SOURCE: "The Words of Their Roaring: Roethke's Use of the Psalms of David," in The David Myth in Western Literature, edited by Raymond-Jean Frontain and Jan Wojcik, Purdue University Press, 1980, pp. 156-67.

Theodore Roethke's long Praise to the End! sequence is probably best approached through Roethke's own guide to perception: "We think by feeling. What is there to know?" Indeed, it is one of the few long sequences in modern poetry that can be read aloud, dramatically, and erupt into meaning solely by means of its sounds and images. Yet, for those of us who must know as well as feel, the sequence is extremely complex and thus difficult to explicate. Though Roethke insisted he did not "rely on allusion," he suggested many of the ancestors for these poems and among the sources he first mentions is the Bible. He notes one direct quotation from Job, but the more fertile source material is that of the Psalms, especially those traditionally attributed to David. Although their authorship is debated by modern biblical scholars, these songs have for centuries formed part of the mythical and literary reality of that heroic figure, a man who knew triumph and despair, power and persecution, and who ordered his most intense experiences by shaping them with music. It is toward that persona, that popular image of the lyric side of David, that Roethke reaches in his own unique way. The Psalms contain dramatic emotional correlatives for Roethke's protagonist and their rhetoric and images provide the means by which the two voices can blend in their singing.

An immediate link between the Psalms and the Praise sequence is suggested by parallels in rhetorical patterns. A great many Psalms begin with invocation: "Hear the right, O Lord," "Plead my cause, O Lord," "Our Lord, Our Lord, how…," "Help, Lord," "My God, my God…" The protagonist in Roethke's poems uses similar invocations, "God, give me a near" ("Where Knock is Open Wide"), but the object addressed soon becomes quite different: "Hear me, soft ears and roundy stones" ("I Need, I Need"), "Voice, come out of the silence" ("The Lost Son"). As the sequence progresses, Roethke invokes metaphoric spirits which come from dreams or the unconscious: "You child with a beast's heart," and "Mother of blue and many changes of hay," and "You tree beginning to know" ("Give Way, Ye Gates").

Another example, "Worm, be with me," is a perfect echo of David and the pattern found so often in the Psalms: the address follows, or is followed by, the imperative. "Bow down thine ear, O Lord" (86:1), "Judge me, O Lord" (26:1), "Preserve me, O God" (16:1), "O Lord, rebuke me not" (6:1). There is much of the same in Roethke, and the pattern creates an immediacy, a rare sense of drama. "Delight me otherly, white spirit," he says in "I Cry Love! Love!" and "Lave me, ultimate waters" ("Praise to the End!"), or, in another mood, "Renew the light, lewd whisper" ("The Shape of the Fire").

The pattern is used for both exhortation and supplication. When David wishes revenge on his enemies, the tone is tense and demanding: "Destroy, O Lord, and divide their tongues; for I have seen violence and strife in the city" (55:9); "Arise, O God, plead thine own cause: remember how the foolish man reproacheth thee daily" (74:22). When he laments, the tone of the Psalmist is one of supplication: "Be merciful unto me, O God, be merciful unto me; for my soul trusteth in thee" (57:1), and, "O Lord, rebuke me not in thy wrath" (38:1). Roethke also uses exhortation and supplication, more and more often as the Praise sequence progresses and the poems gain intensity. For example, "Believe me, knot of a gristle, I bleed like a tree" ("Give Way, Ye Gates"), or "Mamma! Put on your dark hood: / It's a long way to somewhere else" ("Sensibility! O La!"). In the softer tones: "Sooth me, great groans of underneath, / I'm still waiting for a foot" ("O Lull Me, Lull Me"); "Voice, come out of the silence, / Say something, / Appear in the form of a spider" ("The Lost Son"). Or simply: "Father, forgive my hands" ("Praise to the End!").

To read this sequence aloud is to become acutely aware of how often Roethke uses these patterns, how strong the biblical echoes are. And we might well ask why a modern poet would choose such "archaic" forms in which to deliver his very contemporary song. An answer is immediately clear: the effect is incredibly powerful. Speech is formalized and intensified and all verbal excesses, all temptations to philosophize, are eliminated. The short, tight forms present the emotion with an immediacy that touches us far more quickly than any metaphor could. Indeed, there is a literalness in this language which is rare in modern poetry, and yet the mystery remains. When Roethke or David uses invocation, the object addressed, be it the Lord or a "white way to another grace" metamorphoses, quickens, as we are forced to focus on it so sharply. In marvelous contrast to the dramatic lines such rhetoric produces, the lyric passages in Roethke become all the more musical. Listen, for example, to the contrast in two stanzas from "I Cry Love! Love!":

Mouse, mouse, come out of the ferns,
And small mouths, stay your aimless cheeping:
A lapful of apples sleeps in this grass.
That anguish of concreteness!—
The sun playing on loam,
And the first dust of spring listing over backlots,—
I proclaim once more a condition of joy.
Walk into the wind, willie!
…..

A fish jumps, shaking out flakes of moonlight.
A single wave starts lightly and easily shoreward,
Wrinkling between reeds in shallower water,
Lifting a few twigs and floating leaves,
Then washing up over small stones.

There is another rhetorical connection. Mitchell Dahood, in The Anchor Bible, mentions that "the dominating principle of… Biblical poetry is… that of balance or symmetry, the famous parallelismus membrorum." This balance shows most clearly in pairs of synonyms: rejoiceexault, foe-adversary, devoted ones-faithful ones. But the translators of the Psalms usually provide a balance in rhythm or rhetorical structure also. Thus we hear David sing "I will praise thee, O Lord, among the people; and I will sing praises unto thee among nations" (108:3), and "All night I make my bed to swim; I water my couch with tears" (6:6).

Again, Roethke takes advantage of the Psalms pattern, especially as he moves from entreaty to celebration. The effect is incantatory. "You tree beginning to know, / You whisper of kidneys" ("Give Way, Ye Gates") leads to "In the high noon of thighs / In the springtime of stones" in the same poem. In "Praise to the End!" the youth urges: "Speak to me, frosty beard. / Sing to me, sweet," and, having heard the singing, prays: "Wherefore O birds and small fish, surround me. / Lave me, ultimate waters." The repetition sometimes intensifies, sometimes clarifies, as it does when the poet balances an abstraction in one line with something quite concrete in the next: "I could say hello to things; / I could talk to a snail" ("O Lull Me, Lull Me").

Such rhetorical similarities invite a more direct comparison of the two protagonists, but the relationship is subtle, oblique. The ancient heroic lad who faced Goliath with only a sling in his hand lends his voice to a modern child whose battles are all internal and whose giant is a ghost. This protagonist struggles slowly and painfully toward some understanding of his personal tragedy and his present condition. When Roethke reaches toward the David image, therefore, he seeks not a literal but an emotional reference for his sequence. The Psalms create for us David the singer, the poet-king who tells us of his great sorrows and his great joys, a lost son who seeks understanding and forgiveness from his Father. There is no lasting triumph for this singer; instead, the shifts of mood and tone and spiritual condition come through the powerful lyric poetry and we find ourselves alternately rejoicing or weeping as we read. And so we do for the lost son of this Roethke sequence, of which the poet says, "… 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… is bound to be a succession of experiences, similar yet dissimilar. There is a perpetual slipping back, then a going forward; yet there is some 'progress.'"

There are certain "facts" which become clear as the sequence progresses, however, that relate to those in the Psalms: events, themes, plot, and images. A central event is the death of the father, seen through the eyes of a very young child at the end of the first poem, "Where Knock is Open Wide." "He was all whitey bones / And skin like paper," the child says, sharing with us the traumatic event which colors all his perceptions. His instinctive emotional response to this event, "Kisses come back, / I said to Papa," establishes the intense feelings of loss, separation, and lack of love and communion which determine the child's response to all external sights and sounds. His rational response to the event, "God's somewhere else" and "Maybe God has a house. / But not here," explains his sense of isolation and his continuing quest for a place or a time in which he can be enclosed by love.

The poems which follow in the sequence record that quest, described by John Wain as central to art, "an endeavor to break down the isolation of the human being… to bring us into a fruitful contact with something" ["The Monocle of My Sea-Faced Uncle," Theodore Roethke: Essays on the Poetry, edited by Arnold Stein, 1965]. Wain goes on to say that Roethke is an "evangelical writer," that "the intensity of his lyric gift sprang directly from the hunger that raged at its center—a hunger for salvation." Such hunger is also at the center of the Psalms, and the implied dramatic situation—of a passionate, lonely person with great emotional gifts and needs, awaiting and seeking reconciliation, union—could provide Roethke with just enough structure to shape his account of the restless psyche.

As Karl Malkoff notes [in Theodore Roethke: An Introduction to the Poetry, 1966], "the main themes of the entire sequence—birth and death, sexual guilt and confusion, separation from the father and God (the 'lost son' motif)—are explicitly considered in the first poem." The themes are reiterated constantly, but always from a different point of reference and usually with some novel linguistic rendering. As the child grows up, he seeks solace from the mother, from associations with his past, from all elements of nature. His understanding comes after numerous descents to the "pit," a place familiar to David. To Roethke, the pit symbolized the far reaches of a regressive journey, a place of mire, of primordial slime. These journeys are often accompanied by scenes of masturbation and consequent guilt, until the protagonist finally comes to realize a union with all things, which is sensual and ultimately sexual, for the regressive journeys have set off a fish-sperm association and, by extension, a fish-father-death-womb-water-life-light sequence. The young man's awareness of the cycle brings him, finally, to a sense of his own identity and to the understanding that "What the grave says, / "The nest denies" ("Unfold! Unfold!") that

We met in a nest. Before I lived.
The dark hair sighed.
We never enter
Alone.
["I Cry Love! Love!"]

The profound perception is reiterated in the final poem of the sequence, "O, Thou Opening, O":

The dark has its own light.
A son has many fathers.
Stand by a slow stream:
Hear the sigh of what is.

There is much more. The physical growth of the persona is accompanied by a parallel spiritual development; the union is mystical also. So too with the protagonist's aesthetic progress, for the child moves from a "small sing" in the first poem to a point where the grown persona cries in "Unfold! Unfold!":

Sing, sing, you symbols! All simple creatures,
All small shapes, willow-shy,
In the obscure haze, sing!

As Roethke's sequence opens, the tie to David is immediate, albeit indirect. The title of the first poem, "Where Knock is Open Wide," is from Christopher Smart's A Song to David. Smart asserts "Strong is the lion…," and in verse 77:

The unique diction renders Smart's version of Matthew 7:7, "Ask, and it shall be given you; seek, and ye shall find; knock, and it shall be opened unto you." Roethke's debt to Smart went beyond the use of that line for the title poem, for he also practices some of Smart's grammatical conversions and thus enlivens the rhetoric of the child protagonist. The title has implications which go beyond the original context, of course; it can have sexual connotations or even refer to the literal as well as the spiritual birth of a child. But the important thing, Smart's devotion to David, cannot be denied. His Song has 86 verses and he also did poetic "translations" of a number of the Psalms, many of which were set to music. Surely Roethke knew of this homage.

Interestingly, another poet whom Roethke cites was also especially devoted to David. Traherne was mentioned the first time Roethke spoke of "ancestors" for this sequence, and in a letter to John Crowe Ransom, Roethke mentions that it was Traherne's prose that most influenced him. In the "Third Century" Traherne says,

but as I read the Bible I was here and there Surprised with such Thoughts and found by Degrees that these Things had been written of before, not only in the Scriptures but in many of the fathers and that this was the Way of Communion with God in all Saints, as I saw Clearly in the Person of David. Me thoughts a New Light Darted in into all his Psalms, and finally spread abroad over the Whole Bible. [Traherne: Centuries, Poems, and Thanksgivings, edited by H. M. Margoliouth, 1958]

After speaking of his new vision, Traherne wrote his own poem about David and then explicated some of the Psalms, giving contemporary exegetical associations. In Thanks givings, Traherne echoes David strongly, seeing with David's poetic vision.

When Roethke was working on this sequence, with just a few of the poems done, he wrote to Kenneth Burke, "But God, I need a larger structure; something dramatic: an old story,—something. Most of the myths are a bore, to me. Wish I could talk to you about it." His search quite obviously took him to the Bible, for his long poem, "The Lost Son" (first done for a collection with that title and later placed at the center of the Praise to the End! collection), contains a direct quote from Job 30:28, "Hath the rain a father?" And perhaps the words of Elihu to Job inspired the "plot" of the sequence: "His flesh shall be fresher than a child's: he shall return to the days of his youth" (Job 33:25), and "Lo, all these things worketh God oftentimes with man," "To bring back his soul from the pit, to be enlightened with the light of the living" (Job 33:29, 33:30).

The path from the pit to the places of light is long and difficult for adolescent or king, and Roethke fills his journey with an amazing number of images which are also found in the Psalms. Many of these images are traditional symbols, found often in our Western literature, but the Psalms provide an original emotional context for our poet. When Roethke echoes the pleading and anguish of David, he assimilates David's images and invests them with modern psychological symbolism. Thus the pit, for example, is not a place where evildoers are punished, as David saw it, but a dark, subconscious area in the psyche of the boy. It is a necessary stop on the journey of the spirit, and its exploration, however painful, can lead to union.

As we saw, it is easy to tie the theme of return to childhood to some later verses in Job, but the Psalms also open with images of generation and birth: "I will declare the decree: the Lord hath said unto me, Thou art my Son; this day have I begotten thee" (2:7). In the first poem of Roethke's sequence the child tells us: "Once upon a tree / I came across a time," and most critics agree that the time the child comes to is a prenatal time, a point at which he can ask "What's the time, papa-seed?" and when he can tell us "My father is a fish." The tree image is reiterated throughout the sequence, connected most often with sexual awakening or awareness. In an early poem he tells us, "When I stand, I'm almost a tree. / Leaves, do you like me any?" ("Bring the Day!"), and later we hear "Believe me, knot of gristle, I bleed like a tree," and mention of "You tree beginning to know" ("Give Way, Ye Gates"). In "Sensibility! O La!"—in a time of joy—he notes, "I'm a twig to touch," and in "Unfold! Unfold!" he says "I stretched like a board, almost a tree." The idea of potency, caught by the image of a tree, is introduced early in the Psalms: "And he shall be like a tree planted by the rivers of water, that bringeth forth his fruit in his season; his leaf also shall not wither" (1:3). Later, with joy, David tells us "But I am like a green olive tree in the house of God" (52:8).

Roethke's choice of the voice of a child for these early poems is surely striking and appropriate, for David tells us, in Psalm 8:2, "Out of the mouth of babes and suck lings hast thou ordained strength because of thine enemies, that thou mightest still the enemy and the avenger." The enemy of Roethke's child is the ghost of the father, a ghost he must "still" and one that he finds in the wind or in the long grass. David's spiritual Father flies "on the wings of the wind" (18:10) and we know he spoke to Job from a whirlwind. Though Roethke's child comes to accept the wind later in the sequence, his first utterances are tense and compressed, showing the grammatical conversions Christopher Smart was so fond of. "How high is have?" he asks, "Have I come to always?" Or he sighs "Nowhere is out," or pleads "God, give me a near." This last clause has often been misprinted "God, give me an ear," an error which indicates just the kind of audible ambiguity Roethke intended. But it also echoes a number of David's cries: "Hear me when I call, O God" (4:1); "Give ear to my words, O Lord" (5:1); "Hear my prayer, O Lord, give ear to my supplication" (143:1); and finally, "Give ear to my voice, when I cry unto thee" (141:1).

At another moment the child begs, "Fish me out. / Please." A strange image for a child to use, and difficult to explain, until we see that the Psalmist also used it: "He sent from above, he took me, he drew me out of many waters" (18:16), and again: "Deliver me out of the mire, and let me not sinketh: let me be delivered from them that hate me, and out of the deep waters" (69:14). David, in that same Psalm, moans "I am weary of my crying," a condition we noted before, in Psalm 6:6, where he tells us "I am weary with my groaning; all the night I make my bed to swim; I water my couch with my tears." In a beautiful contraction, intensified by the unusual rhetoric, the child tells us simply "My tears are tired."

In a regressive stage, Roethke's protagonist often mentions "a worm." In the first poem he cries, "A worm has a mouth. / Who keeps me last?" and later: "It's still enough for the knock of a worm" ("Praise to the End!"). In "The Lost Son" is an early incantation, "Worm be with me. / This is my hard time." The image and the rhetoric belong to David also, in a song spoken from the same despairing mood: "But I am a worm, and no man; a reproach of men," and a few lines later: "Be not far from me; for trouble is near" (22:6 and 11). Similarly, and just as much a puzzle, is the boy's plea, "Bird, soft-sigh me home" ("The Lost Son"). The object of this address seems very general, until we note that David often cried to the Lord to hide him "in the shadow of thy wings," and connected the image with the soul in 11:1: "In the Lord put I my trust: how say ye to my soul, Flee as a bird to your mountain." For the modern poet, the image carries the weight of physical and spiritual connotations and is offered in terms as lovely. In "Give Way, Ye Gates": "Such music in a skin! / A bird sings in the bush of your bones." And in the poem just previous:

O small bird awakening,
Light as a hand among blossoms,
Hardly any old angels are around any more.
["Bring the Day"]

Often repeated in Roethke's sequence is the image of bones, a reminder to readers of his very first book of published poems. There, in the first poem, "Open House," he presented himself as utterly open, "naked to the bone." This kind of nakedness meant total involvement for the persona, and the image grew in meaning in a later poem, "Cuttings (later)," when the speaker felt in his veins and in his bones the "sucking and sobbing" of the plant beginning to root. In the most intimate moments of the Praise sequence, Roethke uses the bone imagery to express the intense emotions felt by the persona. At first the association is frightening: papa, dead, is "all whitey bones," and later he tells us "I dreamt I was all bones; / The dead slept in my sleeve." As he regresses in this poem, "Praise to the End!" he asks "Can the bones breathe? This grave has an ear." At the end of "The Lost Son," in a time of communion, he sees the light moving slowly "over the dry seed-crowns, / The beautiful surviving bones / Swinging in the wind," but just previous to this, in the heart of a "storm," he says "My veins are running nowhere. Do the bones cast out their fire?" At the very beginning of this poem, in fact, in a time of fear and longing for understanding, he tells us "I shook the softening chalk of my bones."

The Psalmist uses almost the same words in his expression of his fear and impotence: "I am poured out like water, and my bones are out of joint" (22:14). In fact, the bone imagery appears throughout the Psalms, just as it does in the Roethke sequence. In 31:10, David moans: "My strength faileth because of my iniquities, and my bones are consumed"; in 32:3, "When I kept silence, my bones waxed through my roaring all the day long"; and, in a joyful song, "He [the righteous] keepeth all his bones: not one of them is broken" (34:20). In the depths again: "Our bones are scattered at the grave's mouth" (141:7).

The most impressive connection of the sequence with the Psalms is probably the abundance of imagery associated with the pit or the mire. For Roethke, the journey backward was also a journey into the dark, the pit. He tells us: "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 process; an effort to be born, and later, to become something more." When he wrote the "Lost Son" poem, before the others in this long sequence, he titled one of the sections "The Pit," indicating that "The Flight" of the previous section would take one to this dark interior. Any reading of the Psalms is bound to impress one with the same imagery, for the fear of the pit was omnipresent and we see that the wicked are always condemned to it (30:3, 30:9, 28:1, etc.). For David, the pit is dug by the offender, as we see in 7:15: "He made a pit, and digged it and is fallen into the ditch which he made." We feel his joy in his deliverance in 49:2: "He brought me up also out of the horrible pit, out of the miry clay, and set my feet upon a rock." When Roethke's protagonist comes to understanding, it is in reconciliation with the images of the pit, the "miry clay," as well as all else. He tells us in "Unfold! Unfold!": "I was far back, farther than anybody else," and describes how far that was:

I was privy to oily fungus and the algae of standing waters;
Honored, on my return, by the ancient fellowship of rotten stems.

Those images announce the move toward joy and light, a place both singers knew very well. In later poems Roethke often uses images of dancing to exclaim his joy; at one point he tells us "And everything comes to One, / As we dance on, dance on, dance on" ("Once More, The Round"). But the steps of that dance start here, in the final parts of this sequence, when his protagonist "danced in a simple wood." David also danced as he spoke to the Lord, "Thou has turned for me my mourning into dancing" (30:11). And the joy extends into new songs, too, as we see when David announces his faith in the Lord: "And now shall mine head be lifted up above mine enemies round about me: therefore will I offer in his tabernacle sacrifices of joy; I will sing, yea, I will sing praises unto the Lord" (22:7). In 40:3 we see that he has been brought up out of the pit, and immediately he says: "And he hath put a new song in my mouth." Again, in 144:9, the same impulse: "I will sing a new song unto thee, O God." For Roethke's protagonist the awakening brings a new awareness:

I'm more than when I was born;
I could say hello to things;
I could talk to a snail;
I see what sings!
What sings!
["O Lull Me, Lull Me"]

In the final poem of the sequence he tells us "I've crept from a cry," "I sing the green, and things to come, / I'm king of another condition, / So alive I could die!" ("O, Thou Opening, O").

Such joy, such exaltation, is possible for all men, as David sees them in 103:15: "As for man, his days are as grass: as a flower of the field, so he flourisheth"; and it extends to all creation, too, for we see in Psalm 65 that God touches all things on earth and in the heavens, so that "the pastures are clothed with flocks; the valleys also are covered over with corn; they shout for joy, they also sing" (65:13). The realization comes also for the persona of Roethke's sequence, sometimes in the wild joy we have seen above, sometimes in the same image of the field which emanates life. The blessings were there, around him all the time, but the knowledge of such glory was hard to accept. In the first poem the child cried "Maybe God has a house. / But not here." At the end of the sequence he sees

A house for wisdom: a field for revelation.
Speak to the stones, and the stars answer.
At first the visible obscures:
Go where the light is.
["Unfold! Unfold!"]

Theodore Roethke's work remains largely untouched by this investigation. The Praise sequence has many fathers, and is enormously rich in other themes and images, yet Roethke knew the wealth the Psalms held and was not afraid to sing with David's voice when he needed it. He acknowledged his debt to all his "ancestors" when he said: "In their harsh thickets / The dead thrash. / They help." I believe he was thinking of David when he wrote

See what the sweet harp says.
Should a song break a sleep?
["O, Thou Opening, O"]

He answered affirmatively, awaking the harpist, so they could sing together.