Theodore Roethke (29 page)

The third stanza sets forth the Emersonian doctrine of correspondences and argues that self-loss is essential to a mystic aspiring to union with the Absolute. The “unnatural” luminosity of the Dark Night pervades the stanza:

And this leads, in the last stanza, to union. First, the soul is compared to “some heat-maddened summer fly” that buzzes at a window. The glass must be removed before the mystic can find the freedom of true reality. And the personal self must be relinquished. “The self, then,” says Underhill, “has got to learn to be its own center and circumference: to make that final surrender which is the price of final peace.”
²⁷
Making the last inquiry into self (“Which I is
I
”), the poet-mystic ends his quest:

“Fallen,” of course, has to be read ironically. The fall is from flesh
to
spirit, hence, out of fear. The odd notion of the mind entering itself and God entering the mind is taken from Richard of St. Victor; it suggests the dissolution of all boundaries between self and soul, between soul and God. All contrarieties are resolved, and a new, somewhat terrifying freedom is gained. There is no guarantee that the condition of union will continue. The mystic, like anyone else, has to live in the temporal sphere while participating in the eternal one—until his final release in death.

The poem contains Roethke's most diagrammatic account of the mystic
progress of the soul. Yet the bare fact remains that it is less believable than some earlier poems, such as “The Rose.” It reads like a versification of Underhill's paradigm; abstractions obtrude everywhere. And the final stanza is embarrassingly self-conscious. One simply cannot equate Roethke with St. Theresa, Richard of St. Victor, or any other classical mystic. Like most other mystical poets, he attained illuminations,
intimations
of immortality; nothing more. With the possible exceptions of St. John of the Cross and Dante, poets rarely even try to portray the final union in their verse. Attempts to express this union in the language of poetry, as in Blake's Prophetic Books, often end in failure.

The remaining poems of “Sequence, Sometimes Metaphysical” expand or qualify particular sections of “In a Dark Time.” The experience of terror which precedes the final union is the subject, for example, of “In Evening Air.” The poet prays: “Make me, O Lord, a last, a simple thing / Time cannot overwhelm” (
CP
, p. 240). The poem is set at nightfall, around a campfire, and flames flicker off a wall (reminiscent of Plato's metaphor of the cave) which represents the veil between time and eternity, body and spirit. The poet reflects at the end: “How slowly dark comes down on what we do.” In “The Sequel,” which serves as an epilogue of sorts to “In a Dark Time,” the poet wonders, perhaps justifiably, “Was I too glib about eternal things?” (
CP
, p. 241). Indeed, he was. Although the poem contains a number of irritating abstractions, it seems an honest effort by the poet to interpret his mystical impulses. The claims to transcendental vision are absent; the theme of lovers in their dance returns:

Roethke slips back into the sensual world; the Absolute does not satisfy a living man permanently. The poem, in fact, records a failure of mystical penetration.

And “The Motion” confirms this failure. The poet cannot desert the call of his flesh; he needs earthly love, the base from which all lovers mount the Platonic scale: “By lust alone we keep the mind alive, / And grieve into the certainty of love” (
CP
, p. 243). This sentiment recalls the honeymoon lover of “Words for the Wind” who wrote:

So, in “The Motion,” Roethke inquires, “Who but the loved know love's a faring-forth?” He appeals, like Wordsworth and Emerson before him, to the child's special vision, demanding, “O who would take the vision from the child?” Rhetorical questions abound, and one feels the lack of concrete imagery here, especially by contrast with the “North American Sequence” and its welter of objects. But the great Romantic themes continue in slightly altered form.

One never really expects a coherent philosophical system to emerge from any poet's work; every poem is a closed system in itself, a homemade world with private borders and necessary connections. But Roethke seems to have felt some guilt over his inconsistencies; in “Infirmity” he admits: “In purest song one plays the constant fool / As changes shimmer in the inner eye” (
CP
, p. 244). However, he justifies himself admirably: “I love myself: that's my one constancy.” Self-love, perhaps, provides that singular passion which unifies his work as a whole. From here, the poet moves into a sordid portrait of his weakening body, as though the strengthening of his spirit required a diminishing of his flesh. With the fluid draining from a swollen knee and a shoulder pumped full of cortisone, the poet compares himself to an aged tree rotting from the inside out. Still, in the midst of physical decay, he takes comfort in the eternal presence: “The deep eye sees the shimmer on the stone; / The eternal seeks, and finds, the temporal.” “Infirmity,” like “The Sequel,” rings truer than the more purely mystical lyrics; now the poet acknowledges the grave difficulties which accompany the Way of Illumination: “Eternity's not easily come by.” Yet, he can observe at the last, “How body from spirit slowly does unwind / Until we are pure spirit in the end.” A brief epilogue follows in “The Decision,” where the same theme is summarized: “Running from God's the longest race of all” (
CP
, p. 245).

The abiding problem of relapse from mystical illumination back into a lower state of consciousness absorbs the poet in “The Marrow.” He asks, “What's the worst portion in this mortal life?” and answers, humorously, “A pensive mistress, and a yelping wife” (
CP
, p. 246). The pure moment of union is certainly not sustained! But the poet refuses to give up the ascent; as he states: “Brooding on God, I may become a man.” This brooding falls within the great tradition of religious meditation that underlies so much of Western poetry. Mystics are rare, but the end of meditation is not necessarily union with God. Its lesser, but
nonetheless real, purpose is to kindle the affections, to awaken the sense of a Divine Presence. Meditation is that essential exercise which, constantly practiced, establishes a sense of self in relation to God. Thus, the final stage of any formal meditation is that of the colloquy or conversation with God. Hence, Roethke addresses the Absolute in “The Marrow”: “Godhead above my God, are you still there?” And, later, “Lord, hear me out, and hear me out this day: / From me to Thee's a long and terrible way.” As Malkoff and Sullivan have said, the notion of the Godhead above God occurs in Tillich's
Courage to Be
and that was probably Roethke's source for this idea, essentially a rhetorical device employed by theologians to account for the anthropomorphic aspects of the Christian God. It is a further abstraction from God, resembling the One of Plotinus.

The last poems of “Sequence, Sometimes Metaphysical” tell of hope restored, of renewal and final illuminations. The movement in “I Waited” is from a barren landscape to a bright seaside where a sense of gladness follows a long vigil. As in Eliot, the wind symbolizes the spirit; it presages rain, which is redemptive. In “The Tree, The Bird,” which comes next, Roethke conjures once more the image of self-as-tree. The familiar voice calling from the cloud (God-Otto) is present. The bird has become a sign of the ascending spirit, as in the poetry of St. John of the Cross, Eliot, and others. The tree, rooted in the physical world, is prey to all motions of the wind. The bird is the soul arising out of the tree; it pierces the veil of heaven. (Roethke comes close to allegory in this metaphysical conceit.) A final illumination comes in the last lines: “Thus I endure this last pure stretch of joy, / The dire dimension of a final thing” (
CP
, p. 248).

Similarly, in “The Restored” the poet's soul enters the shape of a bird. But this time the bird has lost use of a wing; disaster seems at hand until, miraculously, the wing is restored:

“The Right Thing” is a villanelle, and it recalls “The Waking,” Roethke's earlier triumph in this form. In the earlier poem, he had said:

That is, illumination often takes us by surprise. The tree represents the permanent self; the worm is the temporal and sensual self, struggling to mount the stair of time and get
beyond
time. But the process is acknowledged to be painful and slow. The poet recapitulates this theme in “The Right Thing,” exuding a newfound confidence in the ultimate success of his spiritual journey:

Roethke lays claim here to the Unity of Being which Yeats took for his goal. “God bless the roots!” says Roethke, “Body and soul are one!” Yet one cringes at this assertive tone. The earlier villanelle, which proceeds by an intricate series of highly concrete images and symbols, excels “The Right Thing” in every respect.

Fortunately, the last sequence and
The Far Field
itself end with Roethke's intense and moving lyric, “Once More, the Round.” “What's greater, Pebble or Pond?” he asks (
CP
, p. 251). But pebble and pond partake of the same substance, as all things relate to the One, the ground of being. The poem celebrates Roethke's spiritual rebirth, his ongoing participation in the cosmic dance. Here dancer and dance are one; the “hateful contraries” are resolved: “And everything comes to One, / And we dance on, dance on, dance on.” The poem contains all of Roethke's favorite symbols of the protean self: bird, tree (leaf), fish, and snail. It is fitting that the dance of love should bring his work to a close. As Underhill observed:

The Far Field
, which Roethke never brought into final shape before his death on 1 August 1963, remains an imperfect collection; yet many of its poems can be counted among his best, especially the Whitmanesque meditations of “North American Sequence.” These last poems extend and refine the mythos of the lost son, taking the poet-hero beyond
the dangerous clutch of self-absorption via the Way of Illumination. The long journey out of the self, begun in
Words for the Wind
, was at once tortuous and delightful; for, in spite of the terrors which seem necessarily to attend the Romantic on his quest for unity of being, Roethke's final message is ever: “All things bring me to love.” American Romantic literature would be much the poorer without this posthumous volume.

PART FOUR

CONCLUSION

To have paced out the whole circumference of modern consciousness, to have explored every one of its recesses—this is my ambition, my torture, and my bliss
.

Nietzsche, copied by Roethke into his “Notebooks” (24 January 1963
)

Roethke copied this epigraph into his notebook in the last year of his life, perhaps identifying his own task with Nietzsche's. Certainly the desire to explore consciousness in its entirety is fundamentally a Romantic impulse. It would be foolish to say that Roethke achieved as much as this; yet he did search dim regions of the subjective mind with uncommon persistence. He found in the recesses of memory those images which perhaps could liberate him from the ruin of his own past. His world view was deeply Romantic, following from Blake and Wordsworth on one side, from Emerson and Whitman on the other. Like his great contemporary, Wallace Stevens, he was writing “the poem of the mind in the act of finding / What will suffice.” But unlike Stevens, he was willing to settle for nothing less than mystical union with the Divine Presence. In this ambition, he seems closer to Emerson, who wanted his ideal poet to claim
everything: