A Mountain on the Landscape

...This art of perfect naturalness and effortless case we find in such instances as: The soul has many morions, body one...

...When opposites come suddenly in place, I teach my eyes to hear, my ears to see How body from spirit slowly does unwind Until we are pure spirit at the end...

...But listen to Roethke: Things without hands take hands: there is no choice Eternity's not easily conte by...

...His passionate fidelity to the faintest motion of a wind, light on a weed, the action of fish, the behavior of birds, gives to their self-contained vitality a kind of Blakely holiness...

...The dead speak noise...

...He does not have to say so of "A sea wind pausing in a summer tree...

...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 fails on his naked ears...

...There is no attempt to heighten the moth, the vireo, or wood pigeon by dwelling upon them and finding rare metaphors for them...

...He sang himself out of both, one might say, and we see where that singing brought him to, that getting up the ladder (Yeats' spiral stairway of the Tower— descending to ascend the higher—seems the most appropriate image...

...with his own sensibility he makes a speech that walks in symbols...

...The power of this book is that it convinces one it is...

...Bearing being itself or: A fallen man, I climb out of my fear...

...Thus to read him is to be convinced that a stone not only may speak, but has a skin, and all natural things live in an intimacy of a secret inward order that he, in his far field, has fallen on by sheer spirit's nakedness and more—by the tremendous power to feel the stone or wind, to be roused by the sight of the stone or flower into self-knowledge and self-realization which is at the same time a knowledge of them (the objective gathered into subjectivity) and out again and in again...

...He began with their flowers and got soon enough to weeds, to a primitive world older than hay and filled with owls, elvers, shot through with Mother Goose rhythms and a Finnegans Wake richness of association...

...Roethke had such ears...

...Her latest book of verse is Country Without Maps...

...he breathed the better for its demands...

...Both confessions and prayers, they move, "Yeatsian" endstopped line by line, from moment of truth to moment of truth...

...writing the conflict out—in other ways and new forms, over and over...

...Words for the Wind (1958)—which included his four earlier books: Open House (1941), The Lost Son (1948...

...We sec it in the poems that close the book: "The Marrow...

...Is this the destination of all breakthroughs...

...His spirit moves like monumental wind That gentles on a sunny blue plateau He is the end of things, the final man The lapses, the pull between assent and denial, blindness and great seeing are not only a theme of this book but a major theme of his previous books...

...in his case, sight leads to insight...

...The felicity is in the phrasing and...

...That is to say, he worked in the traditional lyric forms and made them his own...

...A translucence, a strippeddown shimmering clarity where being, just always this side of the abyss, plays with the meanings of the opposites, alternating between the fall and the sudden achieved state of grace, and in between dances the taut tight rope between vision that is its own exultance and darkness that is its own descent...

...In an age of many talking birds, Roethke was a singing bird...

...The Restored," "The Right Thing," "The Decision," "In a Dark Time...

...But poetry is made of words...

...Jean Garrigue, the poet and critic, writes frequently for The Hudson Review...

...They were scarcely organized for logic's sweet sake nor did they have an ounce of naturalistic soberness...

...Indeed, it seems to have reached even the other side of its own world, and to have crossed that as well...

...And notably in these last poems he writes the line on line that is a unit in itself, a full thought, a most pregnant statement and on the most demanding level when the metaphysical is one step away from the mystical, if it is that far...

...In these poems, into what...

...They are "merely" seized upon at their most exquisite or vigored instant, in their most characteristic behavior...

...And what but the right word on the pulse of a rhythm that is out of the poet's own blood and is as sensitive as the faintest wind can create this illusion...

...And as for the famous "breakthrough" that it is the custom to talk about, these last poems are the purest example, it might seem, of the most complete breakthrough by one who had had his breakthroughs before, had gone through other doors, had crossed many frontiers...

...An old wind-tattered butterfly flew down And pulsed its wings upon the dusty ground Dialogues between the self and soul of things, and very God, these are the poems of one inwoven into the universe only, too...

...because he is always falling out of it...

...Says the Lamb!, a collection of lyric and nonsense verse, was published in 1961...

...A world where the round stone has lips and may speak, if there are ears to hear...

...And who has connected the soul's disequilibriums so closely with the flux and reflux of light and air, the dying of the day into itself, or the wind, or the action of waters...

...They worked underground to come up into the open and were filled with wild humor and savage humors, stretching consciousness very far...

...Praise to the End...

...The mind enters itself and God the mind...

...so far has this poetry gone into its own created world...

...What other poet has held so steadfastly to it and played so many variations upon it...

...His light and waters stand in two worlds, and his birds, his flowers appear and disappear in his lines as parts of the great order...

...This is poetry's most magical feat and Roethke's power...

...His wild originality rather than being subdued thrived in form...

...Roethke's work was constantly changing, developing, moving into new, even forbidden areas...

...95 pp., $3.50) are the crown on the mountain...

...The glass-house of the greenhouse (recreated once for all and forever in "Otto," one of the great poems)—that childhood world of the little flower mouths and the great roses, stood at the other side of the black Woodlawn, the self's asylum...

...I am...

...And beyond that, the illusion of the "seamless" line, the "seamless" poem that is simply a radiant whole as natural as the creation it is talking about...

...And one is One, free in the tearing wind he is defining an experience that is beyond rational experience and which yet is poetry's most natural, most sovereign and first realm where imagination in the "intuitive night" incarnates the first and last realities in transcendent language...

...When he writes: Knowing slows for a moment And not-knowing enters, silent...

...were set to a new tune, and a rhythm taken over from Yeats but made, again, his own...

...All finite things reveal infinitude" he writes in "The Far Field," and in this extraordinary inweaving of the "heron's hieratic fishing," the hawk's "single wingbeat" —"Was it here I wore a crown of birds for a moment...

...it did not stifle him...

...1951), and The Waking (1953)—is a mountain on the landscape of the "poetry scene...

...I remember the sea-faced uncles...

...Early in his work Rocthke had shown what he could do with the line, the single line that is, after all, one of the first tests of a poem, the line whole in itself, and memorable because of a proverb-like shine or because, simply, it is so handsome and rich in itself: What the grave says, The nest denies The field is no longer simple: it's a soul's crossing time...

...Yet they were not experimental in surrealist ways...

...The series of love poems, especially "Four for Sir John Davies...

...These sensual, exalted love poems are some of the great ones of this century...

...His love poems—in the vein that calls for the miraculous—achieve much of their power by having their energies measured by meter, in the discipline of the stanzaic shape that intensified...

...Poetry and the New Yorker...

...The recently published posthumous poems of The Far Field (Doubleday...

...or: "I have been somewhere else...

...It is that order that is the subject of these metaphysical poems...

...There is no wish to see them in "new" ways...

...It was after his first book in which he announced, in the poem called "Open House," "My secrets cry aloud/I have no need for tongue/My heart keeps open house/My doors are widely swung," that he found his childhood in his "greenhouse" poems...