It was Matthew Arnold who called Emerson the friend and the aider of anyone who would live in the spirit, and Roethke is the latest major American poet to benefit from this help.
Emerson adapted from Coleridge the idea that the “ruin or the blank, that we see when we look at nature, is in our own eye. The axis of vision is not coincident with the axis of things, and so they appear not transparent but opaque.”
21
Poetic vision, then, becomes the coincidental alignment of one's personal axis with that of nature's. It is seeing into the heart of things. This liberates the poet from his dependence on culture, for the source of real knowledge is within him already. In this ideal state of transparency, the inner and outer realms come together. Everything in nature remains itself, a separate thing, but a luminous symbol as well, an analogue to the interior paradise. Roethke took over Emerson's so-called doctrine of correspondences entirely, in one late poem announcing his experience of “A steady storm of correspondences!” (
CP
, p. 239). According to this doctrine, every landscape becomes, in effect, a moralized landscape. Because the ruin is in his own eye, the poet reads into
nature his spiritual condition, or better, he discovers the appropriate symbol in nature, whether it suggests joy or desolation.
Roethke liked to count himself “one of the happy poets” though his poems often move through purgatorial stages, sometimes willfully, as he acknowledges in “The Long Waters”:
And I acknowledge my foolishness with God,
My desire for the peaks, the black ravines, the rolling mists
Changing with every twist of wind,
The unsinging fields where no lungs breathe,
Where light is stone.
I return where fire has been,
To the charred edge of the sea
Where the yellowish prongs of grass poke through the blackened ash,
And the bunched logs peel in the afternoon sunlightâ¦.
(
CP
, p. 196)
This desire for the peaks and ravines is typically Romantic; as in Wordsworth, Roethke's periods of disintegration were a necessary part of the soul's progress from paradise lost to paradise restored. This involves a play of polarities such as one finds in Blake, Wordsworth, and Whitman, not a systematic dialectic of any kind, but as a critic has said of Wordsworth: “[one finds in him] a very strong habit of thinking in terms of paired opposites or contrarieties. Everywhere in nature, in individual man and in society, [he] saw a constant interplay of opposing forces.”
22
It is the image of the journey that controls this dialectic of opposites in
The Prelude
, which Abrams calls “Wordsworth's account of unity achieved, lost and regained.”
23
Like Dante's traveler who found himself lost, but to wonderful advantage in the end, Wordsworth undertook his fearful journey aided by the spirit of Coleridge, to whom the entire poem is addressed, and a number of guides who are analogous to Dante's Virgil or Beatrice:
                       A Traveller I am,
And all my Tale is of myself; even so,
So be it, if the pure in heart delight
To follow me; and Thou, O honor'd Friend!
Who in my thoughts art ever at my side,
Uphold as heretofore, my fainting steps.
24
Roethke called on similar spiritual aid in “The Abyss”:
Be with me, Whitman, maker of catalogues:
For the world invades me again,
And once more the tongues begin babbling.
And the terrible hunger for objects quails me:
The sill trembles.
(
CP
, p. 220)
In this moment of spiritual crisis, he demands a native guide, but one thoroughly apprised of the Romantic contrarieties: “I am not the poet of goodness only,” said Whitman in
Song of Myself
“I do not decline to be the poet of wickedness also.”
25
“The Lost Son” poem itself describes the loss and partial restoration of unity, and the sequence of poems that follows traces the regressive journey of the poet-protagonist from adolescence back to the womb, into the perfect state of bliss that precedes the fall into creation. After
The Waking
(1953) Roethke begins “the long journey out of the self” (
CP
, p. 193) which takes him through the antithetical quest of his Yeatsean period into the Whitmanesque last poems of
The Far Field
. The details of this journey, archetypal in poetry, are the subject of this study.
In
Natural Supernaturalism
(a phrase adapted from Carlyle) Abrams reflects: “Life is the premise and paradigm for what is most innovative and distinctive in Romantic thinkers. Hence their vitalism: the celebration of that which lives, moves, and evolves by an internal energy, over whatever is lifeless, inert, and unchanging.”
26
Roethke, like no other poet since Whitman, made the subject of his poetry the celebration of everything that moves with organic life, including the self in its dynamic interplay with the natural world. Nothing that lives can be less than amazing, as Whitman declared:
I believe a leaf of grass is no less than the journey-work of the stars,
And the pismire is equally perfect, and the egg of the wren,
And the tree-toad is a chef-d'oeuvre for the highest,
And the running blackberry would adorn the parlors of heaven,
And the narrowest hinge in my hand puts to scorn all machinery,
And the cow crunching with depress'd head surpasses any statue,
And a mouse is miracle enough to stagger sextillions of infidels.
Throughout
Song of Myself the
single leaf of grass is taken for the symbol of organic life, that which is most amazing in all creation: “A child said
What is the grass?
fetching it to me with full hands; / How could I answer the child? I do not know what it is any more than he.”
27
He does not know exactly, but he thinks of it as the type of everything that flourishes and dies. This is the great Romantic metaphor and the source of that final optimism we attach to Blake, Wordsworth, Emerson, Whitman, and Roethke.
Whitman's acceptance of reality, his celebration of each separate fact, whether good or evil, coincides with his master's; Emerson wrote in his last chapter of
Nature
:
“To the wise, therefore, a fact is true poetry, and the most beautiful of fables. These wonders are brought to our own door. You also are a man. Man and woman, and their social life, poverty, labor, sleep, fear, fortune, are known to you. Learn that none of these things is superficial, but that each phenomenon hath its roots in the faculties and affections of the mind.”
28
Because the ruin or blank in nature is in our own eye, we must re-establish our line of vision, our axis of real sight, with the natural world. It is a question of aligning the essentially identical structures of subjective and objective realms (mind and nature). Mcintosh points to a passage in Schelling behind this:
So long as I am
identical
with nature, I understand my own life; I realize how this general life of nature reveals itself in the most various forms, in step-by-step developments, in gradual approaches to freedom. But as soon as I separate myself (and with me the whole ideal realm) from nature, nothing remains for me but a dead object and I cease to understand how a
life outside
me is possible.
29
The fear behind this, of course, is the loss of contact with anything outside the individual mind, solipsistic withdrawal and detachment. So one must actively seek to contact nature; according to Emerson, to realize the correspondences; to make the natural world an extension of one's body; to connect the private self with the infinitely greater self which is transcendent.
This was Roethke's effort from his middle years to the end of his life:
To have the whole air!â
The light, the full sun
Coming down on the flowerheads,
The tendrils turning slowly,
A slow snail-lifting, liquescent;
To be by the rose
Rising slowly out of its bed,
Still as a child in its first loneliness;
To see cyclamen veins become clearer in early sunlight,
And mist lifting out of the brown cat-tails;
To stare into the after-light, the glitter left on the lake's surface,
When the sun has fallen behind a wooded island;
To follow the drops sliding from a lifted oar,
Held up, while the rower breathes, and the small boat drifts quietly shoreward;
To know that light falls and fills, often without our knowing,
As an opaque vase fills to the brim from a quick pouring,
Fills and trembles at the edge yet does not flow over,
Still holding and feeding the stem of the contained flower.
(
CP
, p. 67)
This epiphany, summarized by the last two imagesâthe rower in equipoise, gliding, and the transient flower in its vase, filled to brimmingâis directly in the Emersonian line of vision. Contact with nature has been established, and the poet has found his identity
in relation to
nature, not outside of it.
Once the self gathers enough stability to engage nature in vital conflict, the transcendental journey out of the self begins. Roethke accomplished this selfhood in the
Praise to the End!
poems and the wonderful love elegies of his middle period (“Words for the Wind” and “Four for Sir John Davies” especially). His last volume comprises that “long journey out of the self,” for in this book,
The Far Field
, Roethke's transcendental glimmerings find ultimate expression:
Near this rose, in this grove of sun-parched, wind-warped madronas,
Among the half-dead trees, I came upon the true ease of myself,
As if another man appeared out of the depths of my being,
And I stood outside myself,
Beyond becoming and perishing,
A something wholly other,
As if I swayed out on the wildest wave alive,
And yet was still.
(
CP
, p. 205)
Here he continues the Emersonian program taken up in various ways by poets like Jones Very, Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman, Robert Frost, E. E. Cummings, and Hart Crane. (Even Stevens and Eliot were fevered with self-transcendence in their own, highly original ways.) Roethke, who was able to assimilate the most divergent influences, must finally be seen as the central American Romantic poet of the generation that includes Robert Lowell, John Berryman, Karl Shapiro, Richard Eberhart, and John Crowe Ransom. He is the celebrant of a uniquely American nature, a Romantic descended from Blake, Wordsworth, and Yeats, but one whose language is idiomatically American and whose meaning derives from the Emersonian tradition.
More so than many of his contemporaries, Roethke's poetry seems divided into periods marked by radical changes of style; but there are no real shifts of intention. Roethke's original symbol cluster remains the
same. The few themes he took for his own at the beginning are never deserted, though they undergo constant revision or elaboration. The dream world Roethke imaged has a unity that reveals itself gradually as the work unfolds in time, centered on an autobiographical myth reflecting a deep Romantic bias. If we judge Roethke harshly, we must judge the tradition of Emersonian Romanticism in the same terms. Indeed, any argument for Roethke's greatness impels us to see him whole
and
in the context of this visionary line that, far from exhausting itself, continues as the lifeblood of contemporary poetry in America.
CHAPTER TWO THE POET AS APPRENTICE
I am that final thing
,
A man learning to sing
.
Roethke, “The Dying Man”
In a late essay, Roethke referred to his own poetic apprenticeship:
The poet's fidelity, as Stanley J. Kunitz has said, is to the poem. In my own case, many pieces are completed without asking for or accepting comment, but I have received valuable criticism, from time to time, from people ranging from practicing poets and editors to semi-literates who profess to hate poetry. The writer who maintains that he works without regard for the opinion of others is either a jackass or a pathological liar. (
SP
, p. 35)
The fact is, few poets of Roethke's stature have been so open-minded about criticism, so willing to play the role of apprentice, so indefatigable in the quest for mastery over the details of their craft. To the end of his life he sought out those whose advice might prove useful; this was one aspect of his greatness. It is also true that Roethke had a long way to go before he could write as well as he ultimately did.
Roethke first began writing seriously as a graduate student at Harvard in 1930, and from the beginning his poems could be called autobiographical, although his treatment of this material was indirect, tentative, even self-deceived. One extract from his earliest existing notebook points to the problem:
He remembered his youth, his childhood. But most of all, he remembered his childhood. Somehow this stood out more strongly than anything. There was something very fine in the suffering young boy. He had led a hideous life, but everything was natural there. His courage at the time was a fine, moral courage. Physically, he had been afraid of everything: of dogs, of thunder. Now he was afraid of the very idea of life. Sometimes he almost hated to be alive.
1
Characteristically, he always speaks of himself in the third person when referring to something close to the bone, like his childhood. And the earliest poems cast nervous glances at the matters that really concerned himâthe relations with his father, his struggle for egoâbut there is no confrontation. It is one thing for a poet to recollect the pastâthis is easy; but the
re-creation
of the past which occurs in the mature poetry meant reliving the experience, and this could not have been easy.