Theodore Roethke (1908–1963)

This collection is a mixed bag. I’m rating it with five stars anyway, for when Roethke was good, he was very good. I liked in particular “The Lost Son.” It has a language and themes all its own and gives the feeling it could have been written by no other poet. There are many other fine ones as well. I’m struck by how many good love poems he wrote, as incongruous as they seem in company of those in which he rages in the mire of physical life. Throughout, there is the contention between flesh and spirit and the awareness of death. Many images are recurrent: stone, snail, snake, and the basic elements, especially fire and water. He was also obsessed with birds and—son of the greenhouse—flowers.
A telling line from “What Can I Tell My Bones” seems a key to Roethke’s perceptions and obsessions: “The dead love the unborn.” Roethke is intensely aware that his particular person is part of a great network of being, connected not only to all of nature (animate and inanimate) but to all that came before or will come. His yearning for reconnection with this leads not only to the imagery of rebirth; his longing extends to a recapitulation of evolution. The self-referential “worm,” conventionally in the pen of other writers an expression of self-loathing (at times in Roethke as well), is, for him, a sign of kinship.
Roethke’s nursery poems point in the same direction, a recapturing of simplicity. For the most part, however, these songs of experience-informed innocence don’t work for me. Nevertheless, there are many poems in this book that I’ll return to again and again.… (mais)