"Summoning Roethke" by J.A. Bernstein
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Every time I teach Roethke to undergraduates, at least one of them drifts off to sleep. Worse, it’s usually one of the better ones. This is because Roethke invariably falls late in the term, well after Shakespeare, Cervantes, Austen, and Ellison, and the best students are almost always the ones working long hours outside class. Nothing frustrates me more, though, because no poet, no writer, in fact, has ever moved me like he.
Stumbling upon his “Greenhouse Poems” as an undergraduate, sure, I was wowed by his verse. But it was only later, as a graduate student holed up in the carrels one night and poring over a dissertation on British trench poetry that I had no desire to write, that I discovered The Far Field, Roethke’s masterwork of ’64, which was published posthumously, and realized what language could do.
Speaking with Kevin Young in The New Yorker in 2019, Peter Balakian, himself an acclaimed poet and author of Theodore Roethke’s Far Fields (1989), explains that Roethke “is anthologized poorly,” adding that he’s mostly known for his “mid-fifties, Yeatsian formal poems.” Some of these poems—“The Waking,” “Root Cellar,” “My Papa’s Waltz”—are obviously brilliant, and heart-rending, at times, too. But none, in my judgment, merits a third or fourth read, and none of them are terribly complex. Yet, and perhaps for this reason, they tend to be the ones reproduced in volumes like The Norton Anthology, which, for generations, have served as reliable doorstops or study-guides for the GRE, depending on the student’s aims.
I myself came to the same realization as Balakian, especially after reading—or being stunned by, to put it bluntly—Roethke’s later, more free-flowing works, many of which are collected in The Far Field. Although they still bear what Balakian rightly calls “the confessional” aspects of The Lost Son (1948) and earlier works, the poems of The Far Field tend to be far more digressive in theme and almost meandering in form. They’re deeply metaphysical at points, even enigmatic. “The Far Field” in particular, the book’s titular poem, involves a series of impressions and recollections, ranging from philosophical meditations to reflections on the natural world. The first time I read it, it sent an actual chill through my spine. I read it again and again and realized, as I suppose every fledgling writer must do, that I never wanted to write creatively again because I could never do what he had in this verse. To call this poem beautiful would be analogous to a youthful playground shooter stumbling upon Michael Jordan lighting up Larry Bird for 63 points in the ’86 Playoffs in Boston. This was beyond the recorded limits of what language could do.
I never looked at my dissertation again—at least not with any seriousness—and all of the writing I’ve done since then, I’ve gathered, has been a failure in comparison, which is in its own way an uplifting fact.
The hardest part for me, however, isn’t writing like Roethke—that I’ll never do, nor even begin to conceive of—but teaching him effectively, or allowing my students to have the same experience as me.
This never works, of course.
Each time I prepare for my class, I envision having some Robin Williams moment, where I’ll convey to them the importance of poetry, and the eternalness of verse, and have them realize, if they haven’t already, that the world, even though it’s an otherwise horrifying place populated by self-serving leaders—our current President especially—hellbent on wrecking the Earth, also contains endless moments of beauty, small islands of resolve, and tiny instances of wonder and glory and hopefulness and love that great poets, including Roethke, describe.
I want them to see that this is what he gets at when he writes:
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…
That simple assonance in “moving, elusive as fish,” or the mystery and magic of the way he makes lists—“Cape May, Blackburnian, Cerulean,” as if the sounds were meant to leap off the tongue before the mind processed them—is simply uninterpretable. There’s frankly nothing I can say of any substance about Roethke’s poem that isn’t better understood by reading it.
Yes, I can explain that he died of a heart attack a year later while swimming in a friend’s pool, or that he was a seasoned alcoholic for much of his adult life, and despite being a committed patient of psychiatric wards, he was also a devoted teacher and friend (perhaps a little too devoted in the case of some female students, as one biographer, Allan Seager, implies). He probably wouldn’t even be taught today if the world knew half of his deeds. Per Seager’s biography, when the President of Bennington College received a letter from the mother of one of Roethke’s students assenting to the marriage she expected between him and her daughter, Roethke was asked not to return to his teaching post.
Or I can mention how his poetry wrestles with the Absolute, in the tradition of Donne, Hopkins, and Whitman, but without any semblance of religiosity, or at least any conventional one. (I happen to think a Gnosticism, or basic mysticism, underlies much of his verse.) Finally, I could add that the final lines—
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.
—call into question the very value of language, which, like memory, is transient and impervious to meaning, and yet able to transmit, if only for a second, the very essence of what a person might feel. I want to convey to my students that what poetry does above all, and Roethke above others, is help us see the world, not outside of ourselves as much as in our hearts, and in our own thoughts and words and expressions. For Roethke, language, like nature, is a love unto itself, a human gift that we’ve acquired, and one in which we’ll invariably fail but must still endeavor, not unlike the winding “waters of the world.”
None of the students get this. I look like a fool. I undoubtedly do a disservice to him, consigning to the shelves of bookstores another required text that I want them to feel, breathe, and crave. In short, I want every one of them to become a writer, as I have tried to be, because it is the only kind of life that I know. Perhaps that makes me a bad teacher, and Roethke a bad guide, but I see of no other way, shape, or form.
Maybe he’s just a relic of another time, but I’ll go on teaching his poetry, preaching the way, if I can.
J. A. Bernstein is the author of four published or forthcoming volumes, including a novel, Rachel’s Tomb (New Issues, 2019), which won the Association of Writers & Writing Programs Award Series Prize; and a chapbook, Desert Castles (Southern Indiana Review Press, 2019), which won the Wilhelmus Prize. His stories, poems, and essays have appeared in Washington Square, Kenyon Review Online, Boston Review, and other journals. A Chicago-native, he is an assistant professor of English and Director of Graduate Studies in English at the University of Southern Mississippi, as well as the fiction editor of Tikkun.
