Theodore Roethke (17 page)
The fourth section describes a certain relief from sexual and spiritual anxiety. It recounts what seems to be a kind of rebirth, the goal of all puberty rites. And it parallels that section of “The Lost Son” entitled “The Return.” Here one finds “The long alleys of strings and stem” which give the poem its title. The boy experiences a lyric moment, another partial illumination or epiphany:
Light airs! Light airs! A pierce of angels!
The leaves, the leaves become me!
The tendrils have me!
The reunion with the physical universe, with nature, has the traditional Romantic effect of amelioration. The frenzy of sexual and spiritual alienation seen earlier in the poem is relieved by contact with the material world.
And, in the fifth and final section, the poem's antagonisms are nearly resolved:
Bricks flake before my face. Master of water, that's trees away.
Reach me a peach, fondling, the hills are there.
Nuts are money: wherefore and what else?
Send down a rush of air, O torrential,
Make the sea flash in the dust.
Call off the dogs, my paws are gone.
This wind brings many fish;
The lakes will be happy:
Give me my hands:
I'll take the fire.
Read outside of the context of Roethke's developing symbolism, this “conclusion” would seem incoherent. But for the hero of
The Lost Son
, this is a crucial moment of self-awareness. The importunate ghost of Father Fear remains “trees away.” And the adolescent has accepted his sexuality as a natural part of life (“Reach me a peach, fondling ⦔). The false equation of sexuality with materialism is replaced with a fresh valuation of sex: “Nuts are money.” The protagonist asks for wind and rain, although his urges are still self-directed and autoerotic at the end: “I'll take the fire.” The resolution, again, is partial, but progress has been made. The hero is not running away from his desires, which is a start in the right direction.
Again, Kenneth Burke's private comments to Roethke in a letter of 12 August 1946 are worth noting:
Delighted to hear from you. And many thanks indeed for the poem (“The Long Alley”), which I have copied for my subsequent ponderings.
It is very lovely. Or rather, becomes so, up out of the convincingly and newly expressed depression. The great girlies-posies-fishlets amalgam in part 4 goes over very well.
But it does take many readings, before things begin to emerge as satisfactorily as one cries for. (The general tenor, I think, is clear enough at firstâand perhaps that is enough for meeting the minimum requirements of communication.) I wish I had a chance to ask you about details. (Incidentally, some comments you made, in an earlier letter, about a progression in one of your hothouse poems, suggested a lot to me. So don't hesitate to say something about the
ars poetica
whenever it occurs to you. After all, you are more up on your ways than anyone else can beâand one can easily miss, or fail to evaluate properly, something that seems obvious to you.)
Above all, I'd like to ask you something about the structure. At first, noting that it was a five-stanza poem, I began trying to build it about part 3 as fulcrum (looking for the same kind of form I
thought I saw in the Keats Ode). But later, I decided rather that One and Three are in order, and Two and Four in another order. I.e., I would consider Two as antiphonal to One, Four as antiphonal to Three, and Three developing the motive of Two. Whereupon, Five would be the resolution of the two orders (a kind of “irresolute resolution”?).
I call Five an “irresolute resolution” because, although things seem to be clearing up, with the poet getting ready for the next time, the new fire must be taken in the
hands
, it thus being a not wholly communicative fire, but somewhat self-involved still. Would you agree? To review the whole series of summarizing lines, however, is to see that such a quality must be retained even at the last, if only for purposes of consistency. (By the summarizing lines, I mean: “My gates are all caves â¦Return the gaze of the pond â¦I'm happy with my paws â¦The tendrils have me â¦I'll take the fire.” Indeed I wonder whether it might not be a good idea, for editorial purposes, and for pointing a direction in a way not alien to the quality of the poem itself, if you used these lines as titles for the five stanzas, instead of merely using numbers.)
My only complaints are:
“Slowly turning, / Slowly” seems spoiled by the second “slowly.” Similarly, I begrudge the repetition of “remember” in the next stanza.
Where you establish a tonality so thoroughly as you do, such purely mechanical repetitions seem bothersome to me. In another kind of poetry, where they were more necessary, I don't think I'd object to them.
I'd be happier (slightly) if “Can you name it? I can't name it” had just the second half.
As the author of a book on the grammar of who, what, when, where, how, I object to your one moment of weakness where you fall into my territory, in the line, “Wherefore and what else.” I can't see that it conveys anything at all. And suspect that you put it there simply because you wanted to use up some time, so that the line would be the same length as its compatriots.
As for the beginning of that same line, “Nuts are money,” it suggests wayward notions to me, alien to the quality of your poem. I once knew a guy who said the same thing, but he meant it in a Petronius sort of way.
Incidentally, as regards the ultimate equational recipe in your work, the “nuts are money” formula (taken seriously, not in the
above suggested burlesque) has started me on a line of speculations I am still vague about. In your Phase One, you had money and water in antithetical relation (or, at least, so I tentatively thought). But in this last stanza of Phase Two, where fires would be asked to burn under water, the aqueous tree-harvest becomes equated with mazuma. You got me to thinking about starting some new bookkeeping at that point. Any advice, that can assist me in my system of psychic accountancy, would be appreciated.
However, in sum total, let me once again congratulate you on the poem as a whole. It sounds very appealing indeed. And you are certainly working out an interesting language, which I do want to try to learn well enough to be able to find my way about town.
19
Burke is as perceptive and sympathetic as ever. His technical comments testify to his acute understanding of the poetic process, of poetic structure. His hearty endorsement of Roethke's first radical experiment with the language itself could only have been reassuring, for Roethke has pressed language to the boundaries here, as he continues to do in the rest of the sequence. “The Long Alley” demands a close attention to the mythic structure and a willing suspension of linear logic. The poet has inventedâas did Joyce before him in
Finnegans Wake
âa language of his own and a private symbology which is internally consistent, yet unintelligible out of the context of Roethke's mythos. As W. K. Wimsatt said: “Poetic structure is always a fusion of ideas with material, a statement in which the solidity of symbol and the sensory verbal qualities are somehow not washed out by the abstraction.”
20
“A Field of Light” follows directly upon “The Long Alley” and perpetuates the stage of illumination represented by “I'll take the fire.” There is a brief, initial regressive note, however. The poem opens with the hero's coming to a stagnant lake where moss and leaves float on the surface of the water, where strange eyes peer upwards from the bottom. This is the third poem in a series to begin with a phase of indecision and brooding near water. In this odd state of mind, the poet “Reached for a grape / And the leaves changed; / A stone's shape / Became a clam” (
CP
, p. 62). The hero proceeds to the usual question-answer phase, recalling the Job story again: “Angel within me, I asked, / Did I every curse the sun? / Speak and abide.” The answer, as ever, lies in an embracing of the physical world: “Alone, I kissed the skin of a stone; / Marrow-soft, danced in the sand.” As Emerson says: “In the presence of nature, a wild delight runs through the man, in spite of real sorrows. Nature says,âhe is my creature, and maugre all his impertinent griefs, he shall be glad
with me.”
21
This leads to what Emerson called “exhilaration,” the transcendental oneness with the natural worldâcorrespondenceâa condition of sympathetic intercourse between a man and his environment. This condition of ecstatic vision finds wonderful expression in the last lines of Roethke's poem:
My heart lifted up with the great grasses;
The weeds believed me, and the nesting birds.
There were clouds making a rout of shapes crossing a windbreak of cedars,
And a bee shaking drops from a rain-soaked honeysuckle.
The worms were delighted as wrens.
And I walked, I walked through the light air;
I moved with the morning.
The moment of illumination comes, notably, in the field of light. The image goes well beyond the fifth section of “The Lost Son,” that “in-between time” when the sun travels near the sky's rim. The frozen field has been transformed into a landscape buzzing with life: weeds, nesting birds, bees, flowers, worms, and wrens populate the scene. The paradisiacal state of childhood, as seen in the earlier poem “The Waking,” is reinhabited. The union of the hero with his surroundings recalls the prelapsarian condition of the child, who has not yet grown
out
of harmony. A child is still close enough to his point of entry into the material world (birth) to apprehend the eternal in the temporal. But the adult has to fight to regain this apprehension. Significantly, Roethke copied De Quincey's famous statement into his notebooks not long before he wrote the “Lost Son” poems: “The infant is one with God and one with everything in our universe through the medium of loveâ¦. The adult mind must regain this vision, this secure unity.”
22
This recapturing of a lost condition was called “radical innocence” by Yeats. Or, as Emerson put the same idea, “Infancy is the perpetual Messiah, which comes into the arms of fallen men, and pleads with them to return to paradise.”
23
“The Shape of the Fire” completes the sequence up to 1948. Making a sharp turn away from the illumination of “A Field of Light,” the hero tunnels inward, attempts one further regression. This five-part poem repeats what is by now a familiar pattern: dark places into light, chaos into order, regression to progression. The first two sections are full of infantile images. The hero is wrapped in the watery drowse of a womb, but this womb is no place of rest; from the moment of conception, not just birth, life is a struggle with desires which must be either satisfied or repressed. The most basic urge, hunger, preoccupies the speaker, who asks:
What's this? A dish for fat lips.
Who says? A nameless stranger.
Is he a bird or a tree? Not everyone can tell.
(
CP
, p.
64
)
Already, the interior dialectic of question and answer begins. The voice in the above passage cannot distinguish between food and mother. Sullivan, who reads the whole poem as “an attempt to convey the crisis of mental breakdown,” argues that the first line above and a later one, “My meat eats me,” refer to “the self-cannibalism of psychic distress in which the interior self feels consumed and suffocated by the alien body.”
24
Perhaps; but more important, the poem re-enacts a kind of birth. Here is the prenatal state described in symbolist terms:
Water recedes to the crying of spiders.
An old scow bumps over black rocks.
A cracked pod calls.
In “The Vegetal Radicalism,” Burke reports a student of Roethke's noting that the line “An old scow bumps over black rocks” echoed the heartbeat of the mother “as the foetus might hear it dully, while asleep in the amniotic fluids.”
25
Since Burke's essay was published well within Roethke's lifetime, and the poet never had anything but praise for the article, there is no reason to doubt this interpretation. And certainly the next stanza is the voice of a prenatal child: “Mother me out of here.” Then “Shale loosens” and the birth takes place. Finally, “A low mouth laps water” and “The arbor is cooler.” The infant bids farewell to the womb state, and “The warm comes without sound.”
In the second section Roethke uses the nursery rhyme once more to suggest a particular stage of development. The imagery of the cradle prevails, and the doctor (or father) comes to poke the child, who observes, in the haze of inchoate consciousness:
Time for the flat-headed man. I recognize that listener,
Him with the platitudes and rubber doughnuts,
Melting at the knees, a varicose horror.
But the child remains little more than a beast who
Must pull off clothes
To jerk like a frog
On belly and nose
From the sucking bog.
The amphibious associations of “frog” and “bog” point to a very low stage of phylogenetic development. One could believe that the hero has
again regressed, entered the womb where, during the gestation period of the foetus, ontogony recapitulates phylogeny. Yet the third section of the poem is the fulcrum on which the whole poem turns:
The wasp waits.
The edge cannot eat the center.
The grape glistens.
The path tells little to the serpent.
An eye comes out of the wave.
The journey from flesh is longest.
A rose sways least.
The redeemer comes a dark way.
Here we see the influence of Burke again, who thought of proverbs and aphorisms as the core of all poetry. There are no literal connectives between the proverbs in the stanza above, so we are left to our own resources. The wasp, representing alien aspects of the natural world, is in temporary abeyance. But the edge cannot eat the center, which seems a good thing. This cryptic line may well refer to the mother who cannot destroy what is inside of her, or it may mean that the body cannot destroy the heart. Certainly the glistening grape is a symbol of ripeness, of the attractive side of the physical and sensual world. The path, similar to the Way of Truth in Taoism or Christ's “I am the way, the truth and the life,” does not control the serpent. One recalls the Satan
of Paradise Lost
, whose protean shape permitted him to enter Eden in various guises. The journey from flesh to spirit is clearly a long and harrowing one, and redemption, seen in the rose image and in the redeemer who comes a dark and mysterious way, seems far away. The eye in the wave, perhaps, is the artist's vision of order in the midst of chaos, the still point of the turning world, a type of the rose which sways least of all. The dark way, the return to the womb, offers a glimpse of the eternal. Far from being merely a tangle of contradictory phrases, Roethke's litany of aphorisms moves
from
fear
to
the possibility of redemption, not in a linear way, but in the associational dream logic that we gradually learn to follow as the “Lost Son” poems unfold.