THEODORE ROETHKE FROM GREENHOUSE TO SEASCAPE 219Sheisa lily, somehow “sweeter than a tree,” and the poet ’s caring is happy to
rhyme on “air.” Taking after “Western Wind,” these “Words for the Wind”
weave weather into loving.
The wind ’s white with her name,
And I walk with the wind....
She sways, half in the sun.Roethke alliterates himself and her into the elements.
A spell of loneliness also exposes this bond. “The shoal rocks with the sea”
in a supple line learned from Yeats, then Roethke tests his own voice,
I sing the wind around
And hear myself return
To nothingness, alone,and ends “His Foreboding” on an elemental omen:
I sniff the darkening air
And listen to my own feet.
A storm’s increasing where
The winds and waters meet.Shot through by nature ’s light and dark, the lover sounds like Thomas Hardy,
writing as if life depended on getting all this into verse.
“How wonderful the struggle with language is,” Roethke tells his notebook.
“The words grappling across my tongue, things never said coming across the
lip’s threshold.” Carolyn Kizer, once his student, recalls Roethke ’s compassion
and attentiveness: “He was fanatic about active verbs” and distrusted adjec-
tives. Drafts for “Cuttings” show more than twenty prunings and graftings to
get a line right. We need “sensory sharpness,” he would say, “the eye close on
the object,” like Dickinson perusing a hummingbird. Then we need “a speech
so flexible... we ’re alive to every nuance that the language has.” Always the
“rhythm must move as a mind moves,” must have a “psychic energy” that re-
creates reality.
“Every sentence a cast into the dark,” says Roethke. “Make the language
take really desperate steps.” At forty-four, “in that particular hell of the poet: a
longish dry period... I thought I was done,” a washout, a fraud. Suddenly, in
one evening, he composed “The Dance.” “I felt, I knew, I had hit it. I walked
around and I wept; and I knelt down,” he tells us, and “I wept for joy.”
Mental breakdowns dogged Roethke, who said he ’d be content in heaven
“If they let you eat and swear / With the likes of Blake, / And Christopher
Smart, / And that sweet man, John Clare.” Yet he never wavers from nature.
Small things help him pray at his father’s grave: