Theodore Roethke (25 page)

The “First Meditation” establishes the free verse rhythms which distinguish this sequence from the rest in the book. The concrete texture of reality which marked the “Lost Son” poems is recaptured to great advantage:

Nature responds to the old woman's feelings, mirroring them. The external world reflects the internal: the Emersonian assumption. Yet there is no joy here; the old woman must journey toward the condition of unity, the moment of illumination. For now, “The spirit moves, but not always upward.”

Blessing, whose study focuses on the “dynamic” quality of Roethke's verse, sees “Meditations” as the poet's attempt to “develop more fully the possibilities inherent in the use of a dramatic persona.”
²⁶
Roethke, having put on the mask of Yeats in “The Dying Man” now dons an antithetical persona, one that allows the imagination free play. The psychic delvings of the “Lost Son” sequence were fine preparation for this new journey, in which the old woman regresses and recalls younger days around the familiar greenhouse. She says, “… I seem to go backward, / Backward in time.” She remembers:

Meditative poetry always begins in the memory, often symbolized by the wind. The two sparrows here, one inside the glass enclosure and the other outside, represent the Romantic dichotomy of interior and exterior realms. “One sang, then the other,” as if they were echoing worlds. But the journey looks to be tortuous, proceeding much as

The “First Meditation” ends with the speaker's remembrance of chance insights, the occasional epiphanies she found at the end of a long day, “A flame, intense, visible.” The open field served her well, too, as a place where illuminations often occurred. She concludes, “In such times, lacking a god, / I am still happy.”

“I'm Here” follows, beginning in the memory and moving forward toward the present. Like the old woman of “Old Lady's Winter Words” she recalls a green time:

But she acknowledges the deficiencies of adolescence, a time of waiting: “A longing for another place and time, / Another condition.” She sees how every age group envies another, how one is rarely satisfied by the present except in those isolated epiphanies for which, she complains, she was often unprepared. One instance comes to mind; she was walking down a path once and caught her dress on a rose brier; bending over to untangle herself, “The scent of the half-opened buds came up over me. / I thought I was going to smother.” One recalls the line from “A Walk in Late Summer”—“A late rose ravages the casual eye” (
CP
, p. 149). In both cases the speakers were unready for illumination and were either ravaged or smothered by the sensual experience which, if properly attended to, might have led them upward to spirituality.

A tentative resolution is reached in “Her Becoming,” the third poem in the sequence. The old woman has “learned to sit quietly” and meditate. Roethke always respected the art of meditation, as his notebooks show. He wrote:

So the old woman proceeds, contemplating the details of nature, turning the images over quietly in her mind, learning that “There are times when reality comes closer: / In a field, in the actual air” (
CP
, p. 166). The symbol of the open field persists, and the clue-symbols of stones and wind are present. The last lines point to a state of equilibrium and self-assurance if not self-transcendence:

The penultimate “Fourth Meditation” finds the heroine outside of herself again; she speculates on the meaning of her life, starting with a confession:

Yet her disposition to wait for the “pure moment” only just survives the unexpected demands of her past: “The dead make more impossible demands from their silence.” She cannot escape from history, from the coil of memory wound up in her unconscious mind. This realization precedes the image of a lark rising songless from a stone: an aberration. Something is amiss. The familiar questioning section follows as the heroine turns the meditation inward:

The self-definition begins abstractly, with geometrical shapes, yet descends into bitter specifics, “a meal of meat.” The old woman feels
contempt for herself, for no doubt she once fit these definitions. She goes on to scorn these conventional roles of women in society, the “match-makers, arrangers of picnics” who populate suburbia. She inquires, “What do their lives mean, / And the lives of their children?” Answers are not forthcoming, but one expects the usual voices of the dead to help out (as they helped out in the “Lost Son” poems when the hero was in trouble): “Near the graves of the great dead, / Even the stones speak.”

“What Can I Tell My Bones?” completes the sequence and
Words for the Wind
. It takes up where the “Fourth Meditation” ends—on the note of uncertainty:

She asks, “Before the moon draws back, / Dare I blaze like a tree?” The question of self-affirmation is at hand, and the answer demanded is Yes. But the old woman, still, does not possess Boehme's resounding courage to affirm. She reports her internal divisions:

Tillich's advice to incorporate doubt within the context of faith could be useful to her; she declares “I am” but feels unsure of her belief in a supporting spiritual world. One recalls that she confessed to “lacking a god.” But raw
need
draws her closer to faith than one would have expected at the outset of “Meditations:”

This realization leads to various illuminations in the final section where she discovers the healing power of love, declaring:

This old crone recalls the “natural man” of Wallace Stevens's “Esthétique du Mal” who explores the physical world carefully and observes
the horizon's limits, all the while participating in a full life of the imagination, saying that

Released from what Milton called “the hateful siege of contraries,” the old woman experiences a final illumination, achieves the condition of joy which brings most of Roethke's meditative sequences to conclusion:

“What came to me vaguely is now clear,” she asserts, and calls this illumination “Unprayed-for, / And final.” This remains one of Roethke's most resolute endings.

The most obvious criticism of “Meditations” is that the voice of the persona is more Roethke's than his mother's. In most of the stanzas, it would be difficult to distinguish the old woman's psychic rumblings from that of the lost son. The preoccupations are familiar, and are Roethke's own. Where differences occur, they seem rather superficial. Still, “Meditations” is one of Roethke's most interesting poems from this period; the mask of Yeats is momentarily dropped, and that “anguish of concreteness” can once again be detected. The style often looks forward to the Whitmanesque expansiveness of
The Far Field;
indeed, Roethke himself wrote to critic Ralph J. Mills, Jr.: “I came to some of Eliot's and Yeats's ancestors long before I came to them; in fact, for a long time, I rejected both of them. … So what in the looser line may seem in the first old lady poem to be close to Eliot may actually be out of Whitman, who influenced Eliot
plenty
, technically …” (
SL
, p. 230). One feels the growing presence of Whitman throughout “Meditations,” in the bird imagery, in the catalogues, in the flexible long lines. The voice behind the persona is clearly Roethke, Roethke-as-Whitman.

As a selection,
Words for the Wind
preserves the best poems from
Open House, The Lost Son, Praise to the End!
and
The Waking;
new poems are added, the love poems, the Davies and Yeats sequences, and “Meditations of an Old Woman.” One finds in its pages a dazzling array of
personae, although the poet's own voice is never completely lost. The new poems extend and elaborate the basic myth of the lost son, incorporating the lesson of the mask, taking the poet on that long journey out of the self. The “dreary dance of opposites” becomes, in these new poems especially, the “universal round” of Sir John Davies, the dance of love that releases the hero from self-absorption. Love's proper exercise leads to self-transcendence, renewal, and the affirmation of being in spite of non-being. These are the lost son's final insights, the celebration of which provides the subject material for his last volume,
The Far Field
.

CHAPTER TWELVE THE WAY OF ILLUMINATION

Illumination equals adjustment of outer life and inner life: equilibrium
.

Roethke, “Teaching Notes”

Self is the bridge. When man crosses that bridge, if blind, he shall see; if sick, he shall be well; if unhappy, he shall be happy. When he crosses that bridge, though it be night, it shall be day; for heaven is shining always
.

Chandogya-Upanishad 8, 4

The self must be a bridge, not a pit
.

Roethke, “Notebooks” (1945
)

The publication of
Words for the Wind
put Roethke in the front rank of contemporary poets. Awards were showered on him: critics were, by and large, generous. Students flocked to Washington to study under him, and he received many invitations to read at colleges around the country. Yet the periodic bouts of mental instability which had plagued him earlier returned; as was suggested earlier, the problem seemed to worsen in direct proportion to his public success. On top of this, his physical health began to fail. In his letters, he complains of aches and pains, of sleeplessness, and of general irritability. Nonetheless, from 1959 until his death in 1963 he managed to publish sixty-one poems; many of them, in fact, were written in the Halcyon House Sanatorium itself. For this poet, writing poetry was a necessary and inevitable activity.

One of the fascinating aspects of Roethke's last years is his awareness of approaching death. In his last book, mortality threatens him more than ever before; “
The Far Field,”
says Frederick
J. Hoffman, “demonstrates the extent to which Roethke had defined death to himself before the summer of 1963.”
¹
The effort to atone with God (and Otto) takes on a new insistence in his work; it is as if the poet knew of his death several years in advance. These poems fall into the tradition of the
ars moriendi:
they are, in effect, preparations for the final moments.

Not long before dying, Roethke wrote in his teaching notes: “Death is a fruit which each life bears; we must bring forth the death that is ours.”
²
We may read these last poems as an effort to “bring forth” this death, which in Roethke's terms is more an apocalypse than a surrender. The mystical Way of Illumination begun in
Words for the Wind
now becomes central; the lost son moves out into the open field and readies himself for a final illumination. But unlike many traditional mystics, who seek release from the physical world into the realm of pure spirit, Roethke comes to what Hoffman calls “a peculiarly American ‘stance,' the Emersonian confidence in
seeing
the spirit in matter … in a sense, in
creating
matter (or forming it) through the power of the transcending will.”
³
Thus, as we read in
Nature: