Theodore Roethke (27 page)

In the fourth and final section we are given an image of the protean self that survives time and circumstances:

“The garb is symbolic,” Blessing argues, “for the green of the robes suggests perpetual renewal, while the ‘garments of adieu' hint at a ceaseless falling away.”
¹¹
This is the third stage of illumination, where a strong sense of the transcendental self is attended by an increase in psychic energy. Roethke goes on to describe “the final man” who emerges from this contemplation:

Critics all point to Stevens's “Asides on the Oboe” as the source of Roethke's formulation:

Yet Emerson's notion of the “true man” who stands at the center of his culture and speaks with authority underlies both Stevens and Roethke; “The Poet,” Emerson wrote in his journal, “should install himself and shove all usurpers from their chairs by electrifying mankind with the
right tone, long wished for, never heard. The true centre thus appearing, all false centres are suddenly superseded, and grass grows in the Capitol.”
¹³

The poem's last stanza essentially expounds its first line: “All finite things reveal infinitude”—the main theme of the poem. It moves toward the beautiful summary lines:

One thinks immediately of the notebook entry: “All the present has fallen: I am only what I remember.” As the sum of the conscious and unconscious minds, the memory contains within its sphere the entire universe. And each man stands at the center of this universe sending out his imagination like the stone whose ripples widen around the world. Fully attuned to the harmonies of nature, this “final man” is also similar to Wallace Stevens's Nomad Exquisite who creates the world around her:

In Roethke's art the memory becomes, finally, a stage whereon the poem of the mind is enacted.

“The Rose,” which brings “North American Sequence” to its conclusion, embodies Roethke's most complete presentation of the mystical Way of Illumination. Like Dante, Yeats, and Eliot before him, Roethke places the rose at the summit of his vision, suggesting that he has at last attained that “imperishable quiet at the heart of form” wished for in “The Longing.” Three stages of illumination can be clearly discerned: awareness of the Absolute, heightened perception, awakening of the transcendental self. The poem opens with an emphasis on the physical place where this illumination happens; the poet says:

Here the eternal and temporal realms intersect, and a whelm of images follows—a Whitmanesque catalogue of American birds. Special significance is allotted the kingfisher, whose wings flash in the sun (reminiscent of Hopkins's kingfishers catching fire). The meditator asks himself:

The succession of images increases the poet's awareness of the eternal presence, the Absolute.

The second section takes us back to the greenhouse and the rose symbol as the poet explores memory once again. Meditation always takes one into the past, as we have seen. Now, standing by the sea, the speaker sees a “rose in the seawind.” This rose stays in one place even as the wind blows over it: a still point of the turning world. This vision triggers the crucial memories of a childhood paradise. Roethke says:

So he asks the central question: “What need for heaven, then / With that man, and those roses?”
There
was his earthly paradise, where Otto was God. Nothing more was needed. Through the use of memory—memory brought to new life via meditation—the lost Eden of childhood is restored; the “paradise within” promised to Adam by the Archangel Michael is realized.

The third section of the poem, in the usual manner of the meditative genre, provides a series of concrete details for contemplation. The Michigan landscape is recalled, its birds, flora and fauna, its various weathers. And Whitman presides over these stanzas like an attendent spirit; the flexible, long lines echo the master throughout. The poet says: “Beautiful my desire, and the place of my desire.” He refuses to feel guilty about his desires; rather, he blesses their presence. This is a positive restatement of Blake's wonderful Proverb of Hell: “He who desires but acts not, breeds pestilence.”
¹⁵

The fourth and final section of the meditation brings the speaker back
into the present; the Pacific Northwest seacoast replaces the Midwest landscape. The Absolute, embodied in the mystical rose, which is a literal rose swaying in the sea-wind, reveals itself. The poet's self,
not
merging with the Absolute (which would entail the final stage of union), gives way to the transcendent self. The poet says:

This is ecstasy in its root sense of being “beside oneself.”

A summary image of the rose, “this rose in the seawind, / Rooted in stone, keeping the whole of light” completes the poem. We inevitably recall the final image of the
Four Quartets:

Both Roethke and Eliot attempt to “redeem the time,” to discover the timeless moment
in time
, for—as Blake says—“Eternity is in love with the productions of time.”
¹⁷
Roethke and Eliot rely on the same symbols: the kingfisher, the fire, and the rose; but Roethke eschews the Christian aspects of this symbolism. Whereas Eliot's symbols remain emblematic, Roethke's continually refer back to the literal level; his rose is a
rose for real
. Also, he does not share Eliot's concern for history; his personal history remains primary. Eliot, in this way, is anti-Romantic and consciously so.

As noted, Roethke's mysticism in general owes a great deal to Neo-Platonism, and his sea-rose bears close resemblance to the Plotinian One, the focus of all creation. Plotinus says:

By substituting the word “rose” for “The One” in the above passage, a fair paraphrase of the last part of Roethke's meditative poem would be accomplished. “The Rose” as a whole must be praised for its sureness of rhythm, its clarity, and its concision; it is Roethke's finest poem in this vein. Of course, we are expecting the poet to do the impossible here, to describe the ineffable. But given the intractable nature of his subject, Roethke manages to convey something of his personal ecstasy. “The poem speaks for itself,” says Staples, “and the skill with which all its elements are blended into one total impression of peace and harmony demands applause rather than explanation.”
¹⁹

The brief sequence of “Love Poems” which follows looks meager beside the “North American Sequence,” with its vast spaces and detailed imagery. Nonetheless, a few poems stand out for their wit and passion. “Light Listened,” for example, recalls the energetic word-play of “I Knew a Woman”:

Yet one could justifiably complain about most of the late love poems. Roethke often falls again into the trap of abstraction, forgetting the lessons of his apprenticeship. Now some of his verbal ploys have become mannerisms; for instance, “A green thing loves the green / And loves the living ground” in this poem echoes a number of similar lines in earlier poems. “Her Words,” “The Apparition,” “Her Reticence,” “Her Time,” and “Song” are uninteresting, mannered, and less vivid than their counterparts in
Words for the Wind
. But one lyric, “Wish for a Young Wife,” is of surpassing grace. Here Roethke identifies his beloved with a reptile, a creature of instinct. The age difference, which the title suggests, adds to the poignant sense of impending death highlighted by the last two lines:

The intensities of this poem—produced by the careful manipulations of vowel sounds and consonants, the breathless tone, the taut lyric structure, and the fierce emotion held in tight check—are all characteristic of Roethke in top form.

The same randomness from which the cycle of “Love Poems” suffers, especially by contrast with “North American Sequence,” also plagues the “Mixed Sequence.” The title, of course, prepares us for a miscellany, which is what we get. Familiar topics recur: the greenhouse, the father-florist, the need for a balancing feminine principle, the pure moment of mystical perception. Perhaps the most compelling of these poems is “The Abyss,” which returns to many techniques first used in
Praise to the End!
The poem's subject is, again, the mystic's progress through the various stages described by Underhill. It opens with the speaker in the middle of a spiritual crisis of an unspecified nature; Roethke employs the traditional symbol of the stairwell (found in mystical poems from those of St. John of the Cross to Eliot):

This idea, the ever-presence of non-being, has been encountered before. But the abyss normally hides behind the bright objects that dazzle and mislead us into thinking everything is well. The first section ends with the wind slowing—the calm alerting us to an approaching storm.

As he encounters “that anguish of concreteness” again, the poet calls out:

He takes the caterpillar (a variant of his ubiquitous worm) for his chief symbol of mortality: “For I have moved closer to death, lived with death.” He dissociates himself from the eagle or kingfisher of “North American Sequence,” preferring now to consort with “a mole winding through earth” or a “night-fishing otter.” He courts the dark side of the universe, believing that self-affirmation demands a confrontation with non-being. This is the stage Underhill often calls Purgation, which involves a “deliberate recourse to painful experiences and difficult tasks.”
²⁰
The effort recalls the lost son's earlier descents into infernal regions of the unconscious mind.

The third section shows the poet in temporary withdrawal from the objects for which he hungered previously. Echoing Eliot, he says, “Too much reality can be a dazzle, a surfeit.” And he returns for imagery to the greenhouse, remembering an open door “in a florist's storeroom” and the subsequent “rush of smells.” He laments the “terrible violence of creation” which, like Blake, he identifies with the fall of man. But he goes on to argue that meditation can restore the calm and clarity of pure consciousness; he approaches the Oriental concept of the empty mind, the mind “linked back” to its source, which is the ultimate goal of yoga and religion in general (
re-ligio
). This illumination, however, is temporary, and the world of objects invades once again.