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This week: Theodore Roethke Edited by: Stormy Lady  
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The Far Field
by Theodore Roethke
I
I dream of journeys repeatedly:
Of flying like a bat deep into a narrowing tunnel
Of driving alone, without luggage, out a long peninsula,
The road lined with snow-laden second growth,
A fine dry snow ticking the windshield,
Alternate snow and sleet, no on-coming traffic,
And no lights behind, in the blurred side-mirror,
The road changing from glazed tarface to a rubble of stone,
Ending at last in a hopeless sand-rut,
Where the car stalls,
Churning in a snowdrift
Until the headlights darken.
II
At the field's end, in the corner missed by the mower,
Where the turf drops off into a grass-hidden culvert,
Haunt of the cat-bird, nesting-place of the field-mouse,
Not too far away from the ever-changing flower-dump,
Among the tin cans, tires, rusted pipes, broken machinery, --
One learned of the eternal;
And in the shrunken face of a dead rat, eaten by rain and ground-beetles
(I found in lying among the rubble of an old coal bin)
And the tom-cat, caught near the pheasant-run,
Its entrails strewn over the half-grown flowers,
Blasted to death by the night watchman.
I suffered for young birds, for young rabbits caught in the mower,
My grief was not excessive.
For to come upon warblers in early May
Was to forget time and death:
How they filled the oriole's elm, a twittering restless cloud, all one morning,
And I watched and watched till my eyes blurred from the bird shapes, --
Cape May, Blackburnian, Cerulean, --
Moving, elusive as fish, fearless,
Hanging, bunched like young fruit, bending the end branches,
Still for a moment,
Then pitching away in half-flight,
Lighter than finches,
While the wrens bickered and sang in the half-green hedgerows,
And the flicker drummed from his dead tree in the chicken-yard.
-- Or to lie naked in sand,
In the silted shallows of a slow river,
Fingering a shell,
Thinking:
Once I was something like this, mindless,
Or perhaps with another mind, less peculiar;
Or to sink down to the hips in a mossy quagmire;
Or, with skinny knees, to sit astride a wet log,
Believing:
I'll return again,
As a snake or a raucous bird,
Or, with luck, as a lion.
I learned not to fear infinity,
The far field, the windy cliffs of forever,
The dying of time in the white light of tomorrow,
The wheel turning away from itself,
The sprawl of the wave,
The on-coming water.
III
The river turns on itself,
The tree retreats into its own shadow.
I feel a weightless change, a moving forward
As of water quickening before a narrowing channel
When banks converge, and the wide river whitens;
Or when two rivers combine, the blue glacial torrent
And the yellowish-green from the mountainy upland, --
At first a swift rippling between rocks,
Then a long running over flat stones
Before descending to the alluvial plane,
To the clay banks, and the wild grapes hanging from the elmtrees.
The slightly trembling water
Dropping a fine yellow silt where the sun stays;
And the crabs bask near the edge,
The weedy edge, alive with small snakes and bloodsuckers, --
I have come to a still, but not a deep center,
A point outside the glittering current;
My eyes stare at the bottom of a river,
At the irregular stones, iridescent sandgrains,
My mind moves in more than one place,
In a country half-land, half-water.
I am renewed by death, thought of my death,
The dry scent of a dying garden in September,
The wind fanning the ash of a low fire.
What I love is near at hand,
Always, in earth and air.
IV
The lost self changes,
Turning toward the sea,
A sea-shape turning around, --
An old man with his feet before the fire,
In robes of green, in garments of adieu.
A man faced with his own immensity
Wakes all the waves, all their loose wandering fire.
The murmur of the absolute, the why
Of being born falls on his naked ears.
His spirit moves like monumental wind
That gentles on a sunny blue plateau.
He is the end of things, the final man.
All finite things reveal infinitude:
The mountain with its singular bright shade
Like the blue shine on freshly frozen snow,
The after-light upon ice-burdened pines;
Odor of basswood on a mountain-slope,
A scent beloved of bees;
Silence of water above a sunken tree :
The pure serene of memory in one man, --
A ripple widening from a single stone
Winding around the waters of the world.
On May 25, 1908, Theodore Huebner Roethke was born in Saginaw, Michigan. His father, Otto Roethke and his mother Helen Huebner owned a local greenhouse. Roethke spent his childhood helping his parents in the greenhouse. At the age of fifteen, Roethke lost his father to cancer. This tragic event made Roethke even more determined to pursue his creative talents. Though the rest of the family wanted him to attend law school after graduation, Roethke would only stayed in for one semester. Roethke took graduate courses at the University of Michigan and later the Harvard Graduate School, but the great depression would cause Roethke to drop out of Harvard.
Roethke began teaching in 1931, at Lafayette College. He stayed there for four years before moving on to teach at Michigan State College at Lansing. This was short lived, Roethke had a mental breakdown and was hospitalized. Roethke would have many recurrences of depression over his life time. In 1936 Roethke went back to teaching at Pennsylvania State University. He taught there for the next seven years. It was during his time Roethke was published in such journals as Poetry, the New Republic, the Saturday Review, and Sewanee Review. His first volume verse, "Open House," was published in 1941. Two years later he left Penn State to teach at Bennington College. Roethke's second volume, "The Lost Son and Other Poems" was published in 1948. Roethke was awarded Guggenheim Fellowship in 1950. Then one year later, Poetry magazine Levinson Prize. In 1952, he was awarded major grants from the Ford Foundation and the National Institute of Arts and Letters.
In 1953 Roethke married Beatrice O'Connell a former student. Roethke did not inform his new bride of his battles with depression, yet through it all she stayed with him. On their honeymoon Roethke started editing his book, The Waking: Poems 1933-1953 which was published later that same year, winning him the Pulitzer Prize in 1954. In 1955 Roethke and his wife started a year long tour of Europe on a Fulbright grant. Then in 1957 he published "Words for the Wind," winning the Bollingen Prize, the National Book Award, the Edna St. Vincent Millay Prize, the Longview Foundation Award, and the Pacific Northwest Writer's Award for it.
On August 1, 1963, while swimming in a friends pool, Roethke suffered a fatal heart attack at 55. The pool, located on Bainbridge Island, is now filled and is a zen rock garden, which can be viewed by the public. After her husbands death O'Connell published his last volume of poetry "The Far Field" in 1964. This book received the National Book Award.
The Survivor
by Theodore Roethke
I am twenty-four
led to slaughter
I survived.
The following are empty synonyms:
man and beast
love and hate
friend and foe
darkness and light.
The way of killing men and beasts is the same
I've seen it:
truckfuls of chopped-up men
who will not be saved.
Ideas are mere words:
virtue and crime
truth and lies
beauty and ugliness
courage and cowardice.
Virtue and crime weigh the same
I've seen it:
in a man who was both
criminal and virtuous.
I seek a teacher and a master
may he restore my sight hearing and speech
may he again name objects and ideas
may he separate darkness from light.
I am twenty-four
led to slaughter
I survived.
The Waking
by Theodore Roethke
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
I feel my fate in what I cannot fear.
I learn by going where I have to go.
We think by feeling. What is there to know?
I hear my being dance from ear to ear.
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
Of those so close behind me, which are you?
God bless the Ground! I shall walk softly there,
And learn by going where I have to go.
Light takes the Tree; but who can tell us how?
The lonely worm climbs up a winding stair;
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
Great Nature has another thing to do
To you and me; so take the lively air;
And, lovely, learn by going where to go.
This shaking keeps me steady. I should know.
What falls away is always. And is near.
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
I learn by going where I have to go.
Thank you all!
Stormy Lady
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The winners of "Stormy's poetry newsletter & contest" [ASR] are:
First Place:
I place my words before you
My shattered soul laid bare
My hands shake in horror
At what an empty shell I share
I stack the tainted pages
And my pen I set aside
As I realize that my writing
Is my only place to hide
Second Place:
| |  | Invalid Item
This item number is not valid.
#1867988 by Not Available. |
Pages of clay
Tainted hands may never tell
but words will ever say
what the empty soul doth pen
on pages made of clay.
-
The time so spent in dreaming
of when our ship comes in
are days of doing nothing
while waiting to begin.
-
Tainted hands may never tell
but time will ever say
in words that we have written
on pages made of clay.
Third Place:
So empty is the night
My hands tainted with my longing thoughts
To my soul I say at last
Is this to words or words to my writing pen
Filling the sky tonight
As I long for another chance
Like pages of my other life
My tainted soul bemoans my fading sight
To the endless reaches
Hands out-stretched toward the sky
Declaring all my wanting heart
To my tainted soul's demise
Sunlight settles upon the sky
Masking shadows of the night
And to my empty life be won
Tainted pages of my soul's bequest
Oh sorry is the day
My hand writes words that don't display
Empty feeling I try disguise
My soul repents to my dying eye
So once again I pen
Woeful words that reside within
To my loss I shall not claim
My life to you forever is my shame
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Poetry: June 06, 2012 Issue [#5084]
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