SOURCE: "The Unity of the Greenhouse Sequence: Roethke's Portrait of the Artist," in Concerning Poetry, Vol. 12, No. 1, Spring, 1979, pp. 53-60.

[In the following essay, Spanier examines autobiographic allusions to the creative process revealed in the "Greenhouse Sequence" from Roethke's The Lost Son and Other Poems.]

Simplicity is deceptive in Theodore Roethke's "greenhouse sequence," which includes the first thirteen poems of The Lost Son and Other Poems (1848) plus one other poem inserted in two later editions of the group. The works are short and descriptive. They contain few, if any, abstract or philosophical statements. On first reading, the sequence may appear to be little more than an album of snapshots—true in color and sharply focused, to be sure—taken in and around the greenhouse that Roethke's father operated in Saginaw, Michigan throughout the poet's childhood. Roethke seems to have arranged the snapshots in a careful order, though (even his later addition is precisely placed within the group), and it is only when we view the sequence as a whole that the full significance of this body of poems emerges.

There appears to be a general movement forward through the sequence, from the pre-natal life of the cuttings in the first poem to the crisp, perfect blossom of the carnation in the last. Though he is not speaking here specifically about the greenhouse sequence, Roethke's own comments support a cyclical reading of the poems:

Each poem … is complete in itself; yet each in a sense is a stage in a kind of struggle out of the slime; part of a slow spiritual progress; an effort to be born, and later to become something more…. At least you can see that the method is cyclic. I believe that to go forward as a spiritual man it is necessary first to go back. Any history of the psyche (or allegorical journey) is bound to be a succession of experiences, similar yet dissimilar. There is a perpetual slipping-back, then a going-forward; but there is some "progress."

As I see it, the fourteen greenhouse poems run the gamut of human experience in more or less chronological order: birth, the struggle to survive in a harsh environment, growth, death, eternity. But the sequence can also be read more specifically as a documentary of the process of artistic creation, from the first pre-conscious stirrings of thought, through the artist's struggle to resist the forces which work against his creation and to develop it fully, to the finished product, which may either fail and be rejected or succeed in achieving perfection and, thereby, eternal existence, Grecian-urn fashion. In this reading, the greenhouse sequence becomes Roethke's "portrait of the artist."

Several critics have sensed that these poems, though they are concrete and simple, might also be read symbolically or allegorically. Kenneth Burke writes that they are "clearly the imagistic figuring of a human situation." He likens them to Aesop's fables featuring flowers instead of animals, saying, "The poet need but be as accurate as he can, in describing the flowers objectively; and while aiming at this, he comes upon corresponding human situations, as it were by redundancy." Richard Blessing adds that "in the greenhouse sequence the reader is asked to supply the abstractions himself—or to leave them out, if he prefers." Theodore Roethke himself invites a symbolic reading, or, rather, demands one, when he calls the greenhouse "my symbol for the whole of life, a womb, a heaven-on-earth."

It becomes evident, then, that these simple poems have been crafted precisely enough and arranged carefully enough to be able to bear the weight of abstraction, just as a perfect crystal goblet, if placed properly, is said to be able to bear the weight of a person standing on it. I will take Roethke at his word that the greenhouse represents "the whole of life" and will examine the sequence as a microcosm of human life, and, more specifically, as an allegorical depiction of the process of creating a work of art.

In my view, the poems fall into several groups, each marking a stage in the "life cycle" of a work of art: (I) pre-conscious beginnings; (II) the "struggle out of the slime"—crude, but tenacious existence; (III) obstacles to survival; (IV) nurture and growth; (V) soaring beyond ordinary experience—striving for perfection; and (VI) products of the effort.

Consistent with the complexity of their subject, these poems are packed with paradox and the tension of opposites. In them there is dynamic interplay between life and death, beauty and ugliness, fecundity and decay, creation and destruction, activity and stillness, past and present. The greenhouse itself is a paradoxical image, as Burke has remarked, embodying "a peculiar balance of the natural and the artificial."

In looking at these poems, then, I will try to "supply the abstractions," as I believe we are permitted and even invited to do, focusing on the part each poem plays in the allegory and considering the paradoxical imagery which Roethke employs to depict the complex, dynamic, often messy and painful process of artistic creation.

I have called the first phase of the creative process "pre-conscious beginnings," and the poems "Cuttings" and "Cuttings (later)" belong in this group. Very little "happens" in these poems; in the eight lines of "Cuttings," we simply view sticks planted in loam slowly awakening to life:

    One numb of growth
    Nudges a sand-crumb loose,
    Pokes through a musty sheath
    Its pale tendrilous horn.

"Cuttings" describes the first stirrings of vegetal life on a microscopic scale: we can even see the "intricate stem-fur" on the sticks and their "small cells." The only motion here is the loosening of a grain of sand, yet Roethke has managed to endow such a still scene with a sense of potential vigor in his choice of action verbs: the sticks "droop," small cells "bulge," slips keep "coaxing up" water, a nub of growth "nudges" and "pokes." Thus, in this simplest of poems, we can see Roethke's dynamic and paradoxical imagery operating. In stillness and dormancy there is activity and life.

"Cuttings (later)" continues the description of the sticks slowly coming to life, but here Roethke explicitly relates "This urge, wrestle, resurrection of dry sticks" to human experience by asking

    What saint strained so much,
    Rose on such lopped limbs to a new life?

He tells us that he feels the stirrings of life in himself; we are witnessing the rejuvenation of a stilted, "lopped" human being beginning a new way of life. To begin to supply abstractions, this could well be a portrait of the artist himself, whose soul has been dried out and pruned by conventional existence and who is beginning to recognize an inner calling to his art. He feels new life coming to him from within, independent of his will, "sucking and sobbing" in his veins and bones. As the artist traditionally looks backward and inward to encounter life at its most basic, so the speaker tells us, "I quail, lean to beginnings, sheath-wet." Again, there is a tension of opposing forces in the imagery. There is simultaneous movement of growth in both directions: the saint "rose" to a new life and small waters are "seeping upward," while the stems are "struggling to put down feet" (italics mine). Similarly, the sprouts "break out" into an external environment, yet there is movement backward and inward as the speaker leans to beginnings. This imagery reinforces the allegorical applications of this poem to the experience of the artist in that an artist's work involves both out-reaching communication and private introspection.

The second group of poems—"Root Cellar," "Forcing House," and "Weed Puller"—abounds with crude but tenacious life, depicting "the struggle out of the slime," to use Roethke's terms. On the allegorical level, we witness in this group the artist's determination that this germ of a work of art will survive. "Root Cellar" presents a vivid description of vegetal abundance and fecundity in a dark cellar. We are told that

    Nothing would sleep in that cellar, dank as a ditch,
    Bulbs broke out of boxes hunting for chinks in the dark,
    Shoots dangled and drooped,
    Lollying obscenely from mildewed crates,
    Hung down long yellow evil necks, like tropical snakes.

Again, the concrete description calls up more abstract associations with human life. In the root cellar we may be reminded of the abundance and tenacity of human life, of people striving and struggling to survive in the most adverse conditions. More specifically, the activity in the root cellar parallels the gestation of a work in the artist's mind. Like the shoots and bulbs, the poet's thoughts and feelings at this stage are chaotic, ineffectual, unpresentable, maybe even a little obscene, but, nevertheless, struggling hard to survive. There is little order but much life:

       Nothing would give up life:
       Even the dirt kept breathing a small breath.

Paradoxically, this poem about fecundity and the will to live is set in an environment of darkness and decay, amid "a congress of stinks," just as much art emerges from unpleasantness, pain, and confusion.

In the "Forcing House," there is a feeling of unnatural vigor as the plants are shot with nutrients and pulse with forced steam. The vines, scums, mildews, and blossoms

     All pulse with the knocking pipes
     That drip and sweat,
     Sweat and drip,
     Swelling the roots with steam and stench,
     Shooting up lime and dung and ground bones,—
     Fifty summers in motion at once,
     As the live heat billows from pipes and pots.

The mechanisms in the greenhouse mercilessly manipulate nature, trying to improve upon it, just as a poet may not-so-gently "work over" his budding creation in order to perfect it. Language and experience are removed from their normal, natural states and are artificially manipulated, compressed, and intensified by the poet, who, like the operator of the forcing house is perfectly capable of putting "Fifty summers in motion at once." As in the poems already discussed, there is paradox here, too, with nature and artifice in opposition. In the greenhouse and in the artist's mind, natural entities are roughly and sometimes cruelly handled, precisely because the "torturer" (the florist or the artist) cares for them and wants them to improve and thrive.

In "Weed Puller" there is a contrast between the lovely public spectacle of

     Lilies, pale-pink cyclamen, roses,
     Whole fields lovely and inviolate,—

and the weed puller's private view of the underside as he, "down in that fetor of weeds," is

    Hacking at black hairy roots,—
    Those lewd monkey-tailes hanging from drain holes,—
    Digging into the soft rubble underneath.

This underneath view seems analogous to the sometimes messy "root layer" of the artist's mind, filled with things repressed, forgotten, or decayed, but very much alive and the breeding ground for beautiful creations. While others view only the pretty public blooming of the finished work, the artist, like the weed puller, must engage in a private struggle, grovelling in the messy source of it all, trying to create beauty and order out of chaos:

    Tugging all day at perverse life:
    The indignity of it!—
    With everything blooming above me.

The artist, too, may find his subterranean work treacherous going, in terms of his own mental health, for the poet describes himself as

     Crawling on all fours,
     Alive, in a slippery grave.

"Orchids," "Moss-Gathering," and "Big Wind" are included in the group I call "obstacles to survival" because they depict some stumbling blocks in the creative process, both external and internal. "Orchids" is a poem of quiet seduction and deadly beauty. The orchids are sensuous and alluring, and they seem almost human: they lean out over the path in the greenhouse and sway close to the face, they are "delicate as a young bird's tongue," they have "soft luminescent fingers," their "musky smell comes even stronger" when the heat goes down and the moonlight falls on them through the glass, and they slowly draw in air through "their fluttery fledgling lips." Lovely as they are, though, the flowers are insidious and must be resisted. The imagery points up their treachery and the need for caution when dealing with them. The orchids are "adder-mouthed," they come out "soft and deceptive," and they drift down from their beds of moss like "devouring infants." The sensuous yet sinister descriptions suggest that the orchids may represent sensuous, worldly pleasures, which, however pleasant-seeming and attractive, may divert the artist from his real work and eventually destroy him.

In "Moss-Gathering" the obstacle to creation is a sense of guilt within the artist himself. Pulling up naturally-growing moss to be used in a cemetery basket, a "made" object, makes the speaker feel mean:

      As if I had broken the natural order of things in that swampland;
      Disturbed some rhythm, old and of vast importance,
      By pulling off flesh from the living planet.

The conflict and danger here are within the artist. In order to create an art object, any artist must somewhat destroy "the natural order of things," and in this creation there is a sense of loss, "As if I had committed, against the whole scheme of life, a desecration." These conscientious pangs may not be completely undesirable—things to be erased from the artist's mind—but they are potentially crippling to him and do represent an obstacle to creative productivity and, therefore, must be reckoned with.

"Big Wind," analyzed in detail by Kenneth Burke, is a metaphorical narrative of survival as the greenhouse rides out a violent rainstorm just as a ship would ride out a storm at sea. This poem is a portrait of endurance, of something battling against an external assault and finally emerging unscathed. While the owners help by draining the manure machine, watching the pressure gauge on the rusty boilers, and stuffing burlap into holes left by blown-out glass, the greenhouse "hove into the teeth of it, / The core and pith of that ugly storm." The fragile glass house, which finally "sailed until the calm morning, / Carrying her full cargo of roses," may be likened to the delicate (or, at least, sensitive) mind of the artist, as it struggles to survive the attack of a harsh and hostile world upon its sensibilities and emerges from the battle intact, carrying its "full cargo of roses"—its beautiful and cherished creations.

Assuming that the artistic impulse has germinated, clung stubbornly to crude existence, and surmounted the obstacles of insidious distraction, potentially crippling inner reservations, and overt external assault, the time has come for care and nurture so that its fullest growth may be realized. The next three poems in the sequence—"Old Florist," "Frau Bauman, Frau Schmidt, and Frau Schwartze," and "Transplanting"—explore the theme of care and growth.

"Old Florist" is a portrait of a man close to life, nurturing, caring for, and protecting the flowers. Again, there is paradox in that his loving care often consists of destruction. The same "hump of a man" who gently fans life into wilted sweet-peas with his hat and stands all night watering roses also stamps dirt into pots, flicks and picks leaves, pinches back asters, and drowns a bug "in one spit of tobacco juice." Creation and destruction are juxtaposed in the greenhouse as they are in art; the artist must prune and selectively destroy parts of his work in order that it be sound.

"Frau Bauman, Frau Schmidt, and Frau Schwartze" depicts three "ancient ladies" bustling about the greenhouse caring for the flowers. It did not appear in the first edition of the greenhouse poems but was later inserted between "Old Florist" and "Transplanting" in the volume The Waking (1953) and more recently in Words for the Wind (1958). Louis Martz has complained that this poem with its "Yeatsian" flavor is an "intrusion" and is out of place in the simple greenhouse sequence: "it breaks the natural, intimate presence of those earlier poems, and it ought to be printed elsewhere in future editions of Roethke's poetry." But when the sequence is viewed in terms of the groupings I have outlined, it does belong here, for the three ladies are also nurturing creatures, sometimes even called "earth mothers." We are told that they straightened blossoms, tied and tucked the stems, "teased out the seed that the cold kept asleep," and "They trellised the sun; they plotted for more than themselves." These vigorous, vigilant "nurses of nobody else" are peacemakers, bustling along rows, "keeping creation at ease." Past and present come together in the final lines, as the mature poet remembers how they picked him up, "a spindly kid," and nurtured him, and he tells us.

     Now, when I'm alone and cold in my bed,
     They still hover over me,
     These ancient leathery crones,
     With their bandannas stiffened with sweat,
     And their thorn-bitten wrists,
     And their snuff-laden breath blowing lightly over me in my
         first sleep.

"Transplanting," too, is a poem of care and nurture. We watch sure hands swiftly and skillfully transplant the young plants into loam and set them in the warm sun. In this poem, the last of the "nurturing" group, we finally view the triumphant culmination of this tender care, dramatically, as though in slow motion photography:

      The young horns winding and unwinding,
      Creaking their thin spines,
      The underleaves, the smallest buds
      Breaking into nakedness,
      The blossoms extending
      Out into the sweet air,
      The whole flower extending outward,
      Stretching and reaching.

"Stretching and reaching" is the central motion of the next poem, "Child on Top of a Greenhouse," though we have moved from the realm of plants to that of human beings. In this seven-line poem, quite simply, a child has climbed to the top of a greenhouse and is looking down through the glass at the flowers below end et the people on the ground looking up at him and shouting. The child's climbing where no one has ventured before (much to the alarm of those bound to the earth by aging joints or common sense) is much like the artist's striving to soar above the known and ordinary. The analogy is strengthened when we remember that Roethke called the greenhouse the "whole of life." The poet, like the child, wants to stand atop it, to conquer and master the summit, but it is a terrifying, lonely, and thrilling quest, baffling and upsetting to the less ambitious. Roethke has captured the terror and exhilaration by packing a tremendous amount of action into this very short poem. All is in violent motion with the wind billowing out the child's britches, splinters of glass and dried putty cracking under his feet, flowers "starting up like accusers," the glass "flashing with sunlight," a few clouds "all rushing eastward," elms "lunging and tossing like horses," and "everyone, everyone pointing up and shouting!"

The final two poems depict the possible end products of this artistic quest: the reject on the junk heap and the enduring perfect creation. In "Flower-Dump" we view the junk heap. The flowers, weeds, molds, dead leaves, and clumps of roots which have been "pitched" and left to decay are topped by

    One swaggering head
    Over the dying, the newly dead.

This tulip is like the latest literary addition to the artist's waste basket. Happily though, Roethke does not end on the teeming trash heap his series of poems about artistic creation. Instead, he leaves us with "Carnations," a poem about this crisp, intricate, classically perfect flower. The description of the carnation evokes images of the classic age of Greece: the leaves are "Corinthian scrolls," the air is cool "as if drifting down from wet hemlocks," and the poem ends with the description of

     A crisp hyacinthine coolness,
     Like that clear autumnal weather of eternity,
     The windless perpetual morning above a September cloud.

This still life of cool perfection and timelessness is the perfect culmination for this series of poems about artistic creation, for producing such a classic objet d'art is the goal of any artist.

In the greenhouse sequence Roethke has led us through the whole creative process. We have witnessed the most primitive stirring of an artistic impulse, its first crude but determined efforts to exist, the obstacles to its survival, the nurturing and development of the work, the artist's soaring beyond everyday existence, his failures, and the culmination of his effort in the creation of a classic, eternal work of beauty.

Roethke called his greenhouse his symbol for the whole of life. I would offer a more particular metaphorical equivalent for the greenhouse as it appears in this sequence of poems. As it is a place in which nature is imitated, artificially cultivated, and improved upon, it is much like the mind of the artist, who draws upon nature as the source of his art but manipulates and stylizes it, and, if he is successful, fashions a product which may be more "real" and enduring than the piece of nature it imitates. A work of art, like a hot house flower, may be more perfect than its uncultivated counterpart in nature. Luckily for us, too, the greenhouse is transparent, so that we may look with Roethke into the artistic mind as it creates a work of art.