero into the present. The adolescent hero becomes the adult lover, the professor, the poet, and the mystic of later phases. The greenhouse image recurs, and Otto Roethke reappears. The poet's growing awareness of God seems an extension of affection and fear from the poet's biological father to God, who is Father in the abstract. The open field as a symbol displaces the greenhouse, just as the poet moves outside the prison (greenhouse) of his self-consciousness into the clear light of nature (open field).
A crucial aspect of the mask in Roethke's sense of that term involves his relation with his precursors, which is highly complex. Whereas he was merely
imitating
his precursors in
Open House
, in his later volumes
he wears them like masks; he
becomes
each precursor, merging his own self so completely with another's that an amalgam voice is born. In a poem like “Four for Sir John Davies,” for instance, Roethke flaunts the mask with great daring:
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 fiddled through my brain.
Yes, I was dancing-mad, and how
That came to be the bears and Yeats would know.
(
CP
, p. 105)
One good way to escape the self is to become another. Here, Roethke gets into Yeats's skin, plays at being Yeats, just as Yeats played at being Oisin or Michael Robartes.
In his last book,
The Far Field
, the mask of Whitman takes precedence, although Yeats and Blake are not abandoned. The last book completes the myth of the lost son, reviving the metaphor of the journey in a fresh context. The journey, again, is regressive, but the illuminations now become the emotional center of these poems, just as the descent theme preoccupied the poet at an earlier stage. Roethke's belief in nature as a symbol of the spirit pervades these expansive final poems, most of which celebrate American landscapes in a way reminiscent of Emerson, who said: “O Poet â¦Thou shalt have the whole land for thy park and manor, the sea for thy bath and navigation, without tax and without envy; the woods and the rivers thou shalt own, and thou shalt possess that wherein others are only tenants and boarders.”
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Roethke's last meditations fulfill the Emersonian prophecy, constituting an imaginative repossession of the natural world which, in turn, allows a repossession of the spirit.
The Far Field
contains some of Roethke's very best writing, especially in “North American Sequence” and “Sequence, Sometimes Metaphysical,” which display “not only some of his finest work,” according to Ralph J. Mills, Jr., “but a number of the most astonishing mystical poems in the language.”
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“Once More, the Round,” the ecstatic epilogue to Roethke's posthumous volume, completes Roethke's long journey out of the self with the cosmic dance wherein all conflicts find resolution:
What's greater, Pebble or Pond?
What can be known? The Unknown.
My true self runs toward a Hill
More! O More! visible.
Now I adore my life
With the Bird, the abiding Leaf,
With the Fish, the questing Snail,
And the Eye altering all;
And I dance with William Blake
For love, for Love's sake;
And everything comes to One,
As we dance on, dance on, dance on.
(
CP
, p. 251)
CHAPTER ELEVEN LOVE'S PROPER EXERCISE
Dauncing (bright Lady) then began to be
,
When first the seedes whereof the world did spring
,
The Fire, Ayre, Earth, and Water did agree
,
By Loves persuasion, Natures mighty King
,
To leave their first disordered combating;
And in a daunce such measure to observe
,
As all the world their motion should preserve
.
Since when they still are carried in a round
,
And changing come one in another's place
,
Yet do they neyther mingle nor confound
,
But everyone doth keepe the bounded space
Wherein the Daunce doth bid it turne or trace;
This wondrous myracle did Love devise
,
For Dauncing is Love's proper exercise
.
Sir John Davies
, Orchestra (
1956
)
Nineteen fifty-three marks another turning point in Roethke's career.
The Waking: Poems 1932â1953
was published, completing the “Lost Son” sequence with its first poem, “O, Thou Opening, O” and announcing a new, highly formal style which derives from Yeats and the Elizabethan, Sir John Davies. Also, on 3 January 1953 Roethke married Beatrice Heath O'Connell, surprising his family and friends, who had come to think of him as a confirmed bachelor. His own attitude toward his marriage was one of unabashed delight. He wrote to an old friend, the Canadian poet A. J. M. Smith:
I got marriedâdon't faintâon January 3 to Beatrice O'Connell of Winchester, Va., and N.Y.C. Auden was best man & Bogan the matron of honor (the only attendants except for her ma & pa & brother). She's v.
pretty (26); Irish & German & no fool. You'll both like her, I know. I've known her for nearly ten years. (SL, p. 183)
True, he had known Beatrice for nearly ten years, but only slightly. She had been his student at Bennington in the mid-forties and had admired him from a distance. Their acquaintance had lapsed until a chance meeting in December 1952. They met this time in New York, where Roethke was appearing at the Poetry Center, and the courtship lasted a matter of weeks. Auden, who was best man, offered the new-lyweds his villa on Ischia for a honeymoon, and they accepted, sailing to Naples in March. They stayed until the end of May, in relative seclusion; during this period Roethke wrote his finest love poem, “Words for the Wind,” and began the long journey out of the self. The “Lost Son” period was certainly over. The hero had won the bride, and he was ready to experiment with various masks; he was ready to extend himself to another.
After Italy, the Roethkes traveled by way of Geneva and Paris to England, where Roethke befriended Dylan Thomas and did a broadcast for the B.B.C., called
An American Poet Introduces Himself and His Work
(30 July 1953). The talk was well received, and Roethke was gaining in confidence every day. He returned to America buoyed up by his accomplishments, the warm reception he had received in England, and the love of Beatrice.
But the mental illness which had plagued him in earlier years would not let him be. He was overtaken by one of his “manic phases” in late autumn and was forced to spend two weeks in the Columbus Hospital. He recovered quickly this time, but it was obvious now that no measure of worldly success would protect him against these bouts of extreme anxiety; in fact, his anxiety tended to increase with public acclaim. Yet it was typical of Roethke to turn failures to his advantage as a poet. He liked to identify with other “mad” poets of the past: Christopher Smart, Blake, and John Clare especially. He took on the persona of a visionary, taking pride in his madness, using his altered mental states to probe the boundaries of sanity.
It was also during this period, the mid-fifties, that Roethke came into his own as a teacher. Whereas the notebooks of the “Lost Son” period are an indispensable guide to the poet's thinking at the first turning point of his career, his teaching notes from the University of Washington provide essential clues to the thought underlying the later poetry. We learn what books he was reading, what he was telling his students, and how his own work was planned. We continue to see his obsession with technique, his concern for tradition, and his effort to learn about fields outside
of literature. Burke had introduced him to psychology; now he began reading widely in philosophy, religion, and mysticism. Ideas come into his poetry again, though often without much success.
In a memoir written shortly after the poet's death, Robert Heilman recalls the poet as a teacher-colleague:
As a colleague he was a man of great conscience. He was not useful in ordinary ways in the department of the university; he was not a committee man. But he was not aloof, indifferent, a great man who could not be bothered. He was profoundly concerned about the department, more so, perhaps, than some people who took their own good citizenship for grantedâ¦. He could sound ferocious about those who seemed untalented or lacking in some way or who seemed to be pursuing only private ends, and yet have a very kindly feeling for someone in whom he sensed warmth and the right devotion.
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Similar reports of Roethke's integrity as a teacher have come down from his students, many of whom have become well-known poets in their own right, especially Richard Hugo, David Wagoner, James Wright, and Carolyn Kizer. In his brief and brilliant essay, “The Teaching Poet,” the professorial mask turns suddenly transparent:
Let's say no one would claim to make poets. But a good deal can be taught about the craft of verse. A few people come together, establish an intellectual and emotional climate wherein creation is possible. They teach each otherâthat ideal condition of what once was called “progressive education.” They learn by doing. Something of the creative lost in childhood is recovered. The student (and the teacher) learn a considerable something about themselves and the language. The making of verse remains a human activity. (
SP
, p. 45)
Looking over the teaching notes of his last decade, one discovers the intimate relationship that existed between his roles of poet and teacher. Rather than conflicting, as one might expect, they serve each other in the best possible way. Roethke needed the live audience before him to bring out his best, to get him going every day, to keep him alert and reading widely. He seems to have taken as much in inspiration from his students as he gave out. Also, being a teacher forced him to redefine his terms constantly, the terms of his art and of his self. A good teacher, like a good poet, has to invent his own language and be perpetually reborn to himself with every class.
Certainly Roethke won the devotion of his students. He urged them
to feel
things as passionately as they could. An excerpt from his teaching notes gives some hint of what his classes were like:
You will notice that we don't begin with a great many rules and precepts: but we do begin! Another way to look at it: as a teacher I'm like a little kid who has done something bad. I don't tell about it all at once: it has to break out gradually.
This course is based on the assumption that these particular old forms have served many minds nobly. They may be able to catch
some
of the things you have to say. At any rate, they will give you practice. We begin, to continue the child analogy, with small things. Now along with this I want you to follow your own impulses about the shapes of poems. Put down ideas in your notebooks. Expand them into poems. Always try to get a rhythm, a shape that seems to fit the material.
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Here is a teacher who can do what he professes; these notes tell us a great deal about Roethke's working methods, as teacher
and
poet. And his method, as poet, bears a striking resemblance to that of Yeats. The poet begins with an idea (gained through experience or reading); he puts it into abstract prose and later expands it into poetry, always seeking “a rhythm, a shape that seems to fit the material.” The notion of fitting the shape to the idea comes out of the Romantic metaphor of the plant.
Roethke's teaching notes and his poetic notebooks, from
The Waking
onward, reveal a growing interest in mysticism. Even in the early forties, the poet dabbled in Oriental literature. Perhaps his interest in Yeats was responsible for his branching out. In any case, Roethke never fell head over heels for any sect, as did Yeats, but he believed himself a true mystic. And his conception of the universe takes on a Neo-Platonic hue in later yearsâanother Yeatsian inheritance.
The notebooks of the forties contain many references to such contemporary scholars of mysticism as E. Allison Peers and Evelyn Underhill (a disciple of the Baron Friedrich von Hügel, an important influence on Yeats). The following notes on the mystical expansion or progress of consciousness, taken directly from Underhill, appear in Roethke's notebooks in 1946:
1. Awakeningâto a sense of reality.
2. Purgation of the self, when it realizes its own (unprojecting) divine.
3. An enhanced return to the sense of the divine order, after the Self has achieved detachment from the world.
4. Dark Night of the Soul.
Sacramental perception.
Singleness:
Discovery of singleness of self is the same as discovery of God in oneself.
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These are the kinds of “ideas” out of which Roethke fashioned his poems.
It will be useful to review the stages of mystic consciousness before turning to Roethke's middle and later poems. Underhill divines five progressive stages on the “scale of awareness.” (1) Awakening of the self to consciousness of the Absolute, marked by feelings of intense joy, exhilaration; (2) Awareness of the gulf between the self and the Absolute, which leads to purgation or the attempt to eliminate extraneous factors that stand between the self and God; (3) Illumination: the contemplative state par excellence, characterized by a clear vision of Absolute Reality, a sense of the Divine Presence in creation; (4) Dark Night of the Soul: extreme awareness of the Divine Absence. This resembles the second stage but is a higher exponent of it. The feelings of personal satisfaction which accompany the third stage must be lost before the final stage can be prepared for; (5) Union: the goal of all mystic quests. This stage follows the surrender of selfhood in the fourth stage. It demands more than mere perception of the Absolute; it requires mergence. Self-consciousness gives way to complete consciousness. Serenity predominates, but not necessarily ecstasy.
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