SOURCE: "Theodore Roethke: A Celebration," in Tulane Studies in English, Vol. 20, No. 0, 1972, pp. 169-80.

[In the following essay, Blessing examines technical devices employed by Roethke to evoke dynamic energy and movement, particularly as evident in his elegies.]

Theodore Roethke was ever one to appreciate the process by which complaint becomes celebration, by which a tirade turns to kissing. He would have understood, I hope, my beginning a celebration of his poetry with a complaint—another man's complaint—against it "We have," writes M. L. Rosenthal,

no other modern American poet of comparable reputation who has absorbed so little of the concerns of his age into his nerve-ends, in whom there is so little reference direct or remote to the incredible experiences of the age—unless the damaged psyche out of which he spoke be taken as its very embodiment. But that was not quite enough. The confessional mode, reduced to this kind of self-recharging, becomes self-echoing as well and uses itself up after the first wild orgies of feeling.

Rosenthal is no straw man, though I believe he is dead wrong here. There are, as always, straw men enough to be found. John Wain offers a comically conceived Soviet critic who denounces Roethke's failure to mention "the bread-lines, the war, the racial upheavals," and I might offer a student or two who would venture to say that Roethke is not "relevant." But Rosenthal is a good reader, and other good readers—some of them quite sympathetic to Roethke—have, in gentle ways, intimated that he does not give one "a sense of total participation in life," or that he is "almost untouched by public happenings or by history."

Nonetheless, I think it might be more accurate to say that few, if any, other modern American poets of comparable reputation have absorbed more wholly the concerns of our age into the nerve-ends, nor have more adequately represented in their art the incredible experiences of the age. If, as I believe, the essential experience of modern life is speed, movement, energy, whirl, a sense of unceasing and often violent motion, Roethke surely took it all into the nerve-endings, into the blood and pulse, into the rhythms of his giant body which became the rhythms of his poetry. "Live," he told his classes in verse writing, "out in your fingers." His fingers and their nerve-endings told him that his world was in motion, and he was wise enough to sense that the historical events that swirled around him were but varied forms of the same energy which drove him in his personal evolution as a man and an artist. In fact, I think the root metaphor in all of Roethke's work is the historical event, provided that one understands that any action with all of its context—its total sweep backward into the past and forward into the future—is an event in history. The teaching of a class, the death of a student, the journey out of the self, will serve as well to give a sense of the complexity and dynamism of life—of history—as will the battle of Gettysburg, the assassination of a president, a visit to China. The poet's task—and Roethke's genius—is to make his words become an event, to arrange them in such a way as to create in their reading the sweep and energy of the experience of our time.

Because Roethke was a teaching poet who labored lovingly to help his students discover the secrets of his craft and art, and because many of the notes from which he taught have been preserved, one may with some confidence theorize about what the poet tried to do in his poetry and how he went about doing it. Time and time again the jottings which became the classroom performance demonstrate the vocabulary of dynamism. The key words, repeated in varying forms and combinations, are "energy," "intensity," "speed," "flow." There are lists of devices for heightening intensity in a poem, for speeding the imagery, for creating energy in rhythm. There are aphorisms. "What is the most important element: energy." "Style: What is style but matter in motion?" "A poem means an extra, a surplus of energy." "The enemy of intensity: grandiloquence." There are questions, apparently from students, and hastily scribbled answers:

Q. What do you want in the way of a rhythm, Mr. R.?

A. It's the nervousness, the tension, I think I value most. Blake's bounding line and old Willie's high imperial honking.

Q. You speak of energy in rhythm. What are the factors that seem to enter into, or contribute to, this force?

A. They are so multiple that they constitute the whole art of writing; but I feel what comes to the aid are alliteration of initial sounds and a manipulation and a variation of interior sounds, (repetition of words) particularly vowels. The line—but the verbal forms particularly, particularly the "ing" participial form, impart, as would be expected, movement. This may be because I see the world in motion, but I don't think so. [Italics added.]

There is also the testimony of Roethke's former students, for he seems to have been unforgettable in the classroom. One of the best of his pupils, David Wagoner, has told me that he remembers Roethke's saying, perhaps quoting someone else, that in poetry "motion is equal to emotion." Another, Oliver Everette, writes that Roethke used to snarl, "You've got to have rhythm. If you want to dance naked in an open barndoor with a chalk stuck in your navel, I don't care! You've got to have rhythm. I don't care how you get it." He also remembers that Roethke stressed "motion in poetry," telling the class that "Motion or action should be found in every line. The poetic mind sees things in motion."

It seems to me that Roethke's problem as a classroom teacher was essentially the same problem with which he wrestled as a poet. Given that the poetic eye sees things in motion, given that energy is all, by what techniques does one transfer a sense of that motion and energy to the page or to another's ear? How does one "teach" energy? Not, I think, entirely by telling people to alliterate initial sounds and manipulate interior ones, though I do not wish to undervalue the importance of just such devices. A better clue, I believe, to Roethke's success as a teacher comes from the coed who once told him, "I don't understand a word you say, but I just watch your hands." Or from Richard Hugo, now a fine poet in his own right, who says that he learned at least as much from Roethke's actions—from the boundless energy, what Hugo calls the "overstance," of the teaching performance—as he did from Roethke's words. In Roethke's classroom, apparently, the medium was, to an unusual degree, the message. How do you teach a beat? You don't. But many a student seems to have been surprised to find his foot tapping in time to Roethke's bear-like professorial dance.

"Talent talks," Roethke wrote in one of his notebooks. "Genius does." And Roethke was more than talented. Therefore, the critic who concerns himself primarily with what one of Roethke's poems "talks about," with a paraphrase of the "thinky-think," as Roethke called it, has only a part—and not the best part—of the poem. In his great poems Roethke's "meaning"—never mind the ostensible subject—is always a celebration of the energetic dance of being. To meet his own standards for genius he had to create a revelation of that dance for his audience, and he had to do it by means of his words. In short, he had to make the experience, not talk about it.

As Roethke himself suggested, the devices by which all this is accomplished are "multiple," surely too multiple to be discussed adequately in an article-length study. Nevertheless, a critical thesis ought to be followed by "pages of illustrations," and I have rather arbitrarily decided to illustrate this one by examining the techniques which present dynamism in a few of Roethke's elegies. Energy, the thrust and surge of life, is perhaps most clearly revealed by contrast, most felt when its way is blocked by obstacles or when its motion and sweep are set off against the perfect stillness of death. It is not surprising, then, that Roethke is often at his best in the elegiac mode. "Elegy for Jane, My Student, Thrown by a Horse," "Frau Bauman, Frau Schmidt, and Frau Schwartze," and the little piece called simply "Elegy" in Words for the Wind are some of his more successful attempts to represent the rhythm and pace of life.

Roethke's elegies always celebrate those who have been most active, those in whom energy has been most intensely present. I suppose he was naturally drawn to such people, and he seems to have identified the energy expressed by their bodies, the speed with which they moved and acted, with the creative energy that he prized above everything. The trick is to re-create that energy with words so that the bodily rhythms of the dead move again and breathe again and are again for so long as the poem is remembered. If the trick is brought off, the poet has, in a way, triumphed over death by creating a symbolic and immortal equivalent to the energetic rhythms of the human body.

The first stanza of the "Elegy for Jane" comes close to achieving just such a triumph:

      I remember the neckcurls, limp and damp as tendrils;
      And her quick look, a sidelong pickerel smile;
      And how, once startled into talk, the light syllables
          leaped for her,
      And she balanced in the delight of her thought,
      A wren, happy, tail into the wind,
      Her song trembling the twigs and small branches.
      The shade sang with her;
      The leaves, their whispers turned to kissing;
      And the mold sang in the bleached valley under the rose.

The passage is a catalogue of memories expressed as images; it is a bombardment of the senses creating an experience greater than the sum of its parts, for the speed with which those parts are juxtaposed becomes an additional "meaning" given to the recollected portrait of the girl. Jane is a protean figure, evolving through shifting imagery from plant to fish to bird as Roethke's mind leaps from metaphorical association to association. She is clearly not idealized as a physical beauty. Few coeds would be pleased to have their neckcurls likened to tendrils and fewer still would appreciate having their quick sidelong glance bring to mind a "pickerel smile." It is not beauty, however, that Roethke is after here, but energy—the tendrils' thrust toward light, the violent rush of the pickerel. It is the sense of quickness, of startled leaping, of balancing, of motion so contagious that it causes all the world about to tremble in tune with the song Jane sings. There is much that appeals purely to the kinesthetic sense—a feeling of lightness and quickness, of rising and falling, of precarious balancing against the thrust of the wind.

There is an abundance of just that sort of "alliteration of initial sounds and manipulation of interior sounds" which Roethke suggested might contribute to the energy of a poetic rhythm. "Neckcurls" and "tendrils," "quick look" and "pickerel," "wren" and "wind," "startled" and "syllables," and "light" and "leaped" are among the more obvious examples of Roethke's continuous playing of sound against sound, of manipulation and variation of vowel and consonant. There is also the simple, almost primitive diction—a heavy preponderance of monosyllables, a careful avoidance of "grandiloquence." And there is, primarily in the choice and placement of verbs, the sense of the enormous activity of all things—of leaves that whisper and kiss, of mold and shade that sing.

The passage is primarily a hymn to the power of Jane's talking, to her ability to give the quickness of life to the "light syllables." She is the natural poet, her promise never to be fulfilled, and as such she serves as a kind of Edward King to Roethke's Milton. Just as Milton imaginatively gives King the power to move with his singing "The willows, and the hazel copses green," so Roethke imagines Jane's song to be answered by the shade and by the mold "in the bleached valleys under the rose." And, as in "Lycidas," the energy of the elegiac voice is the assurance that the power to make the light syllables leap is imperishable. Though he denies paternity, in one sense the poet is father to the Jane of the poem. His breath becomes the breath of her startled talking; his verbal energy becomes the rhythm to which her body sways.

One of Roethke's most effective devices for suggesting the flickering speed of life is that by which, as in a kind of double vision, he has Jane be both present and not present at the grave. "My sparrow, you are not here," he says, "Waiting like a fern, making a spiny shadow." The bird, the singer with tail into the wind, is not a creature to wait, to be still. Yet she is, at once, "My maimed darling," the Jane who goes to the earth, and "my skittery pigeon," the Jane whose bird-like energy endures in the memory and in the cadence of the poet.

Just as Jane is "not here" and very much "here," the poet is neither father nor lover and yet something of each. In many ways the poem is about a relationship with a student, a relationship which is fully disclosed by the word "love," a shocking four-letter word in this context. Neither the rights of love nor the rites of love allow for such a relationship. We honor the grief of fathers, sympathize with the grief of lovers, but there are no "rites" (surely the pun is deliberate) by which a male professor may speak the words of his love for his student Jane. Yet Roethke affirms and expresses his rights even as he denies that he has them. His role in the ceremonial mourning exists in motion of its own sort, flickering between the role of the father he was not and the role of the lover he was not, existing only in the nameless spaces gaping between those solid, respectable pillars in the house of grief.

"Frau Bauman, Frau Schmidt, and Frau Schwartze" manages to convey something of the same sense of an elusive, darting "reality," for the three ladies move so swiftly as to manage to be in two places at the same time, to be "Gone" and "still hover[ing]" simultaneously. The ladies, like Jane, have the power to transfer their energy creatively into the life around them, and it is that power which commends them to the memory and to the apotheosizing power of the imagination. The fraus are glimpsed through a flurry of active verbal forms—creaking, reaching, winding, straightening, tying, tucking, dipping up, sifting, sprinkling, shaking, standing, billowing, twinkling, flying, keeping, sewing, teasing, trellising, pinching, poking and plotting. Even nouns such as "Coils," "loops," "whorls," "nurses," "seed," "pipes" and others are potential verbs, suggesting that the names of greenhouse things are squirming with metaphorical action. The ladies are never still, for even when they stand astride the greenhouse pipes, their skirts billow and their hands twinkle "with wet." Their movement is always that of "picking up," and the movement of the poem, like the movement of the climbing roses, is upward from the earth toward the sun. So swiftly do the ladies scurry that the memory blurs fact into fiction, the historical ladies into the mythic. Flying "like witches," they become more and more enormous in their activity until at last they trellis the sun itself, giving support to that strange flower which is the life of our planet.

As the remembered ladies become apotheosized into mythic figures, Roethke imagines them to take on the fecund powers of earth mothers. They straddle the phallic pipes of the greenhouse, pipes belonging to Roethke's father, until their skirts billow "out wide like tents"—as if someone might live there. They have, we are told, the power to "lease out" the seed, to undo the lifeless "keeping" of the cold. And, finally, they give the poet himself a symbolic birth. Acting as midwives to themselves, they pick him up, pinch and poke him into shape, "Till I lay in their laps, laughing, / Weak as a whiffet." The ladies, trellisers of the sun, also trellis "the son," the boy fathered by the greenhouse owner.

Though the ladies are, as the first word of the poem insists, "Gone," they "still hover" in the air of the present. All of the verbs in the first stanza are, as one would expect in a remembrance, in the past tense. Nevertheless, Roethke refers to the fraus as "These nurses of nobody else" as if they were present, as if the memory had managed to recapture in part that which had been totally lost. And, of course, he says that "Now, when I'm alone and cold in my bed, / They still hover over me, / These ancient leathery crones…." The relationship between poet and crones is a highly dynamic one. On the one hand, the hovering mothers "still" have the power to give him life. He lies like a seed, cold and in his bed, and they breathe over him the breath of life, a snuff-laden blowing that lifts him from the keeping of the cold into a life that manifests itself in poetic blossoms. On the other hand, it is the poet who "keeps" the fraus alive, whose breath gives to the dead the power to move and be again. Their energy is entirely dependent upon his ability to intensify the language until their movement becomes tangible in empty air, becomes an event in the viscera of the reader. The poem itself takes its cadence from those German fraus, takes it and gives it back again.

As for the poet, he has, by the end of the poem, lost himself in two places at once. He is in his bed and the time is "Now," yet the crones who hover above him breathe "lightly over [him] in [his] first sleep," presumably that sleep from which one wakes at birth. They are the remembered gateway to the past, these witches capable of collapsing time so that the cold sleep of the adult is at one with the first sleep from which he wakened into life. They are the means by which Roethke demonstrates the sweep of the "Now" in which we always live; for through the fraus who were, through the fraus mythologized and through the fraus who remain as a felt presence, he has made a poetic representation of the living extension of the past into the ever-moving present.

The poem called "Elegy" is short enough to quote entirely:

     1
 
     Should every creature be as I have been,
     There would be reason for essential sin;
     I have myself an inner weight of woe
     That God himself can scarcely bear.
 
     2
 
     Each wills his death: I am convinced of that;
     You were too lonely for another fate.
     I have myself an inner weight of woe
     That Christ, securely bound, could bear.
 
     3
 
     Thus I; and should these reasons fly apart,
     I know myself, my seasons, and I KNOW.
     I have myself one crumbling skin to show;
     God could believe: I am here to fear.
 
     4
 
     What you survived I shall believe: the Heat,
     Scars, Tempests, Roods, the Motion of Man's
     Fate;
     I have myself and bear its weight of woe
     That God that God leans down His heart to hear.

"Elegy" is a poem that took several titles as Roethke worked it into its final shape. The piece was first called "Humility, Its Coarse Surprises Can," after the opening line, a line followed by "Undo the virtues of a carnal man." In that early form the poem was apparently intended as a tribute to an aunt, Julia Roethke. All of the pronouns referring to the dead person are feminine, and another draft, apparently of the same period, has as its subtitle "In Memoriam: Julia Roethke." Underneath her name Roethke had written and lightly crossed out "Dylan Thomas." In many drafts the poem is called "The Stumbling," and Roethke seems to have decided that it suited Thomas better than his aunt, after all. But in final form the poem is, wisely, I think, unassigned, and the neuter pronoun "you" replaces the limiting "he" or "she" which had referred to the dead person in the earlier versions. As it stands in The Collected Poems, "Elegy" celebrates the memory of everyman, all who have been begotten, born and died.

It is a difficult poem, one easily misread. I believe Karl Malkoff, for one, misreads it in his study of Roethke. According to Malkoff, "Guilt is precisely the theme of 'Elegy'…. Indeed, the universe as man knows it is defined by the passage of the seasons,… by the passing out of existence of all life. Once this dissolution has occurred, man can no longer atone for his guilt; his 'essential sin,' his condemnation, is fact forever." The poem does, indeed, open with an admission of heavy guilt, but such an admission demonstrates that sense of humility which may bring even a "carnal man" to salvation by the means of God's grace and with the help of His mercy. It is a poem, I think, that moves from near despair to comfort, from a weight of scarcely bearable woe to a weight that "God leans down His heart to hear."

The form of the poem supports this reading, for as Roethke manipulates his quatrains, they become highly dynamic, suggesting change and development rather than the static hopelessness of Malkoff's interpretation. "Elegy" has the soul of a villanelle; that is, the third and fourth lines of each quatrain act as refrain lines of a sort and give to the poem that satisfying effect of repetition that is the essential pleasure of, say, Thomas' "Do Not Go Gentle" or of Roelhke's own "The Waking." With Roethke, however, refrain lines are always similar, but rarely the same. He manipulates such lines so that the reader is arrested by their continuous alteration as much as by their repetition. The ear is set up for an echo that never quite arrives; instead, the ear is teased by words that move about, altering meaning and value in every stanza.

Stanza one is an admission of the narrator's worthlessness, his sinful condition. If all creatures are like himself, he speculates, then the idea of original sin is rational enough. Indeed, his own sinful nature and the woe of the world he inhabits may well seem to make irrational any doctrine which does not begin by acknowledging some "essential sin" as explanation for the fallen nature of the world. Pondering such a creation and his sinful place in it, the poet skirts dangerously near despair, believing that his weight of sin and woe is such that "God himself can scarcely bear." Nonetheless, God "can" bear that weight, and the basis for future hope is established.

In the second stanza, Christ, God become man, takes upon Himself "the weight of woe," and does so "securely bound," as if with both hands tied behind His back. There is a possible pun here, in that Christ, bound on the cross, is bound for Heaven, and thus "securely bound" in a way that precariously bound man is not. In any case, God the Father, the harsh judge who tolerates with difficulty the foolishness of man, has taken on His more merciful aspect, the aspect of the savior who offers Himself as a full, perfect and sufficient sacrifice for the sins of the world.

The third stanza marks a significant change in the attitude of the narrator, a change marked by a shift in rhyme scheme and the substitution of the word "fear" for the word "bear" that ended the first two stanzas. Essentially, the narrator turns from one kind of knowing to another, from the reasoned to the intuitive. He can bear his "inner weight of woe" because Christ could and did bear it; and should his carefully reasoned doctrine of essential sin fly apart, still he knows what he KNOWS. At the last, a man knows only what his experience tells him—and experience may tell him that he KNOWS some things beyond the need for "reasons." God could believe that the poet lives, is "here," for the purpose of being fearful. We do not ordinarily think of fear as a positive emotion, but in this case it seems to me that it is God Himself who is feared. And the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom, a further step in humility for the spiritual stumbler toward grace. God is feared because of the narrator's awareness of his own sinfulness and of the enormous strain of such a weight upon the mercy of God. He knows that he is a sinner in a crumbling skin and that Eternal Justice for such as he has been would be terrible indeed.

But if God can believe in the narrator's humility before Him, the narrator will believe in "the Motion of Man's Fate," in the human power to survive "the Heat, / Scars, Tempests, Floods." If it is the glory of God to show compassion to such woeful creatures as men, it is the glory of men to act creatively in the face of immense suffering, to survive the Tempests and sing (as Dylan Thomas sang) beneath a weight of woe. The poet who believes in the power of human survival and yet remains humble, fearing the Lord, possesses himself ("I have myself") and is capable of bearing the woe that is his portion of Man's Fate. And, for such a one, "That God that God leans down His Heart to hear." Because the narrator has moved from reasoning to KNOWing, because he has come to a contrite admission of his own fear, God has changed from the God who "scarcely" can bear (tolerate) human sinfulness to that God who bends compassionately toward man and listens, not with His judging mind, but with His merciful heart. It is a poem, like the other two elegies, about a dynamic relationship, in this case one in which man and God change as they interact with one another. Within the confines of a tight formal pattern, Roethke has managed to convey an impression of enormous motion and process, an impression heightened by shifting refrain lines, altered rhyme schemes, associative leaps that all but fracture syntax, and by changing the length of the final line, filling it out to five beats after closing the other quatrains with lines that were short a foot. If the poem works, and I think it does, it works because form and meaning are one, because Roethke's technical skill has been equal to the task of presenting process and change in his poem.

It would be foolish to suggest that these elegies represent an adequate sampling of Theodore Roethke's lifetime of poetry. Nonetheless, I think they do illustrate a few of his better techniques for presenting dynamism in a work of art. The propulsion, the forward thrust, of the free verse comes from the intensification of verbs, the frenetic lists of actions, the energetic rhythms, the associative leaps from image to image and the playing off of sound against sound, phrase against phrase. In the more formal piece, Roethke uses his modified repetition to underscore change and development, and he shifts rhyme scheme and line length to suggest shifts in mental or spiritual development. In all three poems the relationships between the poet and the dead or between the poet and God are highly dynamic ones, relationships which alter even as the poet speaks the words of his love. In these poems, as elsewhere in his work, Roethke manages to transfer the rhythm, the motion, of life from his pulse to the printed page. It is this energetic, dynamic quality which I find the essential characteristic of his craft and which makes his poetry worthy of celebration.