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hey were to me,” says Theodore Roethke
(1908–1963), recalling the greenhouses of his childhood, “both heaven and hell,
a kind of tropics created in the savage climate of Michigan.” Roethke ’s father and
his grandfather, who’d been head forester to the German chancellor Bismarck,
had wild timberland outside Saginaw and greenhouses on a twenty-five-acre
clearing in the city. These humid glass enclosures for growing flowers on a huge
scale became “my symbol for the whole of life, a womb, a heaven-on-earth.”
“Cuttings,” close and sensuous, dreams of an Eden astir with organic begin-
nings.
Sticks-in-a-drowse droop over sugary loam,
Their intricate stem-fur dries;
But still the delicate slips keep coaxing up water;
The small cells bulge;
One nub of growth
Nudges a sand-crumb loose,
Pokes through a musty sheath
Its pale tendrilous horn.Visceral, visual, palpable, with “sugary” taste, “musty” smell, and gut u-sounds
in every line. This prehuman yet sexual plant life—sticks, loam, stem, slips, cells,
crumb, sheath, tendril, horn—actually grows across the stanza break, quickened
by Roethke ’s terse verbs: drowse, droop, dry, coax, bulge, nudge, poke.
“I swayed out on the wildest wave alive”
Theodore Roethke from Greenhouse to Seascape
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