Can Poetry Save the Earth?: A Field Guide to Nature Poems

THEODORE ROETHKE FROM GREENHOUSE TO SEASCAPE 217

In “Cuttings (later)” the speaker’s become a spellbound child.

This urge, wrestle, resurrection of dry sticks,

Cut stems struggling to put down feet,

What saint strained so much,

Rose on such lopped limbs to a new life?

I can hear, underground, that sucking and sobbing,

In my veins, in my bones I feel it,—

The small waters seeping upward,

The tight grains parting at last,

When sprouts break out,

Slippery as fish,

I quail, lean to beginnings, sheath-wet.

From vaginal “beginnings, sheath-wet,” a self emerges, kin to the vegetal birth
around him. And holy dread clings to the verse: “wrestle... resurrection...
struggling... saint... strained... lopped limbs... sobbing... I quail.” Some
mystery draws him down into a world that clasps his turbulent inner world
too.
No wonder William Carlos Williams cheered these poems when Roethke
sent them—Williams, whose “Spring and All” has things “enter the new world
naked,” where “rooted, they / grip down and begin to awaken.” Roethke had
darker leanings than Williams. His greenhouse lyrics, published in The Lost
Son,owe their turbulence partly to a gardener father with a “palm caked hard
by dirt.” Overbearing if also nurturing, he died when Roethke was fourteen, a
son not yet sure of his manly standing.
“Root Cellar,” for instance, scours memory—“My memory, my prison,” he
once said—for a threatening growth, his hellish roots of life.

Nothing would sleep in that cellar, dank as a ditch,

Bulbs broke out of boxes hunting for chinks in the dark,

Shoots dangled and drooped,

Lolling obscenely from mildewed crates,

Hung down long yellow evil necks, like tropical snakes.

And what a congress of stinks!—

Roots ripe as old bait,

Pulpy stems, rank, silo-rich,

Leaf-mold, manure, lime, piled against slippery planks.

Nothing would give up life:

Even the dirt kept breathing a small breath.

Flower bulbs, but lolling like a dog’s tongue, obscenely? Long yellow necks, but
evil? “It was a jungle, and it was a paradise,” Roethke said of his teeming youth.
Tapping into a child ’s fascination, every line emits words like reeking com-
post. Organic and sexual, this decay in the same breath ferments with growth.