218 PA RT T W O
Rampant verbs generate a changing changeless biosystem of uncannily hu-
man plant life: “breathing... pulsing... swelling... creaking... crawling
... swaying... stretching... winding and unwinding... shooting up...
devouring.”
Talking about growth of any kind, Roethke insists it ’s not naïve but primitive,
in the best sense, to see soul animating all of nature. Animism, we call this, and
“Why not? Everything that lives is holy.” “I mean allliving things,” he says,
“including the sub-human,” though subhuman implies a hierarchy he denied,
so let ’s say nonhuman. Scanning his early verse, we don’t find Wordsworthy
daffodils or Frosty birches but Roethke revering every kind of lowlife: sand,
stones, dirt, dust, dead leaves, weeds, thistle, thorn, straw, moss, fern, fungus,
mold, muck, manure, dung, ground bones, lime, loam, scum, algae, marrow,
marl, marsh, bog, puddle, husk, seed, bulb, bud, pod, stem, slip, shoot, sprout,
tendril, and then some. Think of Whitman in Song of Myself, spanning “the
peace and knowledge that pass all the argument of the earth” on down to “mossy
scabs of the worm fence, heap’d stones, elder, mullein and poke-weed.”
So much for the so-called inanimate world. As for animals, literature has
given us the Bible ’s Leviathan, Beowulf ’s dragon, Christopher Smart ’s cat
Geoffry, Milton’s, Coleridge ’s, Dickinson’s, Lawrence ’s, Kunitz’s snakes,
Blake ’s Tyger, Melville ’s whale, Whitman’s eagles copulating in air, Yeats’s
“rough beast,” Rilke ’s panther, Elizabeth Bishop’s moose, Ted Hughes’s fox,
pike, and otter. Roethke leans toward the slug, worm, fly, moth, midge, wasp,
bee, grub, beetle, cicada, caterpillar, shrew, lice, rat, field mouse, bat, toad, newt,
crab, eel, spider, mollusk, and “small birds” too, the swallow, finch, towhee. He
welcomes “The small! The small! I hear them singing clear.”
The world ’s singing fuses with his own, just as he heard cut stems sucking
“In my veins, in my bones.” If Keats hears a nightingale “pouring forth thy
soul” and Shelley a skylark “That panted forth a flood of rapture so divine,”
Roethke finds in minnow or snail “A small thing, / Singing.” For his friend Stan-
ley Kunitz’s daughter, he danced thumped and chanted a children’s poem.
There Once was a Cow with a Double Udder.
When I think of it now, I just have to Shudder!
She was too much for One, you can bet your Life:
She had to be Milked by a Man and His Wife.The little girl burst into tears and crawled under the sofa.
When later it comes to love poems, nature still pervades but with a freer lilt.
Love, love, a lily’s my care,
She ’s sweeter than a tree.
Lovingly I use the air...