A Costly Vision

America is the land of system, at least as far as its poets are concerned. The critics tell the poets what to do, speaking in the pages of a thousand college reviews, and by and large the poets follow their mentors. The result of course is the construction of a great many artificial verbal gardens. The problem of growing real flowers in imaginary gardens – or vice versa – may for many of them never be encountered. Roethke does not smell like a poet constructed by the critics. Here are an old lady’s winter words, spoken to herself in a moment between exultation and rage:

Somewhere, among the ferns and birds
The great swamps flash.
I would hold high converse
Where the winds gather,
And leap over my eye,
An old woman
Jumping in her shoes.
If only I could remember
The white grass bending away,
The doors swinging open,
The smells, the moment of hay –
page 639 When I went to sea in a sigh,
In a boat of beautiful things.
The good day has gone:
The fair house, the high
Elm swinging around
With its deep shade, and birds . . .

The weakness of such poetry is its arbitrary personal choice of images. Its strength, however, far outweighs its weakness. As in a Faulkner story, one is brought inside somebody else’s secret self; one sees through their eyes, one feels the world at their finger-tips. It is in fact paradisal poetry, for Roethke depends on the moment of pure illumination when trees do walk and fish do speak to the wandering child hidden in the body of an oldish man. Perhaps this is also to say that Roethke’s poetry depends to some extent on the reader’s intuitive perception of the poet’s absolute sincerity. This is what William Blake demanded of us. Roethke also demands it; and we have often to give assent, since Roethke’s world is unquestionably superior to our own, more haunted, more terrible, more natural, more angelic.

His angel (thank God) has the feet of a beast. It may not be beside the point to remember that Roethke had several marital adventures and misadventures, that he drank again, stopped drinking and drank again, that he taught in a college and was helplessly attracted by some of his students, that he served time in mental hospitals. He was, one might say, a modern sensitive man. He was also Orpheus torn to pieces by the Maenads, whose head floated down the Hebrus crying out – ‘Eurydice!’ His Eurydice was undoubtedly that secret centre where the soul touches God and the creation at the same moment. And he never lost sight of it.

His last poems are his best because the doors have finally opened wide, a moment or two before the time of silence, and the creation no longer denies itself to the poet. The dead are talking in his bones. In a universe of almost unbearable solitude the poet is able to walk free. His America is actual and unfallen, a spiritual landscape where every natural happening has its reverberation in the human heart. There is no mention of the towers of Manhattan. He has gone back to the moment just before the first Indian looked at his own reflection at the edge of one of the Great Lakes. Roethke is that Indian. But the cost of the vision must have been absolute.

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