Who would ever dare to recycle the 1975 Doubleday/Anchor edition of The Collected Poems of Theodore Roethke ? Surely only someone who'd long since replaced that $3.95 paperback with a newer edition, the likes of which I have not even seen or bothered to look into, suspecting that the poems have not been revised posthumously.
I don't mind the dated cover graphic of the little yellow sun-blob above a row of four blobby trees, one taller yellow and one taller blue tree (crowns vaguely linden-like) flanked by smaller green blob trees, perhaps coniferous cedars.
I've hung onto my 20-something paperback Roethke, repairing its broken back several years ago with chiropractic Scotch tape, continuing to leaf through it now and again to read an old favorite, sometimes to my nature-loving wife, who teaches high-school English, but usually to myself.
The book has served me well since I bought it in 1976, at the Grolier Book Shop in Cambridge, I believe—the year I moved to the Boston area from the Appalachian Ohio state-college town where I had gone to school. It serves me well still.
But somebody around the corner from me on Henry Street in Cambridgeport—let's say a woman around my middle age—threw her copy out. Let's assume, perhaps wrongly, that she didn't replace her copy either, finding Roethke a bit too apolitical, and that she hadn't read this one in so long—not since the course she took at Brandeis on modern poetry—that she just figured she may as well get rid of it.
I found it where she'd left it on a recent rainy night when I was out for my nightly walk. She had placed the Roethke neatly atop a stack in the blue plastic bucket the city provides for recyclable materials. In the morning it would be whisked away to the central distribution center, and driven from there, probably, out Route 2 to the paper mill in Irving, soon to be converted to the paper product writers most fear being remaindered to. Roethke had not been thrown out in the trash, exactly; there was some concession in the promise of being converted.
By drizzly yellow streetlight, with my eye out for the reusables I sometimes collect—little white metal three-shelved storage cabinets good for stashes of gardening supplies, wicker-work wastebaskets with frayed reeds, slightly decrepit shower racks for hanging soaps and shampoos from—I spotted him like an old friend I once knew so well that I hardly have to speak with him now to know what's going on with him.
I can tell just by looking whether he's keeping himself in shape, being productive, having a happy home life. And Roethke, on first appearance on top of that stack, looked just fine. I reached for the book instinctively as if to shake the old friend's hand (someone I don't even hang around with anymore) and was picking it up to look at it (even though I had a friend just like that at home) when this analogy died of natural causes.
The book fell open to the table of contents and its 23-year chronology of Roethke's writings. I noticed the date (1941) of his first book, Open House, and its five sections of lyrical poems, measured, I remembered, by rhyme and meter, a lot of them full of Roethke's familiar affection for nature and his somewhat preachy disgust with human folly; predictably Romantic in sentiment perhaps with its longings for release to the animated otherworld, yet relieved by frequent surprises of elated expression.
First I read a few lines from "Long Live the Weeds," a poem, titled after a line in Hopkins, which illustrates his lifelong effort at primal release and identification with nature.
Next I couldn't resist reading, right there in the rain to see what it had to offer, "The Reminder," the first of several poems he would publish about his Prussian-immigrant father.
I liked the precise particularity of those images—geranium, cat, and wheat—recollected from early childhood in "bed-sitting room confusion"; the focusing apostrophe to the unnamed father figure and the denial and doom suggested by the winding of the watch and the pulling of "the green shade against morning sun"; and the prosodic pun on his rhymed and metered lines in his description of the "strict and formal order" of the wheat.
The poem worked for me as a concise and pointed catalogue of poignant images, and also because it reminded me of a poem from his second book, The Lost Son and Other Poems (1948), that I'd turn to next. "My Papa's Waltz," without a doubt his most anthologized poem, was written in a similarly respectful but damaged spirit about the man who "beat time on my head/With a palm caked hard by dirt,/Then waltzed me off to bed/Still clinging to your shirt."
Before I continued along the sidewalk to the river for a look across the water at the fogbound skyscrapers of Boston, I checked the rest of the paper tower rising from the blue recycling barrel on Henry Street.
My distant neighbor—maybe not a Brandeis grad after all but a town-meets-gown city councilor guy too busy debating zoning issues to read much poetry—had also brought up from the mildewed basement (for now I sniffed a familiar must) his archive of paperback leftist political philosophy books. From Hegel to Marx. "Revolt of the Masses." "One-Dimensional Man." All of them easily converted to toilet paper.
Theodore Roethke (1908–1963) taught at the University of Washington in Seattle. He was a talented tennis player (according to a friend's father, who had him for freshman comp at Penn in the 1940s).
These are the credentials of a bourgeois academic, for sure. And yet he wrote like a drum-beating wild man and had an unfortunate need to check into the psychiatric ward on occasion to check his mania.
His last poems take after the litanizing Whitman and make way for the Deep Image movement of the '60syet he continued to acknowledge T.S. Eliot as the master. It's Eliot's advice from the sublime "Four Quartets" that Roethke's answering, with decisive concision, at the end of "The Longing."
(An extended Salvaged Poems of Theodore Roethke feature article is online at ArtsEditor.com )
Feeds