THEODORE ROETHKE FROM GREENHOUSE TO SEASCAPE 221“afterwards I always felt mean” for “pulling off flesh from the living planet.”
He notices “young rabbits caught in the mower,” a “ravaged hillside,” “slug-
gish water running between weeds, broken wheels, tires, stones,” or “sulfurous
water” where “A fish floats belly upward.”
“The Longing” does more. Starting from a landscape ’s “sensual emptiness”
of “cockroaches, dead fish, petroleum,” fuming “slag heaps... garbage,”
Roethke turns up fresh scenes, “the blackening salmon... the branch singing.”
But after “delighting in the redolent disorder of this mortal life,” jarringly he
recalls early frontier slaughter.
On the Bullhead, in the Dakotas, where the eagles eat well,
In the country of few lakes, in the tall buffalo grass at the base of the
clay buttes,
In the summer heat, I can smell the dead buffalo,
The stench of their damp fir drying in the sun,
The buffalo chips drying.In his day it wasn’t much known that Indians also practiced mass slaughter.
Shortly before his death, Roethke was reading up for a dirge on our injustices: “it
behooves us to be humble before the eye of history.” He knelt before the grave
of Chief Seattle, who surrendered his territory in 1854, saying (as remembered
by a witness, thirty years later), “There was a time when our people covered
the land as the waves of a wind-ruffled sea cover its shell-paved floor.... The
very dust upon which you now stand responds more lovingly to their footsteps
than to yours.”
Like William Stafford—“I place my feet / with care in such a world,” and
Gary Snyder cobbling a mountain trail—“Lay down these words / Before your
mind like rocks,” Roethke ties his craft to nature ’s process.
God bless the Ground! I shall walk softly there,
And learn by going where I have to go.His gut sense of earthly closeness tallies with Native American belief, the Yokuts
Indian chanting “My words are tied in one / With the great mountains, / With
the great rocks, / With the great trees.”
At the same time a need, part anguish part joy, drives Theodore Roethke
“out of the self ” toward ecstasy, a kind of dance:
The spirit moves,
Yet stays:
Stirs as a blossom stirs.In North American Sequence, “The Rose” closes on another dancelike motion
and stillness, whose verses also move and stay,