Theodore Roethke (22 page)

As Underhill observes, the poet rarely goes beyond the stage of Illumination. Roethke probably never went further, though he may have thought he did. It would be easy to mistake certain phases of the manicdepressive syndrome for mystical apprehension of the Absolute or, surely, the Dark Night of the Soul. The dynamics of mysticism imply a Platonic universe, also a fundamental presupposition of Romanticism.
⁵
The mystic posits a spiritual world running parallel to or contained within the material world; the mystical moment is that cutting across or rending of the veil, that “intersection of the timeless in time.”

Using the language of Emerson, Roethke interpreted the world of nature as “a steady storm of correspondences” (
CP
, p. 239). And in his earliest notebooks one finds an appreciation of Plato's (and Emerson's) metaphysics: “Plato: the true order of going … is to use the beauties of earth as steps along which he mounts upwards for the sake of that other Beauty.”
⁶
This basic mystical premise underlies much of his later verse, for in the poems after 1953 there is always the sense that one is being shown the particulars of reality only to suggest a higher reality. Roethke's
metaphysics reflect the influence, too, of Blake's mentor, Jacob Boehme, the German mystic, who wrote in his
Confessions:
“Dost thou think my writing is too earthly? If thou wert to come to this window of mine thou wouldst not then say that it is earthly. Though I must indeed use the earthly tongue, yet there is a true heavenly understanding couched under it, which in my outermost moving I am not able to express.”
⁷
Malkoff finds numerous points of affinity between Roethke and Boehme, including the doctrine of correspondences, the image of the self as a tree, and the symbolic field of light.
⁸
Indeed, in “The Pure Fury” the poet says, “Great Boehme rooted all in Yes and No; / At times my darling squeaks in pure Plato” (
CP
, p. 133). If good for nothing else, these lines point to Roethke's interest in Boehme and his great original, Plato.

In
The Waking
, there is one important addition to Roethke's symbol cluster: the image of Woman as lover. In Roethke's love poetry he almost never has a specific woman in mind, though presumably Beatrice was his later inspiration. He appeals, instead, to the archetype, what Jung called the “primordial image.” Significantly, Roethke transcribed huge passages from Jung into his teaching notes. One key passage relating to the “primordial image” follows:

The primordial image of Woman first appears as the mother of the “Lost Son” poems. In
The Waking
she becomes the lover. In her new guise, in “The Visitant,” we cannot even be sure if the transformation has been completed. The visitant is female, but she remains insubstantial, wraithlike:

Not until the beautiful “Elegy for Jane” does Roethke's Woman receive an earthly habitation and a name. In this elegy the girl's death, in a riding accident, is no more the subject of the poem than Edward King's is the
subject of Milton's
Lycidas
. The girl's death is rather the occasion for a poem calling up a certain emotional state; the poet's feelings of grief and pity transcend the occasion. Roethke compiled the elegy from fragments scattered over many years through the notebooks; it begins, in the manner of meditative poetry, with a memory evoked in concrete terms:

The phrase “a sidelong pickerel smile” first appears in the notebooks of 3 March 1945. Roethke, like many writers before him, used his notebooks as a phrase bank, saving up good images or expressions to be rescued at a later date. In this elegy, Roethke associates the girl with elemental aspects of nature: the plant tendrils, the pickerel, the wren; this has the salutary effect of defusing the pathos of her death. The Romantic views death as merely a stage; the lesson of the plants points to some kind of rebirth. Hence, the subject of the poem becomes, in effect, the poet's
response
to the girl's death and his ambivalent emotions at her graveside. Roethke pushes the technique of association to the extreme here, taking his imagery further down the scale of being, ending up with the mold itself:

The technique is traditional, going back all the way to Bion's
Lament for Adonis
and Moschus's
Lament for Bion
, Hellenic poems of the second century B.C. in which the vegetation god, Adonis, plays a central metaphoric role. Roethke, perhaps not consciously (though he surely knew Shelley's
Adonais
, modeled on Bion's elegy), turns his Jane into a vegetation goddess. Her death occasions this poet's strongest lamentations:

Without the associations of earlier elegies, the emotion would outstrip the situation. As it stands, Roethke is mourning not only this student, whom he knew only slightly, but the deaths of us all.

“Old Lady's Winter Words” follows “Elegy for Jane.” Here, Roethke takes on a fresh mask, an extreme one, and one that he would revive later to great effect in his “Meditations of an Old Woman.” This bitter dramatic monologue explores the problem of old age (and ontological anxiety) as the persona clings to the past, comparing herself to “the half-dead,” the aged who hug their last secrets. She yearns for a glimpse beyond the grave: “O for some minstrel of what's to be” (
CP
, p. 103). She wants God, or at least a sign, “a gleam, / Gracious and bland, / On a bright stone.” But she struggles to recall her youth in vain, “The doors swinging open, / The smells, the moment of hay.” She comes to realize now, “The good day has gone.” And she meditates on the death of her spirit and her body, using concrete analogues from her daily life:

As in the “Elegy for Jane,” Roethke associates the old woman with the earth; she has broken down into seeds and now guards her own fragments. Will the seeds regenerate? No answer is forthcoming, so, like Yeats's old man in
The Tower
, a fury overcomes her: “If I were a young man, /I could roll in the dust of a fine rage.” The poet establishes a strict correspondence between inner and outer weathers in the final lines. Nature is barren and it is wintertime; a cindery snow adheres to the rubble. The old woman wishes to rid herself of her body: “My dust longs for the invisible.” Staying alive itself has become a chore, and despair settles in:

The tone of this poem, stoic and passionate at the same time, is one of Roethke's most delicate achievements, yet critics have largely ignored it. Only Malkoff comments, saying of the conclusion, “these lines are not
entirely without comfort. Not in content, for the emptiness of the poem's vision holds no solace; but rather in the verse's tough, unsentimental tone.”
¹⁰

The poem reminds us of Robert Frost's “An Old Man's Winter Words” from
Mountain Interval
(1916). This precursor captures a similar state of mind and tone, using winter imagery to suggest a corresponding spiritual season. Roethke's old woman says:

Whereas Frost says of his old man:

Both figures are sustained, though barely, by the external world which will not let them simply fall back into their own dark silence forever.

Roethke's magisterial sequence, “Four for Sir John Davies,” is the penultimate poem in
The Waking
. Again, Roethke announces a brand new style: the end-stopped, highly formalized and rhetorical iambic pentameter in which so much of his later verse is composed. Roethke acknowledges his two great debts at the outset, taking on the masks of Davies and Yeats. (Yeats, to be accurate, rarely end-stopped his lines quite so drastically.) The epigraph from Davies that began this chapter directs us to Roethke's major source here, the Elizabethan “plain style” associated with such poets as Goodge, Gascoigne, Greville, Ralegh, and Davies. These were all poets Roethke taught in his creative writing course, offering their fine lyrics as models for imitation.

Both Yeats and Roethke shared the Platonic conception of the universe, which insisted upon that split between soul and body that follows by necessity from the antimaterialistic view of things. Their common interest in mysticism arises from the desire to participate in the eternal while still living in the temporal realm. Both poets believed in the power of art to “redeem the time” by creating that “artifice of eternity” which lifts man out of nature—a version of the Romantic quest for paradise. Finally, both poets wrote autobiographical verse for the most part, speaking of private passions in a public way.

The Davies sequence consists of four separate poems, each of which divides into four six-line stanzas, all maintaining a strict rhyme scheme
(
ababcc
). This formality contrasts rather profoundly with the free verse of the “Lost Son” period, but it is a mistake to think that Roethke, by changing his style so radically, altered his vision. He is still creating, modifying, and extending his personal mythos; the same symbols are active; the imagery remains consistent with his earlier work. Indeed, the organic approach to style still obtains, for Roethke's new theme, the universal dance (taken from Davies), demands the formal pattern, with its repetition and rhyme, in imitation of dancing.

Davies, in
Orchestra
, bids his readers learn the dance for themselves and be in harmony with the heavenly patterns:

Roethke launches off from here, asking a question, then making an assertion of his own:

Roethke implies that something has happened since Davies's time to disturb the easy harmony of the universe. Man no longer hears celestial music; yet the poet
needs
to dance, and this need leads to the promise to “sing and whistle dancing with the bears.” Bears recur in Roethke's poetry from this point on, symbolizing the spontaneous sense of play, that magical zone where the mask can become real, where the game is taken seriously. Bears in this context also refer to the celestial bears: Ursa Major and Ursa Minor. Roethke finally links the bears with Yeats! “Yes, I was dancing-mad, and how / That came to be the bears and Yeats would know.”

“The Partner” follows “The Dance” and introduces once more the Jungian anima or feminine principle. Eros comes into play here, and the mystical associations of erotic love. The poet asks “What is desire? / The impulse to make someone else complete?” Then he affirms, “That woman would set sodden straw on fire.” This is no vaguely defined, primordial
image of Woman: “She kissed me close, and then did something else. / My marrow beat as wildly as my pulse.” The concluding stanza widens the context of this love:

The poet, as the last couplet suggests, gains illumination in the realm of sexual play. This idea permeates mystical literature, of course. One thinks immediately of the Song of Solomon, of Spenser's
Ode to Heavenly Beauty
, or of Milton's Adam, who justifies earthly love as a means of ascending to heavenly love: “To love thou blam'st me not, for love thou say'st / Leads up to heav'n, is both the way and guide.” As Underhill has explained: