There is a poem called "Snake" in which Theodore Roethke describes a young snake turning and drawing away and then says:

I felt my slow blood warm.
I longed to be that thing,
The pure, sensuous form.

And I may be, some time.

To aspire to a condition of purity higher than any available in the human world is a common urge. Poets often give this condition as a pure, sensuous form, nothing if not itself and nothing beyond itself. But it is strange, at first sight, that Roethke gives his parable in the image of a snake, because snakes tend to figure in his poems as emblems of the sinister. In "Where Knock is Open Wide" one of the prayerful moments reads: "I'll be a bite. You be a wink. / Sing the snake to sleep." In "I Need, I Need" the term "snake-eyes" is enough to send its owner packing. And there is this, in "The Shape of the Fire":

Up over a viaduct I came, to the snakes and sticks of another winter,
A two-legged dog hunting a new horizon of howls.

But this is at first sight, or at first thought, because Roethke, more than most poets, sought a sustaining order in the images of his chaos, and only those images would serve. If you offer a dove as answer to a snake, your answer is incomplete, an order not violent enough. Hence when the right time came, in "I'm Here," Roethke would find that a snake lifting its head is a fine sight, and a snail's music is a fine sound, and both are joys, credences of summer. As Roethke says in "The Longing," "The rose exceeds, the rose exceeds us all."

But he did not sentimentalize his chaos. He lived with it, and would gladly have rid himself of it if he could have done so without an even greater loss, the loss of verifiable life. When he thought of his own rage, for instance, he often saw it as mere destructiveness. In one of his early poems he said: "Rage warps my clearest cry / To witless agony." And he often resorted to invective, satire, pseudonymous tirades, to cleanse himself of rage and hatred. In one of those tirades he said, "Behold, I'm a heart set free, for I have taken my hatred and eaten it." But "Death Piece" shows that to be released from rage is to be—quite simply—dead. And the price is too high. This is one of the reasons why Roethke found the last years of W. B. Yeats so rewarding, because Yeats made so much of his rage, in the Last Poems, The Death of Cuchulain, and Purgatory. In one of his own apocalyptic poems, "The Lost Son," Roethke says, "I want the old rage, the lash of primordial milk," as if to recall Yeats' cry, "Grant me an old man's frenzy." And in "Old Lady's Winter Words" he says: "If I were a young man, / I could roll in the dust of a fine rage…"; and in "The Sententious Man": "Some rages save us. Did I rage too long? / The spirit knows the flesh it must consume." Hence Roethke's quest for the saving rage. Call it—for it is this—a rage for order. He was sometimes tempted to seal himself against the rush of experience, and he reminds himself in "The Adamant" that the big things, such as truth, are sealed against thought; the true substance, the core, holds itself inviolate. And yet man is exposed, exposes himself. And, in a sense, rightly so. As Yeats says in the great "Dialogue of Self and Soul":

I am content to live it all again
And yet again, if it be life to pitch
Into the frog-spawn of a blind man's ditch.

In "The Pure Fury" Roethke says, "I live near the abyss." What he means is the substance of his poetry. The abyss is partly the frog-spawn of a blind man's ditch, partly a ditch of his own contriving, partly the fate of being human in a hard time, partly the poet's weather. As discreetly as possible we can take it for granted, rehearsing it only to the extent of linking it with the abyss in other people. Better to think of it as the heart of each man's darkness. In "Her Becoming" Roethke speaks of it in one aspect:

I know the cold fleshless kiss of contraries,
The neverless constriction of surfaces—
Machines, machines, loveless, temporal;
Mutilated souls in cold morgues of obligation

And this becomes, in the "Fourth Meditation," "the dreary dance of opposites." (But so far it is common enough.)

It is still common enough when Roethke presents it through the ambiguities of body and soul. In "Epidermal Macabre" Roethke, like Yeats in The Tower, wishes the body away in favor of a spirit remorselessly sensual:

And willingly would I dispense
With false accounterments of sense,
To sleep immodestly, a most
Incarnadine and carnal ghost.

Or again, when the dance of opposites is less dreary, Roethke accepts with good grace the unwinding of body from soul:

When opposites come suddenly in place,
I teach my eyes to hear, my ears to see
How body from spirit slowly does unwind
Until we are pure spirit at the end.

Sometimes the body is "gristle." In "Praise to the End" Roethke says, "Skin's the least of me," and in the "First Meditation" it is the rind that "hates the life within." (Yeats' "dying animal" is clearly visible.) But there were other moments, as there were in Yeats. In "The Wraith" the body casts a spell, the flesh makes the spirit "visible," and in the "Fourth Meditation" "the husk lives on, ardent as a seed."

Mostly in Roethke the body seems good in itself, a primal energy. And when it is this if features the most distinctive connotations of the modern element: it is a good, but ill at ease with other goods. Above all, it does not guarantee an equable life in the natural world. More often than not in these poems man lives with a hostile nature, and lives as well as he can. In "I Need, I Need" intimations of waste, privation, and insecurity lead to this:

The ground cried my name:
Good-bye for being wrong.
Love helps the sun.
But not enough.

"I can't marry the dirt" is an even stronger version, in "Bring the Day," echoing Wallace Stevens' benign "marriage of flesh and air" while attaching to it now, as courageously as possible, the bare note, "A swan needs a pond"; or, more elaborately in another poem, "A wretch needs his wretchedness." The aboriginal middle poems have similar cries on every page: "These wings are from the wrong nest"; "My sleep deceives me"; "Soothe me, great groans of underneath"; "Rock me to sleep, the weather's wrong"; "Few objects praise the Lord."

These are some of Roethke's intimations of chaos. They reach us as cries, laments, protests, intimations of loss. Most of Roethke's later poems are attempts to cope with these intimations by becoming—in Stevens' sense—their connoisseur. In "The Dance" Roethke speaks of a promise he has made to "sing and whistle romping with the bears"; and whether we take these as animals or constellations, the promise is the same and hard to keep. To bring it off at all, Roethke often plays in a child's garden, especially in poems like "O Lull Me, Lull Me," where he can have everything he wants by having it only in fancy. "Light fattens the rock," he sings, to prove that good children get treats. "When I say things fond, I hear singing," he reports, and we take his word for it; as we do again when we acknowledge, in a later poem, that "the right thing happens to the happy man." Perhaps it does. But when Roethke says, "I breathe into a dream, / And the ground cries…," and again, "I could say hello to things; / I could talk to a snail," we think that he protests too much, and we know that his need is great. Roethke is never quite convincing in this note, or in the hey-nonny note of his neo-Elizabethan pastiche. Even when he dramatizes the situation in the "Meditations of an Old Woman" the answers come too easily. In two stanzas he has "the earth itself a tune," and this sounds like a poet's wishful dreaming. Roethke may have wanted the kind of tone that Stevens reached in his last poems, an autumnal calm that retains the rigor and the feeling but banishes the fretful note, the whine, the cry of pain. But Stevens earned this. And Yeats earned it too, in poems like "Beautiful Lofty Things." Roethke claimed it without really earning it. Here is a stanza from "Her Becoming":

Ask all the mice who caper in the straw—
I am benign in my own company.
A shape without a shade, or almost none,
I hum in pure vibration, like a saw.
The grandeur of a crazy one alone—
By swoops of bird, by leaps of fish, I live.
My shadow steadies in a shifting stream;
I live in air; the long lights is my home;
I dare caress the stones, the field my friend;
A light wind rises: I become the wind.

And here is Stevens, in a passage from "The Course of a Particular":

The leaves cry. It is not a cry of divine attention,
Nor the smoke-drift of puffed-out heroes, nor human cry.
It is the cry of leaves that do not transcend themselves,
In the absence of fantasia, without meaning more
Than they are in the final finding of the air, in the thing
Itself, until, at last, the cry concerns no one at all.

How can we compare these two passages except to say that Stevens speaks with the knowledge that there have been other days, other feelings, and the hope that there will be more of each, as various as before? Roethke speaks as if the old woman were now released from time and history and the obligations of each, released even from the memories that she has already invoked. There is too much fantasia in Roethke's lines, and this accounts for a certain slackness that fell upon him whenever he tried too hard to be serene. Stevens' poem is, in the full meaning of the word, mature; Roethke's is a little childish, second-childish. Stevens would affirm, when affirmation seemed just, but not before. Roethke longed to affirm, and when the affirmation would not come he sometimes—now and again—dressed himself in affirmative robes.

But only now and again. At his best he is one of the most scrupulous of poets. In "Four for Sir John Davies," for instance, the harmony between nature and man that Davies figured—the orchestra, the dance, the music of the spheres—is brought to bear upon the poem, critically and never naively or sentimentally. The divinely orchestrated universe of Davies' poem is more than a point of reference but far less than an escape route. For one thing, as Roethke says, "I need a place to sing, and dancingroom," and for another, there is no dancing master, and for a third, there isn't even at this stage a dancing partner. So he must do the best he can in his poverty. And if his blood leaps "with a wordless song," at least it leaps:

But what I learned there, dancing all alone,
Was not the joyless motion of a stone.

But even when the partner comes and they dance their joy, Roethke does not claim that this makes everything sweet or that nature and man will thereafter smile at each other. In the farthest reach of joy he says:

We danced to shining; mocked before the black
And shapeless night that made no answer back.

The sensual cry is what it is, and there are moments when it is or seems to be final, but man still lives in the element of antagonisms. In "Four Quartets" the "daunsynge" scene from Sir Thomas Elyot testifies to modes of being, handsome but archaic; it answers no present problem. Nor does Sir John Davies, who plays a similar role in Roethke's sequence. And even before that, in "The Return," man in the element of antagonisms feels and behaves like an animal in his self-infected lair, "With a stump of scraggy fang / Bared for a hunter's boot." And sometimes he turns upon himself in rage.

When Roethke thinks of man in this way, he often presents him in images of useless flurry. Like Saul Bellow's Dangling Man, he is clumsy, ungainly, an elephant in a pond. Roethke often thinks of him as a bat—by day, quiet, cousin to the mouse; at night, crazy, absurd, looping "in crazy figures." And when the human situation is extreme, Roethke thinks of man as a bat flying deep into a narrowing tunnel. Far from being a big, wide space, the world seems a darkening corridor. In "Bring the Day!" Roethke says, "Everything's closer. Is this a cage?" And if a shape cries from a cloud as it does in "The Exorcism," and calls to man's flesh, man is always somewhere else, "down long corridors." (Corridors, cages, tunnels, lairs—if these poems needed illustration, the painter is easily named: Francis Bacon, keeper of caged souls.)

In "Four for Sir John Davies" the lovers, Roethke says, "undid chaos to a curious sound," "curious" meaning careful as well as strange and exploratory. In this world to undo chaos is always a curious struggle, sometimes thought of as a release from constriction, a stretching in all directions, an escape from the cage. In "What Can I Tell My Bones?" Roethke says, "I recover my tenderness by long looking," and if tenderness is the proof of escape, long looking is one of the means. In King Lear it is to see feelingly. In some of Roethke's poems it is given as, quite simply, attention. In "Her Becoming" Roethke speaks of a "jauntier principle of order," but this is to dream. What he wants, in a world of cages and corridors, is to escape to an order, an order of which change and growth and decay are natural mutations and therefore acceptable. In many of the later poems it will be an order of religious feeling, for which the punning motto is, "God, give me a near."

The first step, the first note toward a possible order, is to relish what can be relished. Listening to "the sigh of what is," one attends, knowing, or at least believing, that "all finite things reveal infinitude." If things "flame into being," so much the better. "Dare I blaze like a tree?" Roethke asks at one point, like the flaming tree of Yeats' "Vacillation." And again Roethke says, "What I love is near at hand, / Always, in earth and air." This is fine, as far as it goes, but it is strange that Roethke is more responsive to intimations of being when they offer themselves in plants than in people; and here, of course, he differs radically from Yeats. In the first version of "Cuttings" he is exhilarated when "the small cells bulge," when cuttings sprout into a new life, when bulbs hunt for light, when the vines in the forcing house pulse with the knocking pipes, when orchids draw in the warm air, when beetles, newts, and lice creep and wriggle. In "Slug" he rejoices in his kinship with bats, weasels, and worms. In "A Walk in Late Summer" being "delights in being, and in time." In the same poem Roethke delights in the "midnight eyes" of small things, and in several poems he relishes what Christopher Smart in Jubilate Agno calls "the language of flowers." Everywhere in Roethke there is consolation in the rudimentary when it is what it is, without fantasia. It is a good day when the spiders sail into summer. But Roethke is slow to give the same credences to man. Plants may be transplanted, and this is good, but what is exhilarating reproduction in insects and flowers is mere duplication in people. Girls in college are "duplicate gray standard faces"; in the same poem there is talk of "endless duplication of lives and objects." Man as a social being is assimilated to the machine; the good life is lived by plants. In the bacterial poems, weeds are featured as circumstance, the rush of things, often alien but often sustaining. "Weeds, weeds, how I love you," Roethke says in "The Shape of the Fire." In the "First Meditation," "On love's worst ugly day, / The weeds hiss at the edge of the field…." In "What Can I Tell My Bones?" "Weeds turn toward the wind weed-skeletons," presumably because "the dead love the unborn." But in "Praise to the End!" when the water's low and romping days are over, "the weeds exceed me."

There are two ways of taking this, and Roethke gives us both. Normally we invoke the rudimentary to criticize the complex: the lower organism rebukes the higher for falling short of itself, as body rebukes the arrogance of vaunting mind or spirit. This works on the assumption that what is simple is more "natural" than what is complex, and that lower organisms have the merit of such simplicity. Or, alternatively, one can imply that the most exalted objects of our human desire are already possessed, in silence and grace, by the lower organisms. Roethke often does this. In "The Advice," for instance, he says:

A learned heathen told me this:
Dwell in pure mind and Mind alone;
What you brought back from the Abyss,
The Slug was taught beneath his Stone.

This is so presumably because the slug had a teacher, perhaps the dancing master who has retired from the human romp. Roethke doesn't commit the sentimentality of implying, however, that all is sweetness and light in the bacterial world, and generally he avoids pushing his vegetal analogies too far. In his strongest poems the bacterial is featured as a return to fundamentals, a syntax of short phrases to represent the radical breaking-up that may lead to a new synthesis. In grammatical terms, we have broken the spine of our syntax by loading it with our own fetishes. So we must begin again as if we were learning a new language, speaking in short rudimentary phrases. Or, alternatively, we learn in simple words and phrases, hoping that eventually we may reach the light of valid sentences. In this spirit Roethke says, in a late poem, "God bless the roots!—Body and soul are one!" The roots, the sensory facts, are beneath or beyond doubt; in "The Longing" Roethke says, "I would believe my pain: and the eye quiet on the growing rose." Learning a new language in this way, we must divest ourselves at this first stage of all claims to coherence, synthesis, or unity. This is the secular equivalent of the "way of purgation" in "Four Quartets," and it serves a corresponding purpose, because here too humility is endless. If our humility is sufficient, if we attend to the roots, to beginnings, we may even be rewarded with a vision in which beginning and end are one, as in the poem "In Evening Air":

We can see how this goes in the first stanzas of "Where Knock is Open Wide":

A kitten can
Bite with his feet;
Papa and Mama
Have more teeth.

We can take this as pure notation, the primitive vision linking things that to the complex adult eye seem incommensurate. But the adult eye is "wrong," and it must go to school again if it is ever to say, "I recover my tenderness by long looking." Roethke's lines are "intuitions of sensibility," the ground of our beseeching, acts of the mind at the very first stage, long before idea, generalization, or concept. And this is the only way to innocence—or so the poem suggests. Then he says in the second stanza:

Sit and play
Under the rocker
Until the cows
All have puppies.

Here the aimlessness of the kitten stands for the innocence of game and apprehension. The play is nonchalant, and it conquers time by the ease of its reception. Time is measured by the laws of growth and fruition, not by the clock. In this sense it is proper to say, as Roethke does in the next stanza:

His ears haven't time.
Sing me a sleep-song, please.
A real hurt is soft.

In Christopher Smart's "A Song to David" (the source of the title of the present poem) stanza 77 includes the lines:

And in the seat to faith assigned
Where ask is have, where seek is find,
Where knock is open wide.

The cat's ears haven't time because they don't ask for it. If time is for men the destructive element, that is their funeral, and mostly their suicide. "Sing me a sleep-song, please" is a prayer to be released from time. "A real hurt is soft" is an attempt to render human pain as pure description, to eliminate self-pity. And the appropriate gloss is the second stanza of "The Lost Son"—"Fished in an old wound, / The soft pond of repose"—to remind us that the primitive vision is at once harsh and antiseptic. (Roethke himself sometimes forgot this.) Hence these intuitions of rudimentary sensibility are exercises, akin to spiritual exercises, all the better if they are caustic, purgative, penitential. The exercises are never finished, because this is the way things are, but once they are well begun the soul can proceed; the energy released is the rage for a sustaining order.

The search for order begins easily enough in Roethke. Sometimes, as we have seen, it begins in celebration, relishing what there is to relish. Or again it may begin by sounding a warning note. The early poem "To My Sister" is a rush of admonition designed for survival and prudence. "Defer the vice of flesh," he tells her, but on the other hand, "Keep faith with present joys." Later, Roethke would seek and find value in intimations of change and growth, and then in love, normally sexual love. Many of the love poems are beautiful in an Elizabethan way, which is one of the best ways, and whether their delicacy is entirely Roethke's own or partly his way of acknowledging the delicacy of Sir Thomas Wyatt is neither here nor there. Some of the love poems are among Roethke's finest achievements. I would choose "The Renewal," "I Knew a Woman," "The Sensualists," "The Swan," "She," and "The Voice"—or this one, "Memory":

In the slow world of dream,
We breathe in unison.
The outside dies within,
And she knows all I am.

She turns, as if to go,
Half-bird, half-animal.
The wind dies on the hill.
Love's all. Love's all I know.

A doe drinks by a stream,
A doe and its fawn.
When I follow after them,
The grass changes to stone.

Love was clearly a principle of order in Roethke's poems, but it never established itself as a relation beyond the bedroom. It never became dialogue or caritas. Outside the bedroom Roethke became his own theme, the center of a universe deemed to exist largely because it had such a center. This does not mean that the entire universe was mere grist to his mill; he is not one of the predatory poets. But on the other hand, he does not revel in the sheer humanity of the world. Indeed, his universe is distinctly under-populated. Even Aunt Tilly entered it only when she died, thereby inciting an elegy. This is not to question Roethke's "sincerity"; poems are written for many reasons, one of which is the presence of poetic forms inviting attention. But to indicate the nature of Roethke's achievement it is necessary to mark the areas of his deepest response and to point to those areas that he acknowledged more sluggishly, if at all. I have already implied that he responded to the human modes of being only when a specific human relation touched him and he grasped it. He did not have that utter assent to other people, other lives, that marks the best poetry of William Carlos Williams or Richard Eberhart, the feeling that human life is just as miraculous as the growth of an orchid or the "excess" of a rose. Indeed, one might speculate along these lines: that Roethke's response to his father and mother and, in the love poems, to his wife was so vivid that it engrossed all other responses in the human world. It set up a monopoly. And therefore flowers and plants were closer to him than people.

Even when he acknowledged a natural order of things, Roethke invariably spoke of it as if it did not necessarily include the human order or as if its inclusion of that order were beside the point. The natural order of things included moss growing on rock, the transplanting of flowers, the cycle of mist, cloud, and rain, the tension of nest and grave, and it might even include what he calls, rather generally, "the wild disordered language of the natural heart." But the question of the distinctively human modes of life was always problematic. In Roethke's poems human life is endorsed when it manages to survive a storm, as in "Big Wind," where the greenhouse—Roethke's symbol for "the whole of life"—rides the storm and sails into the calm morning. There is also the old florist, standing all night watering the roses, and the single surviving tulip with its head swaggering over the dead blooms—and then Otto.

To survive, to live through the weeds—in Roethke's world you do this by taking appropriate security measures. Property is a good bet. In "Where Knock is Open Wide" there is a passage that reads:

That was before. I fell! I fell!
The worm has moved away.
My tears are tired.

Nowhere is out. I saw the cold.
Went to visit the wind. Where the birds die.
How high is have?

The part we need is the last line, "How high is have?" This virtually identifies security with property. In several poems Roethke will pray for a close relation to God, and this will rate as security, but in the meantime even property in a material sense will help. And because he lived in our own society and sought order from the images of his chaos, security and property normally meant money. In "The Lost Son," for instance, there is this:

And even if he wrote two or three poems to make fun of this, the fact remains: property and the fear of dispossession, money and the lack of it, were vivid terms in his human image. Property was money in one's purse, more reliable than most things—more reliable than reason, for instance.

In his search for a viable and live order Roethke used his mind for all it was worth, but he would not vote for reason. He did not believe that you could pit the rational powers against the weeds of circumstance and hope to win. When he spoke of reason it was invariably Stevens' "Reason's click-clack," a mechanical affair. In one poem Roethke says, "Reason? That dreary shed, that hutch for grubby schoolboys!" Indeed, reason normally appears in his poems, at least officially, as a constriction. Commenting on his poem "In a Dark Time," Roethke said that it was an attempt "to break through the barriers of rational experience." The self, the daily world, reason, meant bondage; to come close to God you had to break through. These things were never the medium of one's encounter with God, always obstacles in its way. For such encounters you had to transcend reason; if you managed it, you touched that greater thing that is the "reason in madness" of King Lear. The good man takes the risk of darkness. If reason's click-clack is useless, there remains in man a primitive striving toward the light. Nature, seldom a friend to man, at least offers him a few saving analogies, one being that of darkness and light. Much of this is given in the last stanzas of "Unfold! Unfold!":

To go where light is: the object is self-possession, sometimes featured as a relation to the world:

I lose and find myself in the long water;
I am gathered together once more;
I embrace the world.

To be one's own man, to come upon "the true ease of myself," to possess oneself so fluently as to say, "Being, not doing, is my first joy"—these are definitive joys when "the light cries out, and I am there to hear." If it requires "the blast of dynamite" to effect such movements, well and good. At any cost Roethke must reach the finality in which, as he says in "Meditation at Oyster River," "the flesh takes on the pure poise of the spirit." (This is his version of Yeats' "Unity of Being.") Hence he admires the tendrils that do not need eyes to seek, the furred caterpillar that crawls down a string, anything that causes movement, gives release, breaks up constriction. In the natural world there is growth, the flow of water, the straining of buds toward the light. And in the poet's craft these move in harmony with the vivid cadence, fluency, Yeats' "tact of words," the leaping rhythm.

For the rest, Roethke's symbolism is common enough. The life-enhancing images are rain, rivers, flowers, seed, grain, birds, fish, veins. The danger signals are wind, storm, darkness, drought, shadow. And the great event is growth, in full light. "The Shape of the Fire" ends:

To have the whole air!
The light, the full sun
Coming down on the flowerheads,
The tendrils turning slowly,
A slow snail-lifting, liquescent;
To be by the rose
Rising slowly out of its bed,
Still as a child in its first loneliness;
To see cyclamen veins become clearer in early sunlight,
And mist lifting out of the brown cattails;
To stare into the after-light, the glitter left on the lake's surface,
When the sun has fallen behind a wooded island;
To follow the drops sliding from a lifted oar,
Held up, while the rower breathes, and the small boat drifts quietly shoreward;
To know that light falls and fills, often without our knowing,
As an opaque vase fills to the brim from a quick pouring,
Fills and trembles at the edge yet does not flow over,
Still holding and feeding the stem of the contained flower.

The flower, contained, securely held in a vase filled with water and light—with this image we are close to the core of Roethke's poetry, where all the analogies run together. The only missing element is what he often called "song," the ultimate in communication, and for that we need another poem, another occasion. One of his last poems, a love poem, ends:

We met to leave again
The time we broke from time;
A cold air brought its rain,
The singing of a stem.
She sang a final song;
Light listened when she sang.

If light listens, if light attends upon a human event, then the event is final. Kenneth Burke has pointed out that Roethke tends to link things, whenever there is a choice, by means of a word in the general vocabulary of communication. We need only add this, that when the relation is as close as a relation can be, the participants "sing," and there is singing everywhere, singing and listening. "The light cries out, and I am there to hear."

Pushed to their conclusion, or followed to their source, these analogies would run straight to the idea of God, or rather to the image of God. And taking such stock in the symbolism of creation and light, Roethke could hardly have avoided this dimension. Nor did he. One of his last and greatest poems is called "The Marrow":

The wind from off the sea says nothing new.
The mist above me sings with its small flies.
From a burnt pine the sharp speech of a crow
Tells me my drinking breeds a will to die.
What's the worst portion in this mortal life?
A pensive mistress, and a yelping wife.

One white face shimmers brighter than the sun
When contemplation dazzles all I see;
One look too close can make my soul away.
Brooding on God, I may become a man.
Pain wanders through my bones like a lost fire;
What burns me now? Desire, desire, desire.
Godhead above my God, are you there still?
To sleep is all my life. In sleep's half-death,
My body alters, altering the soul
That once could melt the dark with its small breath.
Lord, hear me out, and hear me out this day:
From me to Thee's a long and terrible way.

I was flung back from suffering and love
When light divided on a storm-tossed tree;
Yea, I have slain my will, and still I live;
I would be near; I shut my eyes to see;
I bleed my bones, their marrow to bestow
Upon that God who knows what I would know.

The first stanza is all alienation—from nature and man and the self. The second is preparation for prayer, a relation with God as the light of light, source of the sun. The third is the prayer itself to the ground of all beseeching. In the fourth and last stanza the loss of self-hood is associated with the breakup of light on a storm-tossed tree, the emaciation of the human will; and then the last gesture—the voiding of the self, restitution, atonement (a characteristic sequence in late Roethke).

From the poems I have quoted, it might seem that Roethke was concerned with only one thing—himself. And this is true. But in his case it does not mean what it usually does. It does not mean that he is thrilled by his own emotions or that he spends much time in front of his mirror. The saving grace in Roethke, as in Whitman, is the assumption that he is a representative instance, no more if no less. When Roethke searches for value and meaning he assumes that this is interesting insofar as it is representative and not at all interesting when it ceases to be so. This is the source of Roethke's delicacy, as of Whitman's. When he says, in "I Need, I Need," "The Trouble is with No and Yes," or when he says, in "The Pure Fury," "Great Boehme rooted all in Yes and No," he advances this choice as a universal predicament rather than a proof of his own tender conscience. Again, in "The Waking" and other poems of similar intent, when he says, "I learn by going where I have to go," he is not claiming this as a uniquely sensitive perception; the line points to areas of feeling important because universal. And when he says, "Light takes the Tree; but who can tell us how?" the question is given with notable modesty, although indeed Roethke could have staked a higher claim for it, since it is the basis of several of his own religious poems. The motto for this delicacy in Roethke is a line from "The Sententious Man": "Each one's himself, yet each one's everyone." And there is the "Fourth Meditation" to prove that Roethke was never really in danger of solipsism.

With these qualifications, then, it is permissible to say that he was his own theme and to consider what this means in the poems—with this point in mind, however, that Whitman's equations were not available to Roethke. Roethke was not content to think of the self as the sum of its contents, even if he had Yeats to tell him that a mind is as rich as the images it contains. He would try to accumulate property, but only because he thought of property as a protective dike; behind the dike, one could live. But he never thought of this as having anything to do with the "nature" of the self. The self was problematic, but not a problem in addition. In one of his last and most beautiful poems, "In a Dark Time," he said:

A man goes far to find out what he is—
Death of the self in a long, tearless night,
All natural shapes blazing unnatural light.

Dark, dark my light, and darker my desire.
My soul, like some heat-maddened summer fly,
Keeps buzzing at the sill. Which I is I?

That is still the question. In the early poems Roethke held to the common romantic idea of "the opposing self," the self defined by its grappling with the weeds of circumstance; hence, as Hopkins said, "Long Live the Weeds." Much later, Roethke was to consider this more strictly, notably in a poem like "The Exorcism," where he asks in a beguiling parenthesis, "(Father of flowers, who / Dares face the thing he is?)" And this question is joined to several bacterial images of man partaking uneasily of several worlds, beasts, serpents, the heron and the wren. In "Weed Puller" man is down in a fetor of weeds, "Crawling on all fours, / Alive, in a slippery grave."

Many of the middle poems feature a declared loss of self, often given as division, absence. In "Where Knock is Open Wide" Roethke says:

I'm somebody else now.
Don't tell my hands.
Have I come to always? Not yet.
One father is enough.

Maybe God has a house.
But not here.

There is a similar feeling in "Sensibility! O La!" and in "The Shimmer of Evil" perhaps the most explicit of all versions is, quite simply, "And I was only I"—which leads almost predictably but nonetheless beautifully to "There was no light; there was no light at all." The later poems tend to reflect upon the nature of the self by listing its demands; behind the love poems there is the assertion that "we live beyond / Our outer skin" even when the body sways to music. And much of this feeling culminates in the lovely "Fourth Meditation," which begins with many intuitions of sensibility and goes on to this:

This is a later version of the predicament, loss of self, which cries through the middle poems. In "The Lost Son" he says:

Snail, snail, glister me forward,
Bird, soft-sigh me home.
Worm, be with me.
This is my hard time.

And a few lines later we read: "Voice, come out of the silence. / Say something." But there is no song in that "kingdom of bang and blab." In Roethke's poems song is proof that infinity clings to the finite. In "Old Lady's Winter Words" he says, "My dust longs for the invisible." What he wants is given in phrase, image, and rhythm: "the gradual embrace / of lichen around stones"; "Deep roots"; and, quite directly:

Where is the knowledge that
Could bring me to my God?

The only knowledge is reason in madness.

Theodore Roethke was a slow starter in poetry. He survived and grew and developed without attaching himself to schools or groups. He was never a boy wonder; he was never fashionable as the Beat poets were fashionable; most of the currents of easy feeling left him untouched, unmoved. He never set up shop as a left-wing poet or a right-wing poet or a Catholic poet or a New England poet or a Southern poet or a California poet. He never claimed privilege in any region of feeling. This was probably as good for his poetry as it was bad for his fame. He made his way by slow movements, nudgings of growth, like his own plants and flowers. But he grew, and his poems got better all the time—so much so, that his last poems were his greatest achievements, marvelously rich and humane. Along the way he was helped by friends, often poets like Louise Bogan and Marianne Moore, but this is another story, not mine to tell. He was, however, helped also by other writers, earlier poets, and some of this story may be told, and the telling should disclose something of the poetry. Clearly, he was a careful, scrupulous poet. There are lines and phrases here and there that show that he was prone to infection, picking up things from lesser poets, like Dylan Thomas, and keeping them beyond the call of prudence. But the poets who really engaged him were those who offered him a challenge, a mode of feeling, perhaps, that he himself might not possess, or possessed without knowing that he did. The Elizabethan song-poets, and especially John Donne, challenged him in this way, and his own love poems reflect not only their own feeling but the strenuous competition of the Elizabethan masters. And then there were poets like Davies and Smart who disclosed certain modes of feeling and belief that were not so deeply a personal challenge but a measure of the time in which we live. And there were the great modern masters whom he could hardly have avoided hearing. He learned a lot from T. S. Eliot—mainly, I think, how to be expressive while holding most of his ammunition in reserve. And this often comes through the verse as a cadence, as in this passage from "I'm Here":

At the stream's edge, trailing a vague finger;
Flesh-awkward, half-alive,
Fearful of high places, in love with horses;
In love with stuffs, silks,
Rubbing my nose in the wool of blankets;
Bemused; pleased to be;
Mindful of cries,
The meaningful whisper,
The wren, the catbird.

Consider the rhetoric of the short phrase, at once giving and taking; Eliot is a great master in these discriminations. Think of this passage in "East Coker":

In the middle, not only in the middle of the way
But all the way, in a dark wood, in a bramble,
On the edge of a grimpen, where is no secure foothold,
And menaced by monsters, fancy lights,
Risking enchantment.

Other cadences Roethke got from other poets—from Hopkins, notably, especially from "The Wreck of the Deutschland," which Roethke uses in the poem about the greenhouse in a storm, "Big Wind":

But she rode it out,
That old rose-house,
She hove into the teeth of it,
The core and pith of that ugly storm…

From Joyce Roethke learned one kind of language for the primitive, the rudimentary, the aboriginal, especially the Joyce of the Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, bearing hard on the first chapter; and Finnegans Wake showed him one way of dealing with the unconscious. And there is Wallace Stevens. Roethke disapproved of Stevens' procedures in argumentative theory, but in fact he learned some fundamental lessons from Stevens. When he says, "I prefer the still joy," he is Stevens' pupil, conning a lesson he could well have done without. And I think he found in Stevens a justification of, if not an incitement to, his own propensity for the "pure moment." In one of his later poems he says, "O to be delivered from the rational into the realm of pure song." And if pure song is pure expression or pure communication, it is also close to Stevens' "hum of thoughts evaded in the mind." Stevens seems to me to be behind those poems in which Roethke longs for essence, for an essential "purity," or finds it in a still moment. He records it in a passage like this, for instance, from the "First Meditation":

And Stevens is behind those poems in which Roethke presents the "single man" who contains everything:

His spirit moves like monumental wind
That gentles on a sunny blue plateau.
He is the end of things, the final man.

When Whitman comes into the later poems, such as "Journey to the Interior," he shows Roethke how to deal with natural forms without hurting them, so that "the spirit of wrath becomes the spirit of blessing"; or how to give one thing after another without lining them up in symbolist rivalry, so that he can say "Beautiful my desire, and the place of my desire"; or how to preserve one's own integrity even when beset by "the terrible hunger for objects." But Whitman was a late consultant to Roethke. Much earlier, and toward the end of his poetic life, he attended upon Yeats' poems and contracted debts handsomely acknowledged in the "In Memoriam" and again in "The Dance." To Roethke—or so it seems from the poems—Yeats stood for the imperious note, concentration, magnificent rhetoric clashing against the bare notation, the dramatic play of self and soul.

What's madness but nobility of soul
At odds with circumstance? The day's on fire!
I know the purity of pure despair,
My shadow pinned against a sweating wall.

That place among the rocks—is it a cave,
Or winding path? The edge is what I have.

It peters out somewhat. Yeats would not have praised the last line. But the rest is very much in Yeats's shadow, particularly the Yeats of "Coole Park and Ballylee, 1931." The dramatic occasion; the landscape, moralized with a large showing; the poet, finding correspondences and emblems in herons, wrens, swans; nature with her tragic buskin on—these are the Yeatsian gestures. And, to take them a little further, Roethke knows that if he proposes to learn a high rhetoric he must do it in earnest. So he begins with the magisterially rhetorical question, then the short declaration, not yet intimate, "The day's on fire!" and only then the despair. And even now it is given as knowledge rather than romantic exposure, so that even the shadow, the other self, is presented as an object of contemplation before the poet acknowledges the feeling as his own in "a sweating wall."

One of the odd things in this list of relationships, however, is that it is quite possible to think of Roethke as one of the best modern poets without troubling about the fact that he was, after all, an American poet. When reading Stevens or Frost or Williams or Robert Lowell we are constantly aware that we are reading American poets; but this is not an insistent element in Roethke. Indeed, it is quite clear that he bears no special relation to either of the dominant traditions in American poetry—New England and the South. Temperamentally he is not too far away from such writers as Hawthorne, Melville, or James. Like them, in his quite different way, he was concerned with the wounded conscience, the private hazard. But while it is obviously proper in some sense to relate the poems of Robert Lowell to this tradition, it has little bearing on Roethke's work. And the tradition of the South can be ruled out. This suggests that the discussion of American literature in terms of these two traditions may by now have lost much of its force. To think of the New England tradition as scholastic, autocratic, and logical, and the Southern tradition as humanistic, Ciceronian, grammatical, and rhetorical is fine as far as it goes, but its relevance clearly fades in regard to poets like Roethke. This may well be the point to emphasize, that Roethke and many of the poets of his generation took their food wherever they could find it. Yeats could well be more useful to them than, say, Hawthorne, because they saw their problems as being human, universal, in the first instance, and American problems only by application and inference. Roethke committed himself to his own life. He thought of it as a human event of some representative interest. And he set himself to work toward lucidity and order without turning himself into a case study entitled "The Still Complex Fate of Being an American." This is one aspect of Roethke's delicacy. Contemporary American poets, for the most part, are not going his way; they insist upon their complex fate and would not live without it. But Roethke's way of being an American is an eminently respectable way, and part of his achievement is that he makes it available to others.

"The Far Field" is a distinguished example of this delicacy. It has four unequal sections. The first is a dream of journeys, journeys without maps, featuring imprisonment, attenuation of being, the self "flying like a bat deep into a narrowing tunnel" until there is nothing but darkness. It is life in a minor key, diminished thirds of being. The second stanza translates these into major terms, images of force, aggression, suffering, death, dead rats eaten by rain and ground beetles. But the poet, meditating upon these images, thinks of other images, of life, movement, freedom, everything he means by "song." And these natural configurations lead to thoughts of life as cycle, evolution and return, proliferations of being, the whole process of life, which the poet calls "inifinity"; what Wallace Stevens in "The Bouquet" calls "the infinite of the actual perceived, / A freedom revealed, a realization touched, / The real made more acute by an unreal." In the third section the poet feels a corresponding change in himself, a moving forward, a quickening, and as he commits himself to earth and air he says, "I have come to a still, but not a deep center." Naturally it feels like a loss, another diminution of being, even if the sense of life-ordained process is strong. And this feeling leads straight into the fourth and last section:

The lost self changes,
Turning toward the sea,
A sea-shape turning around,—
An old man with his feet before the fire,
In robes of green, in garments of adieu.

A man faced with his own immensity
Wakes all the waves, all their loose wandering fire.
The murmur of the absolute, the why
Of being born fails on his naked ears.
His spirit moves like monumental wind
That gentles on a sunny blue plateau.
He is the end of things, the final man.

All finite things reveal infinitude:
The mountain with its singular bright shade
Like the blue shine on freshly frozen snow,
The after-light upon ice-burdened pines;
Odor of basswood on a mountain-slope,
A scent beloved of bees;
Silence of water above a sunken tree:
The pure serene of memory in one man,—
A ripple widening from a single stone
Winding around the waters of the world.

Roethke says: "The end of things, the final man"; Stevens asserts in "The Auroras of Autumn":

There is nothing until in a single man contained,
Nothing until this named thing nameless is
And is destroyed. He opens the door of his house
On flames. The scholar of one candle sees
An Arctic effulgence flaring on the frame
Of everything he is. And he feels afraid.

The difference is that Stevens identifies the man with his imagination, and his imagination with his vision—and insists upon doing so. And the imagination feeds upon as much reality as it can "see" and values only that; what it can't see won't hurt or help it. The scholar has only this one candle. Roethke's man is not a scholar at all, or if he is, he is an amateur, perhaps a mere teacher. His imagination is partly his memory, which offers hospitality to sights, sounds, and smells, and partly his conscience, and partly his feeling for modes of being that he cannot command, directions that he cannot chart. Hence his poems are the cries of their occasions, but rarely cries of triumph. This is what makes his later poems the noble things they are, stretchings of the spirit without fantasia or panache. "Which is the way?" they ask, and if they include God in their reply they do so with due deference, knowing that one can be "too glib about eternal things," too much "an intimate of air and all its songs."

Another way of putting it is that the poems, especially the middle poems, are cries of their occasions, sudden, isolated cries. The later poems turn cries into prayers, praying for a world order, a possible world harmony of which the cries are part, like voices in polyphony. The self in exposure is monotone; a sustaining society is polyphony; God is the Great Composer. The poet's ideal is the part song, music for several instruments, what the Elizabethans called "broken music." In "In Evening Air" Roethke says, "I'll make a broken music, or I'll die." In such poems as "The Marrow" and "In a Dark Time" he made a broken music at once personal and—in Stevens' sense—noble. And then, alas, he died.