An ambition to find order through poetry is movingly apparent [in Roethke's last poems]. The poems read like last poems, attempts to integrate his themes and bring his vision to final statement. All seem preoccupied with the fear of death and the threat it poses to the validity and endurance of the self, a fear that was responsible for his continuous interest in mysticism. Completing "Meditations of an Old Woman" in 1958, he had probably become aware of what threatened to be a persistent dilemma—that his drive toward mystical ecstasy could prove to be a drive away from life. The "North American Sequence," as I read it, is a penitential act of reintegration with nature…. In this article, I wish to [show that] … Roethke sought to immerse himself in nature in order to find his personal regeneration there. With this emphasis, the "North American Sequence" becomes a poem of age and parting. Its theme is the need to find a way to accommodate the fact of death within an acceptable view of life. It is also the fulfillment of a long-standing ambition to come to terms with the American landscape, interior and exterior.

Throughout his poetry Roethke had written of the desire to encounter the exterior world without threat, without separation, and of the impossibility of doing so while the values of the conceptual mind persist, since the mind cannot enter wholly into nature without fearing that implicit in change is the specter of its own death. There were two alternatives: either withdrawal into abstract isolation in an attempt to move beyond body, time, and thought, or a deeper penetration into process and change until a vision of order and plenitude in nature was recovered. His "North American Sequence" is a final celebration of this second alternative; it is a search for the "imperishable quiet at the heart of form."… (pp. 765-66)

The paradox of his attitude toward form is clear in his use of water, symbolic of process and formlessness, to integrate his sequence in its quest for form. Each poem contains a progressive attempt to engage the self with the element of water, the generative principle of life seen as cycle and change, proliferation of being. But water poses a threat to the self that it may not be able to sustain. Even as it offers metamorphosis and change, it threatens dissolution of self, extinction of identity. The metaphorical burden of the sequence is to reconcile the poet to the element of life as water, with its advance and retreat, its havoc, until finally he can experience these fluctuating orders without threat. But to accept the fluidity of experience, he needs a still center, a "point outside the glittering current" … of experience. This need is the theme of the first poem, "The Longing."… (pp. 766-67)

The need to identify with the generative reality of the here and now moves him to reject any fixed and final order. T. S. Eliot becomes a kind of doppelgänger in the sequence, haunting him with the allurement of release from nature by positing a separate and settled supernatural order beyond life…. His "North American Sequence" is, as it were, an attempt to recover attachment to place by immersion, almost a kind of baptism, in primal waters. The process will be one of unlearning: "I would unlearn the lingo of exasperation, all the distortions of malice and hatred."… His solution is to reject civilized mentality with its egocentric emphasis: "O pride, thou art a plume upon whose head?" and its alienation from nature, and begin to feel his way backwards toward a more primitive mode of consciousness that might enter wholly and finally into nature. The process is one of self-effacement before reality…. (p. 767)

Symbolic topography is crucial to [his] theme. The sequence begins at the Pacific and moves back continually to the Saginaw, Michigan, landscape of the interior continent, a movement that reproduces the interior journey of the poet into the past of his childhood. It is through this regression and subsequent integration of past and present that the poet recovers the attitude of mind that will allow him finally to merge with the dark and oncoming waters. This process is one of unlearning—the mind, trapped by its memories, roving backwards in search of purification until a new category of memory, almost a racial memory, is discovered in the child's celebration of nature: "Once I was something like this, mindless/Or perhaps with another mind, less peculiar."… It is a radical metaphor of belief which asks for commitment to the natural world, trusting that it can accommodate the soul even as it annihilates the … self. (p. 768)

[The] themes are elaborated almost entirely through the accumulation of certain basic images that are repeated with constant variation almost in the manner of musical motifs. Despite their seeming formlessness, the poems derive their meaning from an underlying code in which these images and their qualities are endowed with stable significations. In keeping with a personal habit of perception, Roethke aligns the images into elemental oppositions: earth and water (land and sea), rock and wind, shadow and light, salt and fresh water. They work largely in terms of a tension between notions of openness, vitality, motion, and of closure, sterility, stasis. Earth, even as it offers the assurance of stability, implies false restrictive order. Associated with it are ideas of spiritual dryness and aridity, of failure of desire. Journeys into the nightmare interior of the self find their objective correlative in a car ride through a landscape of dust and rubble, littered with the bodies of dead and dying animals. In contrast, water implies fluidity, even flux, life seen as cycle, proliferation of being; value invested in growth, spontaneity, metamorphosis…. A distinction between salt and fresh water, river and sea, implies an opposition between individual life and the encompassing cycle into which it is subsumed, between temporality and the eternal flux that underlies it. Verbs, as well, carry symbolic import, those of motion and change implying positive ideas of release and liberation: "melting," "shimmering," "widening," "growing," "stretching," "dancing." Negative verbs are those of constriction and diminution: "shrinking," "freezing," "waning," "narrowing," "darkening," "receding."

These verbs and images imply a series of conceptual oppositions in the sequence which involves a debate of values; primarily between ideas of stasis and motion, order and flux, form and formlessness. The poet would work through to a resolution rather than a choice by reconciliation of images, wherein neither possibility need be sacrificed…. (pp. 769-70)

The second poem, "Meditation at Oyster River," opens with an image that seems peculiarly tempting to the American sensibility: "the imagination confronting reality in the guise of the poet gazing at the sea." For Roethke the sea in its inexorable yet imperceptible movement, its blue-black waves creeping closer without sound, without violence, is a symbol of life as ambush. A marvelous paradox occurs in that he chooses to merge with the obliterating waters, to be with the shy beasts where "Death's face rises afresh."… Merging with the flux of the waves is, in the poem, an act of self-effacement before reality, the self plunging into the density of an exterior world that exceeds it. One of the most effective moments in the sequence is the description in section three of this poem of the ice-bound river breaking its boundaries in spring, expressing the ecstasy of release from constriction which is experienced in the escape from self. (pp. 771-72)

That the long journey out of the self is paradoxically a journey to the interior, rather than a counter-impulse towards disembodied transcendence, is made explicit in the third poem. Imagery is entirely symbolic, the exterior landscape a portent of psychological states. There are two journeys: one familiar in Roethke's work—the ascending journey up the narrowing incline along the swollen riverbank toward the dark swampland, the still center of the psychic landscape; the other, more problematical, a symbolic journey westward through an American landscape of desiccation and death, which is probably meant to imply the meager heritage of the Midwest with its uniform, concrete houses, its red weather-beaten court-houses, and its desolate graveyards, all representative of the failure of the culture to provide spiritual sustenance. (p. 773)

In "The Long Waters" the poet turns decisively toward the world of fluidity and change. In a tone of self-mockery, he rejects the appeal of a fixed and final order, and the desire for absolutes as spiritual self-indulgence…. The act of faith is complete. He has chosen the "rich desolation" of the landlocked bay where the salt water is freshened by small streams. The subtlety and effectiveness of the water symbolism is clear; he uses it in an extremely precise fashion to detail a morality of values.

The poem ends with a symbol familiar from "Meditations of an old Woman" and poems like "The Song" and "The Exorcism":

     I see in the advancing and retreating waters
     The shape that came from my sleep, weeping:
     The eternal one, the child, the swaying vine branch,
     The numinous ring around the opening flower
     The friend that runs before me on the windy—headlands,
     Neither voice nor vision….

This is Roethke's last image of the deep-buried principle of life—the soul principle, not merely of the interior self, but of all things. Multiple and seemingly contradictory, it is "child," "swaying branch," "numinous ring"; it is all these things because it is being. If one were to seek a rationale behind the variable symbols, it is to Jung that one would turn, for Roethke obviously intends the symbols as archetypal images, multiple projections of a transcendent postulate at the core of being. He speaks of the principle as a shape weeping. In "Meditations of an Old Woman" it was a low sweet watery noise; in "Song," a voice from a watery hole. Water is the central symbol for the unconscious. Furthermore, the principle is always subterranean—beneath the darkness under the leaves, under earth, root, or crevice. In contact with the deep-buried self, a reintegrated impulse towards life emerges. The poem ends with the magnificent stanza:

   I, who came back from the depths laughing too loudly,
   Become another thing;
   My eyes extend beyond the farthest bloom of the waves;
   I lose and find myself in the long water;
   I am gathered together once more;
   I embrace the world….

The process has been of losing and finding, not of regression for its own sake, but in order to recreate the self. It is being that is affirmed unequivocally.

"The Far Field" takes the explicit theme of death and examines its implications…. His tone is hard to assess. It is both nostalgic and serious, yet underlying it is the delicate humor that is so much a part of his style. We can think of the idea of reincarnation as a metaphor of belief in life; for him epitomized not in human consciousness at all, but in the principle of being. (pp. 773-76)

For him the final man is man in the act of leavetaking, faced with his own immensity, the mystery of being which he incarnates and to which the mind can gain no access. He is returning to water, the sea of origin, encumbered with age and memory, the cycle of which he is the returning unit having almost completed its round. The poem concludes with a celebration of the imagination's capacity for analogy: "All finite things reveal infinitude."… He does not use the concept "infinitude" in the sense of perpetual duration in space or time, but as an ever-present quality, or better, capacity of the soul. (p. 777)

Roethke brings his sequence to resolution through the symbol of the rose, perhaps the most resonant of all literary symbols. He claims it as his own through characteristic images that define its context. His flower is a single wild rose struggling out of a tangle of matted underbrush in that place of conjunction where fresh and salt water meet. Free in the wind, the sea-rose represents the reconciliation between rootedness and fluidity, between earth and water, stasis and motion, that he had been seeking. It is not Eliot's heavily acculturated symbol, but a solitary bloom, growing toward clarity out of confusion. Roethke seems to see the symbol as embodying the energetics of the life process itself. In the rose image, the polar tensions of life are brought to balance in a vision of "the imperishable quiet at the heart of form." The vision does not come out of a vacuum. It is the fruit of the long meditative process of the sequence, and can be understood psychologically. It must be recognized that the sea-rose is an objective and emotionally satisfying expression of an inner subjective synthesis. In contrast to the superficial divisiveness of life embodied in the motion of the waves, there exists the stasis of the rose in the sea-wind. It is magically potent and mysteriously satisfying because it evokes the hybrid roses of the greenhouse, the two conflated in a union of past and present…. (pp. 777-78)

The poem ends with an explicit statement of the new change…. In a still moment of synthesis, a profound readjustment of personality has taken place; what Roethke called … the abandonment of the egoistic center of personality to another center of being. It is as though spirit were something to be achieved, a goal in an ongoing process, the aim of the self in its ascent on the scale of being. This is no withdrawal into pious mysticism. The symbol of the rose celebrates the mystery of incarnate, carnal being. (pp. 778-79)

Roethke's insistence on using pure images does … create problems of interpretation. The disposition of the images, their balance and repetition, are the only basis by which the conceptual structure of the sequence can be inferred. The sequence has, in fact, no clear-cut, paraphrasable meaning, but operates with the impact of music, with the persuasiveness of embrace, through imagery that is self-creating and self-perpetuating. But there is certainly a debate of values between what W. D. Snodgrass and M. L. Rosenthal speak of as religious escapism, the desire for disembodied transcendence, and the celebration of incarnate being. It seems to me that Roethke emphatically rejects the former…. He denies the illusion of any fixed and final form of religious stasis beyond the world of becoming, and seeks to identify with nature as a process of change and fluidity. It is the very depth of his insight into this process that makes him fear for the stability and endurance of the self. Paradoxically, a process of immersion in the flux of life, rather than withdrawal into an abstract purity beyond it, allows him to recover a sense of rootedness and stasis, of subjective synthesis. In one sense he has rediscovered his own past through recovery of a childhood memory. But more profoundly, through an experience of mystical intensity in which the barriers of form dissolve, he comes to discover that the loss of self is not something to be feared; that, in fact, death can be accepted with equanimity as a reintegration into the natural processes of life. (p. 780)

One of the problems involved in criticism of Roethke is a failure to accept his primitivism at its profoundest level. He is deeply antirationalistic. Being and knowing are opposite, antagonistic states. The more you are in being, the less you know…. Roethke's primitivism moves him to reject any formal religion. At the same time, however, he will not place final faith in human individuality. He is a mystic, not in his withdrawal from body and time, but in his total submission to nature, and in his pious recognition of the vital mysterious substance of life itself…. (p. 781)

Roy Harvey Pearce has written that all American poetry must be, in some form, a dialogue with Whitman. The "North American Sequence" is Roethke's dialogue—an attempt, in the words of Robert Duncan, to "strike again the naked string / old Whitman sang from." Whitman bequeathed to American poetry a new attitude toward form—a desire to take form not as a given but as something more important, as a process of discovery, of exploration. He sought to create a form of the loosest kind to embrace rather than order the diversities of external nature…. Whitman's most important contribution to American poetry was to reinvigorate the catalogue as a way of stringing particulars together for maximum evocation of the natural scene without the intrusion of the barriers and filters of formal prosody. He called his technique a "going directly to creation" or, in William Carlos Willams' later rephrasing, "No ideas but in things." His emphases were fluency, candor, unpremeditated attention and assimilation, inclusiveness.

Roethke had been waiting a long time to write his American sequence…. Whitman's long, free, cadenced line, his breadth and inclusiveness, gave him the style he needed but not without posing certain problems. Whitman was content with pure description and association, with long catalogues of cumulative images celebrated for their own sake. Roethke was moved to a more explicit order and control…. The problem was how to incorporate things on their own terms and, at the same time, to convey what he conceived to be their value without resorting to generalized statement. This ambition differentiates him from Eliot, on the one hand, and from Whitman, on the other. He does want meaning and order, but without Eliot's philosophical commentary. He wants the illusion of Whitman's freshness and informal unselfconsciousness,… but with hierarchical and moral values implied. His solution is to align his images, particularly the image of water, to stable significations, as has been demonstrated earlier, so that a perfect accuracy of description is able to imply moral perception. With the closest attention, the hidden currents that manipulate the images are clearly discernible, and the illusion of unpremeditation breaks down. As is clear from his earlier work, he was too devoted to form to acquiesce in collecting random sensational images. He offers the illusion of artlessness and artistic self-effacement in order to celebrate the American landscape—the thing itself. But he is too much of a conscious craftsman not to create a world that attempts … "to explain, evaluate, and ordain the real one." (pp. 781-83)

Rosemary Sullivan, "A Still Center: A Reading of Theodore Roethke's 'North American Sequence'," in Texas Studies in Literature and Language (copyright © 1975 by the University of Texas Press), Vol. XVI, No. 4, Winter, 1975, pp. 765-83.