Theodore Roethke (8 page)

This scarcely goes beyond Georgian poetry, but the high level of technical sophistication should be noticed. “Slow Season” goes on to picture the deadening effect of late autumn on everything in nature, including the poet himself. Again, the Emersonian correspondence between internal and external spheres is drawn:

Robert Lowell has separated American poetry into two categories: the raw and the cooked. “Slow Season,” by this standard, is very well done. Roethke reworked these poems meticulously, usually improving them in the process. An early typescript of “Slow Season,” for instance, ends with these three lines:

The facile phrase “are litter in the lane” has been changed to the more suggestive “obscure the narrow lane.” The dull verb “moves” in the next line has been replaced by the more accurate “slows.” And the banal and nearly illogical line—“Our vernal wisdom has grown ripe and sere”—is transformed in the final draft to allow for a sense of process crucial to the poem's effect.

The influence of Imagist poetry was still strong in the thirties, and Roethke's nature poems abound in hard, clear images that would have pleased Pound and Amy Lowell. In this mode “The Heron” is a successful poem which follows a tedious descriptive poem called “The Coming of the Cold.” It conjures the image of a heron standing on one leg in a pool of black water until

“The Bat” ends the section with an ominous note, forcing a connection between the bat and the human animal in the last, sharp couplet: “For something is amiss or out of place / When mice with wings can wear a human face” (
CP
, p. 16).
This signals
a
change in mood, and one enters the third
section with considerable disquiet.

The third section defines the self by the
via negativa
, the way of negation; but at this stage Roethke has yet to explore the harrowing negative way of his later, mystical poems of
The Far Field
. The specter of death haunts the poet in these poems, as in “No Bird”:

Here Roethke evokes Emily Dickinson specifically, that death-haunted poet whose presence in
Open House
has been documented by La Belle.
⁶
The phrase “the forest of the dead” is lifted unabashedly from Dickinson's “Our journey has advanced” and shows Roethke's acceptance once more of Eliot's famous dictum: “Bad poets imitate; good poets steal.”

Roethke never gives in to complete morbidness; rather, he celebrates the “narrow vegetable realm” that overwhelms mankind, as in the beautiful “Long Live the Weeds,” which takes its title from Hopkins:

One could be ungenerous and point out that Hopkins's line is by a long shot the best in the poem, but this would detract from the real energy of Roethke's vision, which meets the Hopkins image head-on and assimilates it. The poem ends by defining the self in terms of the following unattractive alternatives: “Hope, love, create, or drink and die: / These shape the creature that is I.” The naiveté and abstractness of this conclusion, and the embarrassing contortion of normal syntax for the sake of a rhyme, are further evidence that Roethke matured slowly as an artist. He painfully acquired his skill.

“Epidermal Macabre” is more successful, examining the classic flesh-spirit dichotomy in a witty manner. Roethke begins with a proleptic assertion: “Indelicate is he who loathes / The aspect of his fleshy clothes”; yet this merely prepares the way for his later revelation:

The oxymoronic last phrase, coupled with the word play on the root
came
—the Latin word for flesh—demonstrates a growing sophistication on Roethke's part. Rosemary Sullivan notices that the poem imitates the form of Louise Bogan's “The Alchemist”—but there is nothing new about writing in regular tetrameter couplets. She concludes that “the younger poet's technique is not entirely adequate to the rigid structure.”
⁷
But the brilliant last phrase—“carnal ghost”—allows the poet to have his cake and eat it too. As A. O. Lovejoy points out in his great study of Romantic epistemology,
The Reason, the Understanding, and Time:
“The reasoning characteristic of ordinary thought and natural science depends upon the setting up of sharp contrasts between things, upon propounding dilemmas and formulating irreconcilable oppositions. … Its entire thinking, in short, is based upon the logical principle of contradiction. But the higher insight of the Reason transcends these oppositions. It is all for embracing both sides of all questions.”
⁸

The last poem in this section strikes a more soundly autobiographical note than its predecessor. “On the Road to Woodlawn” refers to the graveyard in Saginaw where Otto was buried, the opening setting, in fact, for Roethke's major poem “The Lost Son.” This brief lyric sketches a small town funeral, recalling the horse drawn procession of baroque hearses and the carriages smelling of perfume and varnish. Yet the poem lacks vitality; it has none of the terrible immediacy of Roethke's later poems about death, such as “Elegy for Jane,” his most famous poem. The remoteness of “On the Road to Woodlawn” and of most of the poems in
Open House
can be attributed to Roethke's early inability to face those aspects of life most painful to him, the taproots of his later poetry. Even in his private journals, he cannot refer to himself directly and uses the third person, as in this entry from July 1934: “His life seemed always subject to a very few major influences. It was a small heaven—with very few stars: mother, and sister, and Stanley Kunitz, and drinking and Conrad Aiken and music. Sometimes mother vanished out of sight.”
⁹

Not until a decade later could he really confront his problems without evasions. In the forties, a sense of self-destructive guilt soaks through his most casual jottings as a few examples from the notebooks indicate:

These are all confessions of a guilt that plagued Roethke from adolescence, but which he was late to acknowledge. The restricted forms of
Open House
, the limited scope of his diction—all based on the models he was imitating—provided no verbal outlet for his anxieties. He needed a more expansive form to deal with his needs, to feed his imagination to a white flame. When he found his
métier
in the “Lost Son” poems, the creative act became, for him, a kind of therapy, an incantation by which the poet sought to liberate himself from “the menace of ancestral eyes” (
CP
, p. 4).

The fourth and fifth sections of
Open House
reflect the immediate influence of W. H. Auden and are largely boring. Roethke would later become a tolerably good satirical poet, but the supposedly cutting poems here, like “My Dim-Wit Cousin,” are a poor excuse for poetry. The poems of social protest in the last section, full of wearisome abstractions, posturing, and cliché (“Ballad of the Clairvoyant Widow” is the worst) remind us that Roethke never possessed Auden's capacity for manipulating ideas in poetry. And he knew this himself, as his notebooks show: “I like to think a thing part way through and feel the rest of the way…. Conceptual thinking is like believing in God—one wants to put it off as long as possible.”
¹¹
This Romantic prejudice against conceptual thought has been discussed already, but here we can find one of the problems with
Open House
. Roethke was an intuitive poet who had not yet learned to trust his intuitions. His gradual drift toward mysticism, which culminates in
The Far Field
, parallels his withdrawal from abstract modes of thought. He understood this by 1944, when he wrote in his notebooks: “Mysticism has the desirability of requiring no sustained thinking; instead, a constancy of belief and the capacity for intuitive leaps.”
¹²

But Roethke's enchantment with Auden continued throughout his life; he said in his notebooks in 1945: “Auden, for all his cleverness and posturing and thumb-turning episcopality, is one of the true sources of life.”
¹³
Auden, who was best man at Roethke's wedding, was one of his closest readers and critics; Auden's insistence on sheer technical virtuosity, characteristic of his own work, had a lasting influence on Roethke. One can find many traces of Auden in Roethke: the idealized landscapes, the photographic aspect of his imagery, the colloquial phrasing assimilated into formal settings. But these were Auden's gift to all poets writing in the thirties and forties. When Roethke comes too close to Auden, as in “Lull (
November, 1939
) “—the result is more like parody than creative imitation:

Premonitions of war are followed by a final groping toward abstract summary:

The poem reads like a very rough draft of Auden's famous “September 1, 1939.”

One final poem of real interest in the book is the last, “Night Journey.” Roethke used as tight a form as before, but the theme is so much his own that echoes of other poets disappear; the poem re-creates the experience of traveling by sleeper across America:

The clickety-clack trimeter suggests the rhythmical sway of the train. The poet's eye catches “Bridges of iron lace, / A suddenness of trees, / A
lap of mountain mist.” Here, Roethke, following Whitman, again fulfills Emerson's prophesy that America would not wait long for a literature to celebrate its riches. Roethke ends his poem and book: “I stay up half the night / To see the land I love.”

In a characteristically astute early review of
Open House
, Auden posed some crucial questions for Roethke: