Roethke’s “The Pure Fury”

Obviously the best poem in the section entitled “Love Poems” of Words for the Wind is “Words for the Wind,” and “The Sensualists” is probably still my favorite poem, a hangover from my college days when I found the poem insightful, and shocking. But then, I hadn’t read any of the beat poets yet, either. I sometimes fear my fondness for particular poems depends more on what I read in a significant time in my life than on any inherent value of the poem. I mean, after all, I still love Elvis’s “Hound Dog” and “Don’t Be Cruel” even though my taste in music today runs more toward Tracy Chapman or R.E.M than country western. Fortunately, you’ll have to buy the book or run to the library to read those poems.

That said, the poem I found most fascinating in this section when I re-read it was “The Pure Fury,” perhaps because this is not a typical “love” poem:

THE PURE FURY

Stupor of knowledge lacking inwardness–
What book, O learned man, will set me right?
Once I read nothing through a fearful night,
For every meaning had grown meaningless.
Morning, I saw the world with second sight,
As if all things had died, and rose again.
I touched the stones, and they had my own skin.

The pure admire the pure, and live alone;
I love a woman with an empty face.
Parmenides put Nothingness in place;
She tries to think, and it flies loose again.
How slow the changes of a golden mean:
Great Boehme rooted all in Yes and No;
At times my darling squeaks in pure Plato.

How terrible the need for solitude:
That appetite for life so ravenous
A man’s a beast prowling in his own house,
A beast with fangs, and out for his own blood
Until he finds the thing he almost was
When the pure fury first raged in his head
And trees came closer with a denser shade.

Dream of a woman, and a dream of death:
The light air takes my being’s breath away;
I look on white, and it turns into gray–
When will that creature give me back my breath?
I live near the abyss. I hope to stay
Until my eyes look at a brighter sun
As the thick shade of the long night comes on.

The ironical, if not paradoxical, tone of this poem is set in the first stanza when this man-of-letters argues that a “stupor of knowledge lacking inwardness” cannot bring one happiness. In fact, too much of such knowledge seems to make the world appear meaningless. Sometimes only experiencing things directly can lead to “second sight” and put us back in touch with our world.

The second stanza attacks the premise that monastic life is the true way to attain enlightenment in the same way the first stanza attacks the premise that books are the true source of wisdom. Though there’s a disturbing tinge of disdain in phrases like an “empty face” and “my darling squeaks in pure Plato,” the stanza as a whole seems to suggest that it is, indeed, this woman that leads him to enlightenment.

A true introvert would certainly identify with the third stanza. Roethke’s tying of solitude to “appetite for life” might seem strange to an extrovert, but makes perfect sense to those of us who find the truest life in our “own blood.” When you’re an introvert, even passionate love cannot completely replace the need for solitude and the inner life.

The last stanza is even more disturbing, tying together the loved one and death, suggesting that somehow this love takes his “being’s breath away.” It’s almost as if his love has tainted the loved one, turning white into gray. And underlying the whole poem is still Roethke’s feeling that he lives “near the abyss,” near death. In the end though, the lines “I hope to stay/ Until my eyes look at a brighter sun” seem to suggest that it is precisely this love that brings him joy even “as the thick shade of the long night comes on.”

Roethke’s “The Lost Son”

I’ll have to admit that in the past whenever professors have said that we would be studying poems from “Praise to the End,” I’ve been apprehensive. And, despite the fact that my copy of Words for the Wind has multiple notations from the various grad courses I’ve taken, I’m not at all assured that I truly understand any of these poems. Despite Roethke’s, “But believe me: you will have no trouble if you approach these poems as a child would, na”vely, with your whole being awake, your faculties loose and alert. (A large order, I daresay!),” I find them nearly as difficult to understand as Pound’s Cantos, though for very different reasons. Where Pound seems to be using literary allusions, Roethke seems to be making allusions to his own life and to his inner feelings.

Not surprisingly Roethke’s comments in On Poetry and Craft
offers the best clues I’ve found to begin understanding this sequence of poems:

“the method is cyclic. I believe that to go forward as a spiritual man it is necessary first to go back. Any history of the psyche (or allegorical journey) is bound to be a succession of experiences, similar yet dissimilar. There is a perpetual slipping-back, then a going-forward; but there is some “progress.” Are not some experiences so powerful and so profound (I am not speaking of the merely compulsive) that they repeat themselves, thrust themselves upon us, again and again, with variation and change, each time bringing us closer to our own most particular (and thus most universal) reality? We go, as Yeats said, from exhaustion to exhaustion. To begin from the depths and come out- that is difficult; for few know where the depths are or can recognize them; or, if they do, are afraid.

Recognition of that cycle plus the realization that, as Roethke notes, “Much of the action is implied or, particularly in the case of erotic experience, rendered obliquely. The revelation of the identity of the speaker may itself be a part of the drama; or, in some instances, in a dream sequence, his identity may merge with someone else’s, or be deliberately blurred. This struggle for spiritual identity is, of course, one of the perpetual recurrences,” makes it possible for the reader to make some sense out of this sequence of poems

“The Lost Son” is probably the best known of these poems and the easiest to follow:

THE LOST SON, 1948

1. The Flight

At Woodlawn I heard the dead cry:
I was lulled by the slamming of iron,
A slow drip over stones,
Toads brooding wells.
All the leaves stuck out their tongues;
I shook the softening chalk of my bones,
Saying,
Snail, snail, glister me forward,
Bird, soft-sigh me home,
Worm, be with me.
This is my hard time.

Fished in an old wound,
The soft pond of repose;
Nothing nibbled my line,
Not even the minnows came.

Sat in an empty house
Watching shadows crawl,
Scratching.
There was one fly.

Voice, come out of the silence.
Say something.

Appear in the form of a spider
Or a moth beating the curtain.

Tell me:
Which is the way I take;
Out of what door do I go,
Where and to whom?

Dark hollows said, lee to the wind,
The moon said, back of an eel,
The salt said, look by the sea,
Your tears are not enough praise,
You will find no comfort here,
In the kingdom of bang and blab.

Running lightly over spongy ground,
Past the pasture of flat stones,
The three elms,
The sheep strewn on a field,
Over a rickety bridge
Toward the quick-water, wrinkling and rippling.

Hunting along the river,
Down among the rubbish, the bug-riddled foliage,
By the muddy pond-edge, by the bog-holes,
By the shrunken lake, hunting, in the heat of summer.

The shape of a rat?
It’s bigger than that.
It’s less than a leg
And more than a nose,
Just under the water
It usually goes.

Is it soft like a mouse?
Can it wrinkle its nose?
Could it come in the house
On the tips of its toes?

Take the skin of a cat
And the back of an eel,
Then roll them in grease,–
That’s the way it would feel.

It’s sleek as an otter
With wide webby toes
Just under the water
It usually goes.

2. The Pit

Where do the roots go?
Look down under the leaves.
Who put the moss there?
These stones have been here too long.
Who stunned the dirt into noise?
Ask the mole, he knows.
I feel the slime of a wet nest.
Beware Mother Mildew.
Nibble again, fish nerves.

3. The Gibber

At the wood’s mouth,
By the cave’s door,
I listened to something
I had heard before.

Dogs of the groin
Barked and howled,
The sun was against me,
The moon would not have me.

The weeds whined,
The snakes cried,
The cows and briars
Said to me: Die.

What a small song. What slow clouds. What dark water.
Hath the raine a father? All the caves are ice. Only the snow’s
here.
I’m cold. I’m cold all over. Rub me in father and mother.
Fear was my father, Father Fear.
His look drained the stones.

What gliding shape
Beckoning through halls,
Stood poised on the stair,
Fell dreamily down?

From the mouths of jugs
Perched on many shelves,
I saw substance flowing
That cold morning.
Like a slither of eels
That watery cheek
As my own tongue kissed
My lips awake.

Is this the storm’s heart? The ground is unsmiling itself.
My veins are running nowhere. Do the bones cast out their
fire?
Is the seed leaving the old bed? These buds are live as birds.
Where, where are the tears of the world?
Let the kisses resound, flat like a butcher’s palm;
Let the gestures freeze; our doom is already decided.
All the windows are burning! What’s left of my life?
I want the old rage, the lash of primordial milk!
Goodbye, goodbye, old stones, the time-order is going,
I have married my hands to perpetual agitation,
I run, I run to the whistle of money.

Money money money
Water water water

How cool the grass is.
Has the bird left?
The stalk still sways.
Has the worm a shadow?
What do the clouds say?

These sweeps of light undo me.
Look, look, the ditch is running white!
I’ve more veins than a tree!
Kiss me, ashes, I’m falling through a dark swirl.

4. The Return

The way to the boiler was dark,
Dark all the way,
Over slippery cinders
Through the long greenhouse.

The roses kept breathing in the dark.
They had many mouths to breathe with.
My knees made little winds underneath
Where the weeds slept.

There was always a single light
Swinging by the fire-pit,
Where the fireman pulled out roses,
The big roses, the big bloody clinkers.

Once I stayed all night.
The light in the morning came slowly over the white
Snow.
There were many kinds of cool
Air.
Then came steam.

Pipe-knock.

Scurry of warm over small plants.
Ordnung! ordnung!
Papa is coming!

A fine haze moved off the leaves;
Frost melted on far panes;
The rose, the chrysanthemum turned toward the light.
Even the hushed forms, the bent yellowy weeds
Moved in a slow up-sway.

5

It was beginning winter,
An in-between time,
The landscape still partly brown:
The bones of weeds kept swinging in the wind,
Above the blue snow.

It was beginning winter,
The light moved slowly over the frozen field,
Over the dry seed-crowns,
The beautiful surviving bones
Swinging in the wind.

Light traveled over the wide field;
Stayed.
The weeds stopped swinging.
The mind moved, not alone,
Through the clear air, in the silence.

Was it light?
Was it light within?
Was it light within light?
Stillness becoming alive,
Yet still?
A lively understandable spirit
Once entertained you.
It will come again.
Be still.
Wait.

Somehow it’s easiest for me to simply follow the poem as a black-and-white rendition of a Grimm’s fairy tale, perhaps as directed by Tim Burton. When you realize that the snail seems to symbolize Roethke’s idea of the spiral progress of the soul, then lines like Snail, snail, glister me forward” show the main thrust of the poem. Most of us have “fished in an old wound” and have ended up finding very little comfort “In the kingdom of bang and blab.”

Of course, the poem is even easier to follow if you happen to have read this advice from Roethke:

“The Lost Son” ” follows a narrative line indicated by the titles of the first four sections: “The Flight,” “The Pit,” “The Gibber,” “The Return.” “The Flight” is just what it says it is: a terrified running away-with alternate periods of hallucinatory waiting (the voices, etc.); the protagonist so geared-up, so over-alive that he is hunting, like a primitive, for some animistic suggestion, some clue to existence from the subhuman. These he sees and yet does not see: they are almost tail-flicks, from another world, seen out of the corner of the eye. In a sense he goes in and out of rationality; he hangs in the balance between the human and the animal.

“The Pit” is a slowed-down section; a period of physical and psychic exhaustion. And other obsessions begin to appear (symbolized by mole, nest, fish). In “The Gibber” these obsessions begin to take hold; again there is a frenetic activity, then a lapsing back into almost a crooning serenity (“What a small song,” etc.). The line, “Hath the rain a father?” is from Job-the only quotation in the piece. (A third of a line, notice-not a third of a poem

Section IV is a return, a return to a memory of childhood that comes back almost as in a dream, after the agitation and exhaustion of the earlier actions. The experience, again, is at once literal and symbolical. The “roses” are still breathing in the dark; and the fireman can pull them out, even from the fire. After the dark night, the morning brings with it the suggestion of a renewing light: a coming of “Papa.” Buried in the text are many little ambiguities, not all of which are absolutely essential to the central meaning of the poem

In the final untitled section, the illumination, the coming of light suggested at the end of the last passage occurs again, this time to the nearly grown man. But the illumination is still only partly apprehended; he is still “waiting.”

In the end, I don’t think it’s really necessary (unless, of course, your teacher thinks it is) or realistic to believe that you can logically analyze or understand these poems because they are at the very least dream sequences and childhood remembrances. Since few of us are able to understand our own subconscious feelings, it’s doubtful we’re going to be able to fully understand someone else’s, no matter how good of a poet they are.

What we can do is identify with the despair of these moments and the longing for spiritual enlightenment that accompanies them.

Perhaps for a few moments we can even understand why some manic-depressives become great artists dramatizing the spiritual quest most of us ploddingly pursue.

Roethke’s “Dolor”

Although my favorite poems in Roethke’s “from The Lost Son and Other Poems” are probably “Cuttings, later,” “Moss-Gathering,” or “Last Words,” the most influential poem for me is “Dolor.” “Dolor” was one of the first poems I ever memorized, perhaps ironically, because then it somehow symbolized to me my experiences at The University of Washington, at the time the largest institution I had ever been exposed to.

In retrospect, of course, the U wasn’t nearly as repressive and demeaning as the Army was, for, despite the fact that I had the relative freedom of being an officer, I found the army as a whole to be a crushing experience, one that demanded mindless conformity, crushing individual personality in an attempt to build a perfect, if mindless, fighting machine.

My brief episode working with the welfare system, as bureaucratic a nightmare as Kafka could ever have imagined, was an even more eye-opening experience. There I was forced to ask old folks whether they had received any cash as Christmas presents, and, if so, to reduce their future grants by that amount. Working in a system that seemed determined to further punish those who dared to fail to conform to society’s expectations quickly convinced me that I, at least, was unwilling to be crushed by a system that tried to crush everyone it came in contact with, whether it was those who needed help or those who wanted to help those who needed help.

Though still convinced that the educational system offers the best hope of creating a better society, as a high school teacher too often I had to enforce rules I never quite believed in and to penalize students who couldn’t, or wouldn’t, conform to those “rules.” In the end it was probably the time-consuming homework that drove me to early retirement, but while I was working it was the meaningless meetings, the constantly-changing attendance procedures to ensure that we had duly noted those students who had long ago given up on the system, and the time-consuming progress reports to reassure parents of good kids that they still had good kids and to once again remind the losers that their children were, like them, still losers with little hope of beating the system that really wore me out and made me long to finally be free of such mindless systems.

“Dolor,” then, has turned out to be more meaningful in my life than I could ever have imagined when I first memorized it as an idealistic 19-year old poetry major:

DOLOR

I have known the inexorable sadness of pencils,
Neat in their boxes, dolor of pad and paper weight,
All the misery of manilla folders and mucilage,
Desolation in immaculate public places,
Lonely reception room, lavatory, switchboard,
The unalterable pathos of basin and pitcher,
Ritual of multigraph, paper-clip, comma,
Endless duplication of lives and objects.
And I have seen dust from the walls of institutions,
Finer than flour, alive, more dangerous than silica,
Sift, almost invisible, through long afternoons of tedium,
Dropping a fine film on nails and delicate eyebrows,
Glazing the pale hair, the duplicate grey standard faces.

In the recently published On Poetry and Craft, Roethke says, “This poem is an exposition of one of the modern hells: the institution that overwhelms the individual man. The “order,’ the trivia of the institution, is, in human terms, a disorder, and as such, must be resisted. It’s truly a sign of psychic health that the young are already aware of this. How far-reaching all this is, how subtle in its ramifications, how disastrous to the human psyche ” to worship bigness, the firm, the university; numbers even, let me say, the organizational effort.”

As a teacher the objects in this poem particularly appealed to me because they were symbols of much of what I disliked about teaching, as I imagine they were for Roethke. This “inexorable sadness” of institutional repetition does more to crush creativity than anything I can imagine. How ironic that most high school English teachers become teachers because they love literature, only to find themselves so overwhelmed by endless grading of papers and endless correction of simple mechanical errors or infinitely repeated errors in thinking that they end up with little or no time to actually read what they do love. No wonder they find it so difficult to share their joy in literature with students or, even worse, to react to students as individuals and not as mere cogs in the machine.

In retrospect, my short exposure to the business world since I semi-retired has made me realize just how free I was as a teacher and to thank-the-lord that I didn’t spend my life in the grey-flannel world of the business world.

Roethke’s “Open House”

Anyone who has immersed himself in reading and discussing poetry as I have the last two years, must inevitably ask himself what he seeks from poetry, particularly when confronted by the diverse styles today that present themselves as “poetry.”

Originally I told a friend that for me the best poetry had to have a “spiritual element” to it. Bored and frustrated by much of what passes for religion today, I have increasingly turned to the arts for spiritual nourishment, particularly to poetry. Increasingly I’ve found myself turning to Zen poets, but sometimes too much exposure to the machinations of the Bush administration or a near-fatal overdose of daily “news” drives me straight to Whitman’s Leaves of Grass for temporary sustenance.

Unfortunately, careful examination revealed that many of my favorite poems lacked a spiritual element, at least spiritual in the everyday sense. Apparently there is something more basic that I seek from poetry. In a recent email I ventured, “I think what I really want is to feel like I’ve actually touched someone else, that I’ve made contact with a real human being, touched them in a way you seldom touch people in real life. It’s the immediacy of poetry that appeals to me.” My friend’s reply suggested that this ties in with Martin Buber’s idea that ” the fullness of our being lies in our
open-ness to the other, because that connection extends our boundary.” In other words, truly connecting with others is a form of spirituality.

It may not be entirely coincidental (though Diane and I did agree to read Roethke several months ago) that re-reading Roethke raised these questions. I chose to major literature at the University of Washington because I had been profoundly moved by my reading of several of Thomas Hardy’s novels, not by any love of poetry. In fact, I had never been exposed to “modern” poetry and still had residual feelings of resentment at having been forced to memorize Longfellow’s “The Village Blacksmith,” an inane assignment for a grade school student whose only exposure to a blacksmith had been in John Wayne movies.

Somehow, though, I managed to major in “poetry,” mostly “modern poetry” in the four years I was at the U. The first modern poetry book I bought was Roethke’s Words for the Wind, the same one I’m presently reading. Most of my teachers had been drawn to the university by Roethke, and undoubtedly what they taught must have been influenced by his presence.

Perhaps it’s not surprising, then, that two poems in the opening section of Roethke’s book go a long ways toward defining what I expect from poetry. The poem “Open House,” appropriately, opens the collection:

OPEN HOUSE

My secrets cry aloud.
I have no need for tongue.
My heart keeps open house,
My doors are widely swung.
An epic of the eyes
My love, with no disguise.

My truths are all foreknown,
This anguish self-revealed.
I’m naked to the bone,
With nakedness my shield.
Myself is what I wear:
I keep the spirit spare.

The anger will endure,
The deed will speak the truth
In language strict and pure.
I stop the lying mouth;
Rage warps my dearest cry
To witless agony.

Although those who read Roethke’s poetry may rightfully question whether his secrets “cry aloud,” there is no doubt that his poetry comes from the “heart,” not the mind. You cannot read his poems and doubt that you are looking at his very soul through his own eyes. He attempts to reveal the “naked” truth about himself, and anguish is an essential part of that truth. Perhaps, for me at least, what makes it truly poetic is that he tells this truth “In language strict and pure.” He not only keeps his “spirit spare,” he keeps his language spare.

Another poem in this section adds to, and refines, what I’m looking for in poetry:

THE ADAMANT

Thought does not crush to stone.
The great sledge drops in vain.
Truth is never undone;
It’s shafts remain.

The teeth of knitted gears
Turn slowly through the night,
But the true substance bears
The hammer’s weight.

Compression cannot break
A center so congealed;
The tool can chip no flake;
The core lies sealed.

I suspect that I could love this poem merely for the line “Truth is never undone,” because I apparently have a fondness for aphorisms and gnomic phrases. How else can I explain my inordinate fondness of Emerson and Thoreau?

Often, though, we can only see “truth” in a certain slant of light. What “shafts” remain? Do these shafts somehow explain my inordinate love for “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs”? Do such stories stay with us because they reveal essential truths, essential beliefs, about ourselves?

Does poetry, at its best, reveal the same truths, the same “core” that “lies sealed” in each of us? Is poetry more than mere decoration, indeed, an essential part of living fully?