The American Century: Literature since 1945 553alliterated, with a preponderance of heavy stresses, open vowels, and participles, to
create an effect of enormous effort and evolutionary struggle; instead of imposing
order on experience (all experience, conscious, subconscious, and preconscious) he
tries to discover the order latent in it. This ties in with an alteration of idiom.
“Approach these poems as a child would,” Roethke instructed, “naively, with your
whole being awake, your faculties loose and alert.” As he dwelt on primeval life, so he
naturally gravitated toward a more subliminal language: the intuitions of folklore,
fairy tale, and myth, shapes that lurk “Deep in the brain, far back.”
Of growing up in the Midwest, Roethke once said: “Sometimes one gets the feeling
that not even the animals have been there before, but the marsh, the mire, the void
is always there.... It is America.” Roethke’s poetry is a poetry of the self, certainly, but
it is also a poetry of the West, in that it is concerned with the frontiers of existence,
the ultimate, inchoate sources of being. This is particularly noticeable in some of the
later work, where the poet lights out, beyond childhood and the natural world, for
the unknown territory of racial memory: a journey backward into unindividuated
experience that then in turn becomes part of a general, evolutionary process forward.
Talking of the poems that made up his third volume, Praise to the End! (1951), for
instance, Roethke said, “Each ... is complete in itself; yet each is a stage in a ...
struggle out of the slime.” “The method is cyclic,” he continued. “I believe that to go
forward as a spiritual man it is necessary to go back.... There is a perpetual slipping-
back, then going-forward; but there is some ‘progress.’ ” Acting on this belief, Roethke
modeled such poems as “Where Knock is Open Wide” and “Unfold! Unfold!” on an
archetypal pattern in which the heroic protagonist – in this case, the poet – travels
into a nightworld, suffering perhaps a dark night of the soul, conquers the dangers
he meets there, and then returns to lead a fuller, more inclusive life in the daylight
realm of ordinary existence. Ancient and familiar as the tale may be, however, what
gives it an air of unfamiliarity is Roethke’s way of telling it. He compresses language
and syntax into abrupt, dream-like units. At its most extreme, when the frontiers of
individual consciousness are crossed and “the dead speak” (that is, the inhabitants of
the collective unconscious utter their communications), Roethke presents us with
what he calls a “whelm of proverbs,” a speech as primitive as folk-saying, as
subhuman, almost, as an animal cry. Along with such mutterings of a rudimentary
sensibility, Roethke telescopes imagery and symbols and employs rhythms that are
primeval, even oracular in their effect. All this he does because, instead of simply
reporting the journey to the frontiers of being as many other writers have done,
he is trying to recreate it. He is inviting the reader to share in the departure to the
interior and the return. If the reader accepts this invitation, then he or she can also
share in the moments of revelation, that knowledge of the correspondences of life,
on which each of these pieces ends.
“Often I think of myself as riding – ” observes the narrator of one of Roethke’s
later poems, “ / Alone, on a bus through western country.” “All journeys, I think,
are the same,” she says a little later. “The movement is forward, after a few wavers.”
The narrator here is an old woman, modeled partly on the poet’s mother; and the
poem from which these observations are taken, “Meditations of an Old Woman,”GGray_c05.indd 553ray_c 05 .indd 553 8 8/1/2011 7:31:31 PM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 31 : 31 PM