SOURCE: "Poetic Empathy: Theodore Roethke's Conception of Woman in the Love Poems," in South Atlantic Review, Vol. 56, No. 1, January, 1991, pp. 61-78.

[In the following essay, Floyd-Wilson examines Roethke's representation of women in his poetry, noting Roethke's idealization of the female persona and attempt to transcend self by portraying women as the dual embodiment of the universal and particular.]

In a poetic universe teeming with greenhouse life and distinctly lacking in human beings, Theodore Roethke's two series of "love poems" have a conspicuous presence in a complete collection of his work. While an "utter assent to other people, other lives … marks the best poetry" of his contemporaries, Roethke concentrates on the lower rungs of the evolutionary ladder. His early verse focuses on the "I," and in a self-described "journey out of the self" the poet explores primordial memories, subhuman life and a child's perception of the world. Stephen Spender describes the development of Roethke's work as a movement "from the child's absorption in the physical nature around him, to confrontation with the polarity of people and things outside—women, the woman!—and at the end the separation of spirit from body, the confrontation of death." Roethke emerges from Praise to the End!'s (1951) "interior life of childhood" to discover "woman" as lover for the first time in the 1958 volume Words for the Wind. Loving another person becomes a process of self-awakening for a man who heretofore rarely stepped out of his own consciousness, and found his comfort and identity in "[t]he gradual embrace / Of lichen around stones." To case the awkwardness and fear inherent in this self-expansion, the poet feels "most drawn to the woman of the Love Poems when she is least human, most animal." "She" is woman in the absolute sense—a general, almost mythic figure.

Although written before the love poems, Kenneth Burke's essay "The Vegetal Radicalism of Theodore Roethke" sets the tone for the critical debate concerning Roethke's portrayal of women. Burke notes that even Roethke's early verse courts an absolute woman and that it lacks what he terms "personalization." According to Burke, Roethke confronts and individualizes human relations successfully in his poem "Elegy for Jane," but fails to "personalize" in most of his other verse. While several critics have debated over the influence of Burke's criticism on the love poems of Words for the Wind, it is my contention that the neglected love poems of The Far Field show a more overt achievement of personalization.

Roethke's female in these first love poems may be a "creature of spiritual and mythological proportions" who helps him achieve "harmony with the cosmos," but she is not "affirmed as herself" or a "person in her own right." The second series of love poems, contained in the posthumous The Far Field has received little critical attention compared to its predecessors. Although overshadowed by "The North American Sequence" and "Sequence, Sometimes Metaphysical" in the same volume, these thirteen poems "have a simplicity … openness," and "personal quality not often found" in Roethke's verse. Although Roethke did not arrange these love poems, six of them do imply an intended series: he dons the mask of a young female, creating a series which Coburn Freer calls "meditations of a young woman." In the only full-length essay devoted exclusively to Roethke's love poems, Freer asks, rhetorically, "Why should this mask have appealed to Roethke at this particular stage of his development?" In answer to Freer's question, I believe that Roethke needed to enter the female's consciousness, much in the way he did in "Meditations of an Old Woman," in order to personalize her. Not only does assuming the female voice provide "the needed focus for a more personal love lyric," it gives Roethke a sense of a woman individualized. Once he reassumes his own voice, he depicts her objectively as a whole other person in a manner that reveals an "inward blessedness" and a "plain tenderness" lacking in his first love poems.

Theodore Roethke's idealization of "woman" originates from a guileless wonder rather than an inculcated web of traditions and symbols. Unlike many other poets, Roethke's main poetic interaction with a female occurs in a few isolated works relatively late in his career. In contrast, Roethke's "toughest mentor," William Carlos Williams, wrestles with the "ineluctable mystery of Woman" incessantly; Williams's idealization of women stems from a conscious obsession "to find out about them all." By insisting that "[a]ll women are not Helen, / I know that, / but have Helen in their hearts" ("Asphodel"), Williams implies that the tradition of a feminine ideal haunts him as a modern poet. Roethke, on the other hand, only responds to the enigma of woman, or any person for that matter, "when a specific human relation touch[es] him and he grasp[s] it." By comparing him to Williams, one discovers an elemental simplicity in Roethke's experience with women. While Williams builds upon the complexity of culturally emphasized sexual differences, Roethke finds poetic power through regression. He derives inspiration from a "realm of pure impulsiveness" that predates "motives" and the significance of difference, freeing his responses of "all arrière-pensée, all ulterior purpose." His "discovery" of woman moves him toward a recognition of a self differentiated from the world. Although Williams's poetry may, in fact, travel along a parallel track, moving from the abstract "muses of Patterson to a celebration of his wife and marriage in 'Asphodel'," his interest in women often takes the impersonal and highly developed form of "fascinating experimentation." The sensations of individual human love overwhelm Roethke, and in a defensive effort not to "drown in fire," he writes his first love poems for "a woman with an empty face." The final love poems, therefore, mark a personal achievement in emotional maturity and wholeness in terms of Roethke's approach to the female. While in Words for the Wind Roethke's love poems explore the self, portraying woman as an abstraction, in The Far Field the poet recognizes woman as another "I," equal, actual, and particularized.

As Randall Stiffler and other critics note, the "major source of conflict" in the love poems of Words for the Wind "is in the lover himself, and love for him is a dynamic emotional continuum." The conflict concerns a desire for the woman, love's power of "self-discovery," and a fear of the possible "self-annihilation" inherent in both physical and spiritual intimacy. Beginning with a dream of woman and the delights of love, the poems move through ambivalence, desire, fear and rage, exploring the opposing allurements of spiritual and physical fulfillment. Coburn Freer interprets the poems through the Prodigal Son parable: "[T]he person who is loved [the poet] must bear the entire burden of being forgiven and receiving," and to avoid this "psychic burden, the beloved, the Prodigal, has an almost obsessive desire to retain his own identity." In order to maintain his own identity in the face of love, the speaker alternately idealizes and belittles the woman, never recognizing her as an equal. He views her and love as invading impurities that will destroy his sense of self, without acknowledging the woman as an individual with her own selfhood.

Roethke meets his beloved in "The Dream" from Words for the Wind, and slates that "Love is not love until love's vulnerable," revealing both comprehension and fear of the paradoxes of his newly found passion. Throughout me sequence he portrays the woman as powerful, unknowable—sometimes encompassing eternity and sometimes, nothingness, depending on the stability of his own identity. In "Words for the Wind" he calls her a "substance" and a "[c]reaturely creature," depicting her as almost subhuman. According to Stiffler, by "making her less human and more animal, Roethke's desire for her grows. He assimilates her to the intimacies of his Greenhouse worldview, and he can therefore more easily approach her." In "All the Earth, All the Air" she is as "easy as a beast," and in "Words for the Wind," "[s]he frolicks like a beast." By portraying her as a lower "creature" Roethke places distance between himself and the woman; he achieves the same goal by raising her to the status of goddess and worshiping her from afar. In "I Knew A Woman" the poet plays the adoring suitor to a woman whose movements mesmerize and dazzle him. He nibbles meekly "from her proffered hand," and follows behind her "for her pretty sake." She teaches him the joys of touch, taking the superior role, and he admits (with tongue in cheek perhaps), "I'm martyr to a motion not my own." In "The Dream," she magically turns "the field into a glittering sea," which he plays in "like a boy." As the sequence progresses, "She wakes the ends of life," and "knows all" that the poet is. By portraying himself as a "fond and foolish man," and the woman as both bestial and divine, the poet establishes an unequal relationship wherein he claims to "see and suffer" himself "[i]n another being, at last."

Seeing and suffering himself in another being leads to a sense of expansiveness for the speaker. In his essay "On 'Identity'" Roethke speaks of breaking from "self-involvement, from I to Otherwise" and of becoming aware of another being in order to bring on "mysteriously, in some instances, a feeling of the oneness of the universe." Throughout the love poems, Roethke's love for the woman has an element of universality. Since she represents both change and eternity to the poet, his union with her symbolizes his movement from the "I" to the "Otherwise." "All things bring [him] to love," and all things—the rose, the oyster, the star, and the leaf—"[a]re part of what she is." He finds "her every place," and feels "her presence in the common day." In "The Sententious Man," he even tastes his sister when he kisses his wife. She is a "shape of change," and in her presence he "start[s] to leave [himself]." For me woman to act as the agent by which the poet achieves this sense of interconnection, she must necessarily remain both aloof and indefinite in character.

As the sequence progresses, Roethke characterizes the woman in more negative terms, illustrating his growing fear of her effect on his consciousness. In the poem appropriately entitled "The Other," he implies than his identity has become too entangled in the woman. "What is she, while I live?" he asks, complaining that he feels "plague[d]" by "her Shape." His desperation grows as he wonders, "Is she what I become? / Is this my final Face?" "The Pure Fury"'s speaker finds himself on the edge of psychic disintegration, and he blames his "darling" for his despair and mental instability. In the first stanza he recalls another "fearful night" when "every meaning had grown meaningless," yet he had found unity and restoration in the morning through the minimal world: "I touched the stones, and they had my own skin," he says. In the second stanza he asserts that the "pure" live alone, implying that the relationship contaminates him and engenders his mental degradation. The speaker's "fear of losing his self in the woman leads him very near a state of derangement." He explains that he loves "a woman with an empty face" and when she "tries to think," nothingness "flies loose again." He scorns the philosophers who theorize on nothingness, since he actually lives "near the abyss," and is keenly aware that the "self can be … annihilated." When his "darling squeaks in pure Plato," she seems to represent the very nothingness he dreads. The third stanza equates "the need for solitude" with an "appetite for life," a need which ironically intensifies his despair to a state of "pure fury." In the final stanza he explicitly blames the "she" for his near loss of self: "Dream of a woman, and a dream of death," he exclaims, and then asks "When will that creature give me back my breath?" Far from being personalized, the woman in this poem seems as mysterious and ominous as death.

The poet admits that his fear actually stems from "those shadows" that "start from [his] own feet," and love of a woman intensifies the vulnerability and unsteadiness of his own identity. In "Love's Progress" he ends the poem, "I fear for my own joy; / I fear myself in the field, / For I would drown in fire." The poet fears the expansiveness and unity that love entails and that the woman represents. As Coburn Freer notes, "No problems have been solved" in the sequence. Not only does the woman remain vague and dehumanized, the poet senses a loss in his own identity. In "The Renewal" he seeks a reintegration of self: "I know I love, yet know not where I am; / I paw the dark, the shifting midnight air. / Will the self, lost, be found again? In form?" Without mentioning the woman, he claims a moment of "[i]llumination" that leads him to love and expansiveness, ("I find that love, and I am everywhere"). Love, and not the woman, becomes the focus for the poet. In the concluding poem "Memory," the speaker says the woman "knows all I am," but that "[l]ove's all. Love's all I know." Since Roethke treats love as a search for his own identity, and conceives of the woman as almost psychologically parasitic, the "she" fails to materialize as a human being equal to the poet in this sequence of poems. While Roethke has incorporated "other people" in his poetry with this first series of love poems, in my opinion he has yet to individualize relations in the manner Burke suggests.

In his earlier poem "Elegy for Jane," Roethke proves that he has the ability to utilize his intimacy with the natural world while individualizing human relations. In contrast to the situation of the love poems, the dramatic situation of an elegy poses little threat to the poet's identity. The girl's young age and her lifelessness increase her approachability for the poet. The final lines of the poem explain that he has "no rights in this matter, / Neither father nor lover," and this lack of a relationship provides the necessary objectivity for Roethke to express tenderness for a particularized female:

     If only I could nudge you from this sleep,
     My maimed darling, my skittery pigeon.
     Over this damp grave I speak the words of my love….

In contrast to the woman of the love poems, Jane is no longer a "shape of change." Not only does Roethke give specific physical details of the girl ("the neckcurls, limp and damp as tendrils; / … a sidelong pickerel smile," but he also acknowledges her proper name, a concrete label that helps to distinguish the specific from the general. He compares Jane to a wren, a fern, and a pigeon, characterizing the "light syllables" of her talk, her "spiny shadow," and the absence of her "skittery" movements respectively. Unlike those in the love poems, these nature metaphors accentuate Jane's human qualities rather than overwhelm them.

The poet's relationship to Jane is an inherently unequal one of teacher to student, which gives him some connection to her while maintaining a safe distance between them. Although Roethke despairs over the ambiguity of his connection to the girl, her distance allows him to keep his own identity intact. The last two stanzas emphasize his ability to confront human relations; through his use of the second person, a technique practically absent from the first sequence of love poems, Roethke breaks from self-involvement, moving "from I to … Thee" ("On 'Identity'"), and successfully individualizes Jane. While Roethke achieves "personalization" in this poem, Jane's non-threatening (and unequal) state, and his vague relationship to her help separate this elegy from the love poems. The Roethke who has rights in the matter as a lover fails to particularize the woman of Words for the Wind in this manner.

"Meditations of an Old Woman" concludes the volume Words for the Wind, and Freer conjectures that Roethke chooses this feminine mask "to imply that the demands of the lover can only be handled through this perspective." The poem stands as Roethke's first extended use of a female persona, and employing the mask appears to be a step in the poet's progression towards confronting woman (and his fears of love) through poetic empathy. As in "Elegy for Jane," Roethke again creates a dramatic situation in which the female poses little threat to the male's psyche. Not only is the old woman incapable of making "sensual gifts to and demands of a man," Roethke bases the character on his deceased mother, dissociating her from the woman of the love poems. Nevertheless, it seems possible that entering the consciousness of a female brings Roethke closer to recognizing his lover as a person in her own right. Roethke may, in fact, have had Burke's notion of personalization in mind when he composed "Meditations of an Old Woman." While critics have acknowledged the possible effect of Burke's criticism on the first love poems, the influence of "personalization" on "Meditations of an Old Woman" and the second series of love poems has received little attention. In a 1952 epistolary response to Burke's essay, Roethke, referring to the poem "Old Lady's Winter Words," asks the critic to "take a look at the current Kenyon. There's apiece (by me) that may bear out your prophecy: about a person…." It seems significant that this poem stands as the only predecessor to "Meditations of an Old Woman" spoken from the perspective of an elderly female.

The adoption of a female persona makes "Meditations of an Old Woman" a transitional piece between the two series of love poems. Although Roethke protects his own identity by creating a non-threatening character, he does have the old woman ask, "What is it to be a woman?" The question confronts the very perceptions of woman that Roethke perpetuates in the love poems. In "I Knew a Woman," the speaker characterizes the female as a "bright container." The old woman of the "Meditations" asks if being a woman means "To be contained, to be a vessel?", seemingly referring to the woman as merely a sexual recipient or a bearer of children, and asking if these aspects of the female make up her whole self. As a living female well past her fertile years, the old woman knows that her "being" has a "flame" and a spirit beyond the utilitarian connotations of a "container."

Fascinated by the movement of the mind, Roethke creates for himself an accessible persona in the old woman in terms of her wisdom and intellectual approach to life. In contrast to the woman of the love poems, who has bestial traits and often seems indistinguishable from the natural elements, Roethke dons a female mask whose articulate, intelligent, and defined presence overshadows any exclusively "feminine" qualities that might intimidate a male by their sheer foreignness. In describing the old woman, Roethke says, "she's tough, she's brave, she's aware of life and she would take a congeries of eels over a hassle of bishops any day." In other words, Roethke empathizes with and admires a woman who can say, "I was always one for being alone, / Seeking in my own way, eternal purpose." She relishes both her solitude and her search. In "Meditations of an Old Woman," Roethke creates a female within himself, yet he deemphasizes the aspects of woman which most frighten him. Dissimilar to the female figure in the love poems, the old woman confesses that she has "become a strange piece of flesh," indicating a disconnected condition of mind and body. Even her youthful memories seem confined to the "[f]lesh-awkward" adolescent years when one's physicality seems to have a life of its own. Underplaying the physical and augmenting the intellectual spirit allows Roethke to form and enter a relatively permeable female consciousness.

Donoghue notes that the "answers come too easily" to Roethke in "Meditations of an Old Woman." In his estimation, Roethke assumes a serene wisdom and stability, or an "autumnal calm" without "really earning it." In my assessment, the true autumnal calm comes in Roethke's posthumous volume, The Far Field. Rosemary Sullivan appraises The Far Field as a "book of reconciliation and atonement, of final statements on themes that have preoccupied [Roethke] from the beginning—themes of love, [and] identity…." Biographer Alan Seager observes that at this time Roethke's mind and poetry seem "to have forgiven everyone everything, demolished its hatreds, and solved all its discords." The mature Roethke sounds less angry when he concludes in "Journey to the Interior" that "[t]he spirit of wrath becomes the spirit of blessing," in contrast to his earlier lament, "Where's my eternity / Of inward blessedness? / I lack plain tenderness." The love poems of The Far Field reveal a more generous spirit and emotional maturity than their predecessors. Not only does he adopt the persona of a young girl, he achieves a level of "personalization" equal to that attained in "Elegy for Jane." In the poem just preceding the love sequence, Roethke writes,

      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….

This passage describes a successful journey out of the self—of moving from the "I to Otherwise." In his late poems, Roethke discovers that not only can the lost self be found again, but it can also become less fragile by moving away from self-absorption.

Experiencing the "true ease" of his self gives Roethke the stability to don the mask of a woman who resembles the female of Words for the Wind in terms of age and vitality. In six love poems from The Far Field, Roethke charts the young girl's own journey out of the self, confronting through the persona female experiences that mirror his past struggles with love. By creating the persona of a young girl, Roethke enters the "consciousness of woman, an 'I' different … from the center of consciousness of the earlier love poems…. In the process the poet's separate identity is not lost, but put aside." Roethke's ability to "put aside" his own identity illustrates his progression. As the final love poems indicate, Roethke's sense of self has strengthened to the point that he can move beyond the "I", and individualize his relations with his female lover.

"The Young Girl" begins the sequence and establishes that her spiritual journey has begun. "What can the spirit believe?," she asks, echoing her poetic ancestor of "Meditations of an Old Woman," who exclaims, "The soul knows not what to believe." The young girl, on "coming to love" seeks an understanding of her own identity that encompasses the body and the spirit:

     What can the spirit believe?—
     It takes in the whole body;
     I, on coming to love,
     Make that my study.

She recognizes that the spirit "takes in the whole body," and she plans to "study" the relationship between the two. In the second stanza, she skips on the shore with such a sense of newness that she seems almost to have just emerged from the sea—the source of all beginnings. Her eyes wander without focusing and her thin arms move without purpose, emphasizing her unformed state and lack of direction:

     We are one, and yet we are more,
     I am told by those who know,—
     At times content to be two.
     Today I skipped on the shore,
     My eyes neither here nor there,
     My thin arms to and fro,
     A bird my body,
     My bird-blood ready.

Intuitively (perhaps through the power of innocence) she has a sense of her body and soul in harmony. Malkoff notes that the bird is a "symbol of soul in Roethke—and blood—symbol of body—," thus "bird-blood" connotes this unity. The girl admits that she has been "told by those who know" that "[w]e are one, and yet we are more," recalling the speaker of the earlier love poems—"Each one's himself, yet each one's everyone." As Roethke repeatedly asserts, feeling this "oneness of the universe" ("On 'Identity'") remains inextricably linked to the journey out of the self. Paradoxically, the process of discovering one's identity can bring on the fear of self-annihilation. The young girl implicitly acknowledges this fear when she observes that we are "[a]t times content to be two," confessing that a state of separateness may ensure a more peaceful existence. Nevertheless, the young girl is "ready" to embark on the trip "from self-involvement, from I to Otherwise" ("On 'Identity'").

In "Her Words," the second poem in the sequence, Roethke removes the mask momentarily and refers to the young girl in the third person. The poem describes an encounter between the girl and "her true love," and hints at the complexity of loving while attempting to retain one's identity. By comparing the girl to a cat, Roethke draws upon the distinction made in "Meditations of an Old Woman" between the "self-involved" women and those who feel "the soul's authentic hunger." The young girl of "Her Words" believes she can "'delight in a lover's praise, / Yet keep to [herself her] own mind….'" This separation of the soul from one's actions resembles the behavior of those selfish "cat-like immaculate creatures" the old woman describes. But "Her Words" concludes with a "'storm, the storm of a kiss,'" indicating that the power of the lovers' union may overwhelm the young girl beyond her anticipation. As the other poems in the sequence reveal, the young girl does experience the "soul's authentic hunger" despite her efforts to keep her "own mind."

The immediately following poems, "The Apparition" and "Her Reticence," seem to parallel Words for the Wind's "The Pure Fury" in terms of the speakers' fears of psychic disintegration. The title "The Apparition" could apply to the "soft-footed one / Who passed by"—(her lover)—or to the girl, sans heart, sans soul. She wonders if she should grieve or mourn in reaction to both her lover's disappearance and the death of her own identity. In "Her Reticence," the girl wishes to send her beloved an unconnected part of herself:

     If I could send him only
     One sleeve with my hand in it,
     Disembodied, unbloody,
     For him to kiss or caress.

Her imagination seeks a way to give something to her lover, yet protect the self. In "The Pure Fury" the poet asks "When will that creature give me back my breath?" and, similarly, in "Her Reticence" the young girl fears losing her "whole heart" and "soul" to her lover. She feels vulnerable, physically and spiritually, and dreads the consequences of revealing her growing dependence on him.

The next poem, "Her Longing," illustrates the transformation that the self undergoes when it needs another being. Sustaining a correspondence to Roethke's own struggle for identity, the poem relies heavily on the world of smaller creatures to describe the renewal of the young girl's ego:

      Before this longing,
      I lived serene as a fish,
      At one with the plants in the pond,
      The mare's tail, the floating frogbit,
      Among my eight-legged friends,
      Open like a pool, a lesser parsnip,
      Like a leech, looping myself along,
      A bug-eyed edible one,
      A mouth like a stickleback,—
      A thing quiescent!

Before she had yearned for another, the young girl had "lived serene as a fish" without a sense of identity or a need for self-definition. Her existence within the minima) world had been one of part to whole—the "tail" of a mare, a "frogbit," and the parasitic "leech." The second half of the poem describes her conversion to a bird that "the sea itself cannot contain," and metaphorically the change mimics natural evolution. Her longing engenders a power and vitality within that sends her soaring with "the gar-eagle, the great-winged condor." The poem climaxes with her metamorphosis into a phoenix, the ultimate symbol of rebirth. Not only does the young girl escape the soulless existence of the "self-involved" criticized by the old woman, but also as a "phoenix" she "flame[s] into being" through her desire for another. By beating her wings "against the black clouds of the storm," the girl proves herself willing to confront the darkest aspects of "[p]erpetually rising out of" herself. She moves away from the serenity of solitude to embrace the tumultuous but spiritually revelatory "other."

"Her Time," the last poem in the sequence, attempts to describe (to the extent that language can) an epiphanic instant that stands outside of time. In a flash of understanding, the young girl conceives of herself as simultaneously unified with and disconnected from the external world. The poem flows in a continuous sentence, yet Roethke strives to pinpoint the revelatory instant with recurrent time qualifications of "when" and "before":

     When all
     My waterfall
     Fancies sway away
     From me, in the sea's silence;
     In the time
     When the tide moves
     Neither forward nor back,
     And the small waves
     Begin rising whitely,
     And the quick winds
     Flick over the close whitecaps,
     And two scoters fly low,
     Their four wings beating together,
     And my salt-laden hair
     Flies away from my face
     Before the almost invisible
     Spray, and the small shapes
     Of light on the far
     Cliff disappear in a last
     Glint of the sun, before
     The long surf of the storm booms
     Down on the near shore,
     When everything—birds, men, dogs—
     Runs to cover:
     I'm one to follow,
     To follow.
 
(emphases added)

When the girl's "[f]ancies sway away" and when the "tide moves / Neither forward nor back," she seems a part of the natural elements. Her mind moves with the water. The vast range of her vision makes her exact location indeterminable. Although she is only "near shore," she feels the spray of water. She seems closest to the "two scoters" flying low. In the same moment that she appears indistinguishable from the external world, she realizes her separateness and individuality. She emphasizes her individuality by making it clear that she follows "everything"; after the "birds, men, dogs … [run] to cover," then she is "one to follow." The repetition of "follow" gives significance to the fact that she is momentarily alone and the very last to seek shelter. Conversely, her following stresses her connectedness to others. She must remove herself from the elements and join the others before the "storm booms / Down on the near shore." The girl has learned first-hand of her concurrent state of dependence and independence. In the process of loving another being, she has come to understand that "[w]e are one, and yet we are more,… [a]t times content to be two."

In this sequence of poems, the young girl experiences a journey out of the self and a process of self-definition akin to Roethke's own. By adopting a female persona Roethke creates a woman with an inner life—a consciousness—and in doing so, his lover becomes personalized. Seager mentions that Roethke wrote these poems out of concern for his wife, Beatrice. Although referring to the landscape poems of The Far Field, Seager makes an important observation pertaining to a change in Roethke towards his wife in these last years: "[H]e had ceased to regard Beatrice as an acquisition whose beauty would enhance his reputation every time he appeared with her…. [H]e came to see what she meant to him as a woman, how great his dependence on her was … and he began to love her … with a true love." This biographical information helps mark the distinction between the love poems of Words for the Wind and those of The Far Field. By assuming the mask, Roethke recognizes his lover as a fellow human being who seeks and suffers in a life analogous to his own.

The remaining love poems "comprise a very mixed bag." Two lyrics, "Light Listened" and "His Foreboding," recall the Words for the Wind series in terms of their approach to love. "Light Listened" echoes "All the Earth, All the Air" and "I Knew a Woman," two of the more celebratory love poems of their sequence. The woman appears in touch with the elements, and as the last line has it, "Light listened when she sang." She moves and changes "with changing light," and nothing "could be more nice / Than her ways with a man." "His Foreboding" presents a darker side of love, stressing the speaker's dependence on the woman as an "incommensurate dread / Of being, being away / From one comely head." In this line, the poet equates the dread of "being" with "being away" from his beloved, a correspondence that encompasses the paradoxes of living and living. For the speaker, being alone means returning to "nothingness," and the "loneliest thing" he knows is his "own mind at play."

The lyric "Song" demonstrates the progression of Roethke's approach to love since Words for the Wind. His "wrath" and "rage" have faded with time. In the first stanza, the speaker sees "wrath" as the "edge" or sharpness of his thoughts that he had "carried so long / When so young." The second stanza questions a future that lacks one's self-protecting rage: "Will the heart eat the heart? / What's to come? What's to come?" Roethke's reconciliation to his dependence on his beloved shows itself in the last stanza. In contrast to the earlier love poems, the poet speaks directly to his lover, and asks her for the answers; while in Words for the Wind, he mocks his lover who "squeaks in pure Plato" and has "an empty face," The Far Field's speaker acknowledges the value of the woman's inner self by seeking her wisdom. Freer notes that "the woman has the transcendent knowledge that the poet lacks, and also has the knowledge of the present and its possibility of fertile regeneration." The poem shows that the speaker still has doubts concerning his own strength of mind, but he also has the courage to confront his loved one on an equal level.

"Her Wrath," "The Shy Man," and "The Happy Three" have no counterparts in Words for the Wind. They approach love in a lighter manner, and each contains examples of personalization. "The Happy Three" depicts a domestic quarrel humorously. His "darling wife" nags and frowns in a typically human fashion. The poet leaves the house in irritation "[t]o drink some half-and-half / On the back lawn" in the company of their pet goose, Marianne, "[n]amed for the poetess." By reporting a dialogue and providing domestic details, Roethke creates a slice-of-life poem that personalizes the characters involved. Although he describes a scene of discord, he does it comically, and admits that his "banked-up vertigo / Vanished like April snow; / All rage was gone." The final lines celebrate the lovers' reconciliation, as he, his wife, and Marianne romp "out again, / Out again, / Out again, / Three in the sun."

"Her Wrath" also characterizes anger through humor. Not only does the poem recognize the woman's emotions (a circumstance completely absent from Words for the Wind), but it also names the poet's lover—"Beatrice." While Roethke does compare his Beatrice to Dante's idealized Beatrice, she remains many steps removed from the earlier "absolute woman." In "The Shy Man," Roethke calls his lover O'Connell's daughter," O'Connell being Beatrice's maiden name. While the poem may be a "mannered imitation of Irish song," it illustrates Roethke's improved ability to confront human relations in a traditional manner. "'I am not alone,'" he says, "'For here close beside me is O'Connell's daughter.'" Roethke particularizes his loved one, and acknowledges in simple terms the support she provides.

"Wish for a Young Wife" makes an appropriate conclusion to Roethke's last sequence of love poems. It stands as the only love lyric that reaches the level of personalization of "Elegy for Jane," yet surpasses the elegy in emotional maturity:

     My lizard, my lively writher,
     May your limbs never wither,
     May the eyes in your face
     Survive the green ice
     Of envy's mean gaze;
     May you live out your life
     Without hate, without grief,
     And your hair ever blaze,
     In the sun, in the sun,
     When I am undone,
     When I am no one.

In this poem, Roethke speaks directly to his wife, recognizing their age difference and offering a tender prayer for her future. With unmatched generosity, Roethke wishes her eternal youth and happiness, understanding that he will someday be "no one." Roethke's hope for his wife's prolonged existence in the face of the inevitable dissolution of his own identity reflects an unprecedented sense of emotional security and spiritual wholeness. In contrast to the "The Pure Fury" in which Roethke blames woman for the death of self, "Wish for a Young Wife" celebrates the woman's life while the poet accepts his own mortality. In wishing that her "hair ever blaze, / In the sun, in the sun," Roethke echoes the climax of "Meditations of an Old Woman," in which the speaker equates "The sun! The sun!" with "all we can become!" Not only does Roethke successfully confront human relations and realize a particularized female, but he also wishes her the joys of "becoming" even after he is "undone."

The whole of Roethke's work charts his progress as a spiritual man, as well as his development as a human being. His poems record the painful process of maturation, of breaking from "self-involvement," and seeking the relationship between the self and the not-self. Loving his wife increases the complications of his struggle for identity. In Words for the Wind, intimacy with a woman poses a threat to the poet's psyche, causing him to dehumanize the female out of self-preservation. Personalizing and objectifying another person, or recognizing the other's reality as equal to his own becomes an important step in Roethke's journey out of the self. By personalizing Jane and donning the mask of the old woman, Roethke makes significant advances towards the "inward blessedness" of The Far Field. The young-girl sequence expands Roethke's poetic empathy for his beloved. As a final word, "Wish for a Young Wife" shows an unselfish Roethke who in the face of his own extinction exults in the vitality of an individualized woman.