Read Online Theodore Roethke by Jay Parini - Free Book Online Page B

Lost Son , in contrast to Open House , is not just a collection of poems; it is a book and must be read whole, in sequence. It tells a story, the backward journey of the poet through memory toward self-realization. It is a version of what Bloom calls the interior quest-romance.
    These poems represent a dramatic shift in style away from the formal lyrics of Open House . Roethke imposed no outward structure on them, allowing them to grow from within and seek their appropriate shapes. This is what “free verse” should mean: language exactly equivalent to reality, a skin pulled tautly over experience. It remains the easiest kind of poem to do badly and the most difficult to do well, because without formal restraints, the poet must have a perfect ear; he must never lose sight of his object for an instant. Roethke succeeds in this brilliantly. Each poem unfolds into what seems its one possible shape—like a plant, whose ultimate form is contained implicitly in the seed itself. Always the language of free verse has to be concrete. As Roethke observes: “The poet: perceives the thing in physical terms.” 3 A mimetic theory of language underlies this notion; the objective of poetic diction in these terms is to reflect, imitate, the physical image. To achieve this effect, Roethke had to summon reserves of technical virtuosity learned in his apprentice years. The first fruits are the greenhouse poems, of which Burke has said: “No matter how brief the poems are, they progress from stage to stage. Reading them, you have strongly the sense of entering at one place, winding through a series of internal developments, and coming out somewhere else.” 4
    The final thirteen (original) greenhouse poems in The Lost Son survived a winnowing process stretching from 1942 until their publication in 1948. Abandoned drafts of greenhouse-type poems scatter the notebooks from these years, and by browsing through them one learns about Roethke’s huge effort to be concrete, to “perceive the thing in physical terms.” Here is an early, uncollected poem called “Growth” (1943):
    Around us abundant examples flourish
    In the patience of sight, the response of seasons,
    Swelling of seed, algae persisting in snow,
    Soft snail-marrow jogging its acorn of shell;
    For growth is a tadpole kicking, a wave-like
    Weed-like motion of small beginning,
    No dolphin-change or leaping.
    Perhaps, further in time than solar calculation,
    Some sport of the spirit, a psychic mutation,
    Will unite pursuer with pursued, fish with otter,
    And instinct enter the lost realm of understanding. 5
    Sloppy and unfocused, the poem dissolves into hopeless abstraction in the last four lines. Yet there is promise in the line “Soft snail-marrow jogging its acorn of shell,” which combines concrete description with rhythms that suggest the primitive sense of unrestrainable life.
    â€œThe Snail” is an early unpublished version of a much later, considerably revised, poem called “A Light Breather” (1953). It was written, in the following draft, in 1944, anticipating in manner the greenhouse poems of The Lost Son . The poet avoids nearly all abstractions (the word “spirit” may be allowed for the conceit’s sake) and generates a mimetic rhythm:
    As a seed sings and beats like a fish
    In soil moist and soft,
    So moves the spirit
    Still and inward,—
    A snail:
    Taking and embracing its surroundings,
    Its house on its arched back,
    Its horn touching a stone,—
    A music in a hood,
    A small thing,
    Singing. 6
    Roethke had finally hit upon his own style; he had found a way of making his conceits physical and concrete. This poem was unsuitable, of course, for the greenhouse sequence, so Roethke tucked it away for later use. But he knew he had discovered a voice unlike anyone else’s.
    Roethke had learned how to whittle a poem to its bones. Here is a wordy early draft of a poem called