[In the following review, Rosenthal offers tempered criticism of Words for the Wind.]

Pick up one of Theodore Roethke's longer poems and you are confronted with a stunning mishmash of agonized gibber, described by the poet himself in an essay written some years ago as "the muck and welter, the dark, the dreck" of his verse. The same essay ("Open Letter," published in Ciardi's Mid-Century American Poets) asserts that he nevertheless counts himself "among the happy poets." And indeed, Roethke at his best throws all kinds of dissimilar effects into the great, ceaseless mixer of his sensibility, stirring together notes of driving misery and hysterical ecstasy, of Rabelaisian sensuality and warm, wet regressiveness:

     Believe me, knot of gristle, I bleed like a tree;
     I dream of nothing but boards;
     I could love a duck.
     Such music in a skin!
     A bird sings in the bush of your bones.
     Tufty, the water's loose.
     Bring me a finger….
                              ("Give Way, Ye Gates")

Some of the allusion here is a little too private. ("Tufty, the water's loose," for example, has all sorts of obvious physiological connotations but probably has something to do with Roethke's boyhood experiences helping out in his father's greenhouse. And it would take more than a feather to knock me over if I were suddenly to learn that "Tufty" was a family nickname for Theodore.) But the passage as a whole, which begins the poem, is a wildly bawdy outcry of desire, thinly and wittily veiled in euphemism.

Later in the poem all this exhilaration withers up and is replaced by language of frustration and suffering, and then of a sort of minimal self-consolation. The over-excitement of the first part, in which the pain of the need behind desire was muted or hidden in humor, is balanced off by a gross, almost infantile desolateness. The images now are of impotence and shame:

     Touch and arouse. Suck and sob.
     Curse and mourn.
     It's a cold scrape in a low place.
     The dead crow dries on a pole.
     Shapes in the shade
     Watch.

This projection without comment of opposed psychological states is characteristic of Roethke's most interesting work. A desperate exuberance that seems at one moment unrepressed joy of life, at the next the pathetic hilarity of the unbearably burdened, makes the manic-depressive mood-spectrum the law of life. Each opposite is implicit in the other, and that is the only necessary logic at work here. The universe of Roethke's poems is a completely subjective one—not what source of meaning the speaker has outside himself but how he feels within is the key to everything. The private sensibility is a mad microcosm; the speaker responds violently to everything that touches it; and he struggles frenetically to win through to a moment of calm realization in the sunlight of "wholeness." The ebullient anguish of poems like "My Papa's Waltz," "Child on Top of a Greenhouse," and "The Shape of the Fire" is a triumphant realization of the aesthetic of hypersensitivity. Consider the opening stanzas of "The Shape of the Fire."

     What's this? A dish for fat lips.
     Who says? A nameless stranger.
     Is he a bird or a tree? Not everyone can tell.

Water recedes to the crying of spiders. An old scow bumps over black rocks. A cracked pod calls.

     Mother me out of here. What more will the bones allow?
     Will the sea give the wind suck? A toad folds into a stone.
     These flowers are all fangs. Comfort me, fury….

The reader will come somewhere near the poet's intention, I think, if he imagines the speaker to be giving a voice to the fire and responding to it. It crackles and whispers—what is the secret of its voice? There is a horror in that devouring sound that considers the wood or coals (or anything else) "a dish for fat lips"; the second stanza gives further images for that dry, merciless sound and its terror—the receding of waters before the "crying of spiders" perhaps the most nightmarish of them. The third stanza shows the speaker overwhelmed with the sheer dread of mutability and annihilation that has been accumulated through all these impressions. The whole process is not so much conceptual as it is self-hypnotic. This is the shaping sensibility in operation, and in this sort of thing Roethke is brilliantly successful.

But it is not his only sort of thing, for in addition he often does try to conceptualize, and he tries to give his poems a further implication of victory over the frenzy through a Freudian rebirth of the Self. These efforts are not, by and large, very convincing. Thus, the last two movements of "The Shape of the Fire" are attempts to soar and transcend in the old sense—like the ending of "Lycidas": "To-morrow to fresh woods, and pastures new." But Milton had a vision of "the blest kingdoms meek of joy and love," and the mourner of his poem speaks to a completely different scale of values—that of the macrocosm ruled over by "the dear might of him that walk'd the waves." That is not the universe of Roethke's poems, and so his ending is contrived, though in its way lovely and delicate.

Something similar happens in "The Lost Son," whose title suggests the psychoanalytical, inward turning of the poet's eye. Roethke's essay "Open Letter" says of this poem that it is at first "a terrified running away—with alternate periods of hallucinatory waiting …; the protagonist so geared-up, so over-alive that he is hunting, like a primitive, for some animistic suggestion, some clue to existence from the subhuman." So be it—this panicky hunt for pre-intellectual sources of the sense of being truly alive is without doubt one of the real, if uneasy, enterprises of the modern mind. But the poet is not ruthless enough to carry the hunt through—any more than he was able to remain true to the realizations at the beginning of "The Shape of the Fire." He finds another clue to salvation, an easier one, than the frenzied beginning would imply was possible. It is the "lost son's" psychological re-entry into the world of his most vivid childhood memories—the world of the "long greenhouse" which he has called "my symbol for the whole of life, a womb, a heaven-on-earth."

Re-entry into this paradisal womb, one gathers, is the necessary preliminary for a rebirth of the Self. The true "coming-through" into mature, calm reconciliation has not yet occurred, but faith is expressed that it will do so—

     A lively understandable spirit
     Once entertained you.
     It will come again.

The promise is too pat and wishful—of a Freudian romance with a happy ending. As in most of Roethke's longer work, the dénouement does not live up to the poem's initial demands. Shorter poems like "The Return," "The Minimal," and "The Exorcism" are really better in the way they sustain a sometimes Dantean close-up of minutely detailed, realistic horror on the terms with which they began. I would add also the beautiful "The Visitant," the guilt-filled "The Song," the deeply sad and very original "Dolor," the dreamlike "Night Crow," and the sweatily, feverishly, embarrassedly alive greenhouse poems from Roethke's 1948 volume The Lost Son and Other Poems. Together with certain passages in the longer poems, such pieces constitute Roethke's more lasting achievements.