220 PA RT T W O
Snail, snail, glister me forward,
Bird, soft-sigh me home.
Worm, be with me.
This is my hard time.His happy marriage in 1953 buoyed the spirit—“I knew a woman, lovely in
her bones”—yet later poems from the northwest pursue a “long journey out
of the self ” into “raw places / Where the shale slides dangerously.” His line
lengthens:
The arroyo cracking the road, the wind-bitten buttes, the canyons,
Creeks swollen in midsummer from the flash-flood roaring into the narrow
valley.Moving into these straits, his lines can close in too:
The way blocked at last by a fallen fir-tree,
The thickets darkening,
The ravines ugly.In the Michigan greenhouse poems, things germinating matched his own grow-
ing pains. Now the west holds out a starker psychic landscape.
North American Sequence enters place after place to “move as the mind moves”:
to “be a stream, winding between great striated rocks in late summer”; to “rock
with the motion of morning, /... By the lapping of water”; to “rise and fall
in the slow sea of a grassy plain”; to “live with the rocks, their weeds, / Their
filmy fringes of green”; to “sway outside myself / Into the darkening currents.”
The Pacific Northwest, Puget Sound, Olympic Peninsula become an existential
test site. Roethke ’s terrain, “half-land, half-water,” blends life and death for
him, “becoming and perishing, /... Gathering to itself sound and silence— /
Mine and the sea-wind ’s.”
As Roethke pushes from small things and greenhouse fleshliness toward the
mind ’s “far field,” contraries coexist. A Yeatsian poem intones prophetically,
In a dark time, the eye begins to see,
I meet my shadow in the deepening shade...
A man goes far to find out what he is—
Death of the self in a long, tearless night.Then he seizes the rhyme to see “All natural shapes blazing unnatural light,” like
Blake. Yet unlike Blake he never abhors the physical world in favor of pure vi-
sion. Roethke ’s late poems cleave to some topographic “place of my desire.”
His landscapes and seascapes are anything but idyllic, with daffodils glisten-
ing beside a breezy lake. Often dusty and scraggly, they stay touchable: rocks,
waters, plants, animals. Sooner than most poets, Roethke ’s eye caught man-
made waste and spoilage. When a boy digging moss to line cemetery baskets,