Poetry Bookclub 2

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Love likes a gander, and adores a goose:
Her full lips pursed, the errant note to seize;
She played it quick, she played it light and loose;
My eyes, they dazzled at her flowing knees;
Her several parts could keep a pure repose,
Or one hip quiver with a mobile nose
(She moved in circles, and those circles moved.)

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Though I know most have moved on to the last stanaza, I thought this one was worth mentioning before we wrap up this discussion.

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Love likes a gander, and adores a goose

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I really liked this play upon the old addage "What is good for the goose is good for the gander"

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Her full lips pursed, the errant note to seize;
She played it quick, she played it light and loose;

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I loved this allusion to music, and I thought it touched back to the first stanza when it spoke of her and the birds, as well I think passion and music can often be tied in together.

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My eyes, they dazzled at her flowing knees

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At first this struck me as a bit odd, "flowing" is not a typical word used to talk about knees, it seems to refelect back to the begining "she moved in more way than one"

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Or one hip quiver with a mobile nose

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Was not sure what to make of the "mobile nose"

I've been in and out of this thread regularly, what a way to enjoy a poet! Thanks Quasimodo for inviting me but I have not read much of Roethke. I ordered a copy of Collected Poems right away and it arrived today all the way from somewhere in America. So, I'll jump in the middle here. I have not read all the posts in this thread but can see that a very intelligent discussion is going on here and we (now I can say 'we') are making good progress. I don't know why but this poet reminds me of Wallace Stevens a good deal.

I Knew a Woman: I think this is a 'memory poem' as the title suggests. Its main concern is memory through time, the consciousness of memory, the consciousness itself. In this context the key lines are:

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Ah, when she moved, she moved more ways than one:
The shapes a bright container can contain!

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This is the kaleidescope of memory. The 'bright container' is that which gives shape, the consciousness, the person's own being casting shadow and reflecting, transforming reality of the subject. The whole universe is at work here, the birds, the sights, the music, the sounds and all these forces are turning the 'bright container' constantly. Then there is the poet himself, his desire, his love, his infatuation as it grows over the years bridging time and space. The woman is being transformed under pressures from all directions. Human consciousness is never free and memory is even more unreliable as it bears the whole burden of the time elapsed and the things that happened over the elapsed period exert their pressure on the subject.

Sorry, time for the school run but does this make sense? During my fleeting visits to this thread I have noticed this theme running through other poems as well, his theme of shadows (Plato's cave), reflections and lights. What do you folks think?

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Originally Posted by stlukesguild

Let seed be grass, and grass turn into hay:
I'm martyr to a motion not my own;
What's freedom for? To know eternity.
I swear she cast a shadow white as stone.
But who would count eternity in days?

.....I find these lines to be the center of this poem. Behind all the allure and beauty of Roethke's subject is this sense of time, or its instantanteity. Like all martyrs, at least of the religious type, his own mind set has predestined him.

Quasi... Yes, I love this final stanza. There is this play back and forth:

"Let seed be grass, and grass turn into hay"... he starts to muse upon the passage of time... but rather suggests that he is content to let the world and time slide on past.

"I'm martyr to a motion not my own"... Again I sense a double meaning: he, like all of us, is martyr to the passage of time which is not his to control... but he is also martyr to this woman... ah! the motion of those hips!! A conquest of reason by passion... like the tale of Phyllis and Aristotle.

"What's freedom for? To know eternity." So proclaims the poet's reason... but once again her charms complete bedazzle and distract him: "I swear she cast a shadow white as stone."

"But who would count eternity in days?"... And so he confronts the question of "eternity" and suggests that perhaps eternity is not measured in time... that perhaps it is indeed, to be found in an hour... spent with the woman who so bewitches him.

"These old bones live to learn her wanton ways:
(I measure time by how a body sways.)" ... And has SHE not become his purpose or reason and his only means of counting the passing minutes?

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StLukes, I got from the last line, that he body takes the form of a metronome/clock, to which he becomes slave. The image then would fit with his other time comments, and make for quite the double entendre, as the first meaning would seem to be of his captivation, whereas the second would allude to his imprisonment to her bidding, and her overbearing control.

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Originally Posted by JBI

StLukes, I got from the last line, that he body takes the form of a metronome/clock, to which he becomes slave. The image then would fit with his other time comments, and make for quite the double entendre, as the first meaning would seem to be of his captivation, whereas the second would allude to his imprisonment to her bidding, and her overbearing control.

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Allow me to steal your interpretation and dove-tail it with my understanding of this poem. Memory is the mechanism that keeps a consciousness afloat or alive. 'In my end is my beginning' as Eliot would quote Mary, Queen of Scots. The woman is a memory, transformed by and transforming consciousness:

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Let seed be grass, and grass turn into hay:
I'm martyr to a motion not my own;
What's freedom for? To know eternity.
I swear she cast a shadow white as stone.
But who would count eternity in days?

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(saves me from going back to my book and JBI's post again and again!)

Time destroys all, but why martyr? Why not just dead or decayed or consumed or deceased, why martyr. What is the cause that the martyr was defending or trying to uphold?

Eternity can be found in the working of one memory, Blake's grain of sand. Time (history) is made up of memories, a chain of memories and a close examination of only one memory can reveal the whole structure of history. It is invisible, individual memory that creates individual and ultimately group/collective-consciousness (history) is invisible. It moves without a shadow (white shadow is an invisible shadow) and works secretly but this is the 'moving mover'. We are made up of memories and memories are made up by us, by the world. We inhabit a world and a history that reflects nothing but ourselves. Time is memory, not days, hours or years. Time is what happens in time. But what happens in time is not pure but is transformed by many different forces while it keeps on transforming everything else. This is a curious idea but what we see is nothing but ourselves. The reality is nothing but consciousness and self is the most powerful part of the consciousness, the major ingredient so to speak. The image of rake (gleaner) following the scythe (the reaper, time) also point to the relationship between time and the memory. After time is passed, all we are left with is memories which are adulterated by external elements as well as emotions. Thus remembrance is never unadulterated and what is time (history) but remembrance?

Welcome back to Kafka's Crow and your observations. "During my fleeting visits to this thread I have noticed this theme running through other poems as well, his theme of shadows (Plato's cave), reflections and lights. What do you folks think?" I think Roethke grew up in and around greenhouses, the source of this imagery?

With all his talk about birds, particuarly herons and water I thought he may have grown up near the water somewhere. He does have a poem called Child On Top of a Greenhouse

One of the poets Roethke read while institutionalized was "that sweet man John Clare.":

FIRST LOVE

I ne’er was struck before that hour
With love so sudden and so sweet,
Her face it bloomed like a sweet flower
And stole my heart away complete.


My face turned pale as deadly pale,
My legs refused to walk away,
And when she looked, what could I ail?
My life and all seemed turned to clay.


And then my blood rushed to my face
And took my eyesight quite away,
The trees and bushes round the place
Seemed midnight at noonday.


I could not see a single thing,
Words from my eyes did start—
They spoke as chords do from the string,
And blood burnt round my heart.


Are flowers the winter’s choice?
Is love’s bed always snow?
She seemed to hear my silent voice,
I never saw so sweet a face
As that I stood before.
My heart has left its dwelling-place
And can return no more.

Now that it seems like I Knew A Woman is wrapping up, Quasi said I could pick the next poem for disuccion. I was really struck by the poem Genesis. It is not a very long poem, but out of all I have read so far, something about it just really sticks out in my mind the most.

Ok! Let's do it stanza by stanza.

Genesis
This elemental force
Was wrested from the sun;
A river's leaping source
Is locked in narrow bone.

An utterly biblical title and an utterly scientific opening! What's going on here? The universal force is channelized into creating a small planet (the narrow bone). I am amazed by the six syllables. I think only a couple of lines or three in the whole poem are written in less than six syllabus and none exceeds six. Did he rest on the seventh? The poem is being created as well as the universe.

Yes it is quite interesting that he choose the word Genisis as the titile of this poem, though the poem is riddled with biblical references, there is also something very "natural" about it.

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This elemental force

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This is a great opeening line. It enstnatly grabbed my attention in my first reading of the poem, and it never fails to effect me and I have read this poem over several times now. It does open the poem with a "bang" I think.

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Was wrested from the sun

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I think this is an interesting line. It is the idea of some struggle, a conflict of energy, a pushing and pulling force. It is a very scientific take on creation coupled with the title of the poem.

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A river's leaping source
Is locked in narrow bone

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Bones seem to come up a lot in Roethke's poems. I think the mention of the river, has a sort of calming effected compared with the violence of the first two lines. Though I was not sure what to make of the "narrow bone"

Is this 'river' with a 'leaping source' the universal time and 'narrow bone' is the microcosmic or the earthly time, days and nights, hours, months and years, what Wordsworth calls 'earth's diurnal course'. I can be wrong here but I think he is talking about the creation of time.

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Originally Posted by Dark Muse

I think this is an interesting line. It is the idea of some struggle, a conflict of energy, a pushing and pulling force. It is a very scientific take on creation coupled with the title of the poem.

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Why do you think the idea of conflict is "scientific"? I see strife more as "pre-scientific"(as in Greek cosmogonies, or in Ovid's account of Creation). The presence of natural elements (fire, water, which oppose each other) also make me think that. And "wrested from the sun" strangely reminds me of Prometheus...

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Bones seem to come up a lot in Roethke's poems. I think the mention of the river, has a sort of calming effected compared with the violence of the first two lines. Though I was not sure what to make of the "narrow bone"

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The very regular rhythm (perfect iambic trimeters) also contributes to the calming effect (and contrasts with the violence of the beginning), I find.

If I knew what the rest of the poem was about :D (didn't find it on the net), it would be easier for me to understand, I think, but the "narrow bone" gives me the impression that all that energy is being poured into man, there to be bounded ("locked").

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Originally Posted by Kafka's Crow

Is this 'river' with a 'leaping source' the universal time and 'narrow bone' is the microcosmic or the earthly time, days and nights, hours, months and years, what Wordsworth calls 'earth's diurnal course'. I can be wrong here but I think he is talking about the creation of time.

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Ahh yes, that does make sense.

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Originally Posted by Bitterfly

Why do you think the idea of conflict is "scientific"? I see strife more as "pre-scientific"(as in Greek cosmogonies, or in Ovid's account of Creation). The presence of natural elements (fire, water, which oppose each other) also make me think that. And "wrested from the sun" strangely reminds me of Prometheus...

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Though the poem might be touched with elements of mythology, it seems to me, that inspite of the title of the poem. At least those first opening lines seems to refelct more the idea of the "Big Bang" rather than Biblical Creation. The elements expressed within the poem contradict "Geneisis"

Kafka's Crow will forgive me for jumping to the last stanza... "A pearl within the brain,
Secretion of the sense;
Around a central grain
New meaning grows immense." My take on this poem is much more personal, personal for Roethke that is. All the references come together if he is writing of his own unique source for a poem. How "meaning grow immense" once his mind has created that "seed" or concept.

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Originally Posted by Dark Muse

Though the poem might be touched with elements of mythology, it seems to me, that inspite of the title of the poem. At least those first opening lines seems to refelct more the idea of the "Big Bang" rather than Biblical Creation. The elements expressed within the poem contradict "Geneisis"

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Ah, Ok, I hadn't understood that that was what you were emphasizing. Pretty interesting idea!:thumbs_up

Erm, I'd love to see the rest of the poem, now my curiosity has been sparked!

I could not find it anywhere online, so I just PMed it to you, sense for legal reasons I cannot post it in its enterity here.

Thanks a ton!
Now that I can see the whole poem, the meaning is a tad clearer! :p

First stanza: Creative forces: sun, water, "source" (reminiscent of the river in the garden of Eden). There's strife - as for all creative activity. The "narrow bone" has "locked" the force in - that's perhaps why it threatens to break out again in the second stanza?

Second stanza: I can understand the link with Genesis at least, now :p - there's a reference to the fruit of the garden of Eden. What's interesting is that it's not exactly the "fruit of good" in the Bible, is it? Isn't it rather the fruit from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil? And why is the "wisdom" (positive connotations) associated with "floods" and "invades" (pejorative, the flood which came to punish mankind); likened to an almost destructive force ("swells", "burst"). Is creation both beneficial and destructive? One has the impression this force is going to break, to burst the mind that harbours it.

Third stanza: something hidden and secretive ("pearl", "secretion" which contains the word "secret") which you therefore have to go and look for? How come it hasn't burst out? It "grows immense" yet is still "within". Maybe the mind has found a way to control the elemental force of the beginning. More intellectual vocabulary (sense", "meaning", "brain" rather than "mind").
I find this stanza a bit of a letdown, actually... :( :p

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This wisdom floods the mind,
invades quiescent blood;
a seed that swells the rind
to burst the fruit of good

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The second stanza is quite interesting. I think the frist two lines

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This wisdom floods the mind,
invades quiescent blood;

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Could be linked to poetic creativity and its effect upon a person. The way in which it says "wisdom floods the mind" from what information I have gleamed about Roethke by reading the other posts here, and his struggles with sanity, I think this line is quite fitting. It is something that comes overwhelming upon a person.

As I found the second line here

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invades quiescent blood

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To be quite interesting. I admit I had to look up quiescent

marked by inactivity or repose : tranquilly at rest

Now this is interesting, when pared with the line "invade" it seems to me to suggest one who is at rest, suddnely being sparked into activity again. It also toys with the early ideas of chaos seen in the first stanza.

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a seed that swells the rind
to burst the fruit of good

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These lines, paricuarly the mention of the seed that swells and than bursts into fruit, I could not help but to have the imagery of a woman impregnated, which would tie into ideas of creation.

I have to apologize. I was away on a business trip and could not get an internet connection. I need to catch up.

Virgil: Not a problem. While awaiting a response from the next person to choose a poem... I'd like to put one up for consideration. Let this one have at least a day or two. It surely is dense enough. See next posting.

From The Collected Poems of Theodore Roethke
pp 13-14

THE COMING OF THE COLD

I

The late peach yields a subtle musk,
The arbor is alive with fume
More heady than a field at dusk
When clover scents diminished wind.
The walker's foot has scarcely room
Upon the orchard path, for skinned
And battered fruit has choked the grass.
The yield's half down and half in air,
The plum drops pitch upon the ground,
And nostrils widen as they pass
The place where butternuts are found.
The wind shakes out the scent of pear.
Upon the field the scent is dry:
The dill bears up it acrid crown;
The dock, so garish to the eye,
Distills a pungence of its own;
And pumpkins sweat a bitter oil.
But soon cold rain and frost come in
To press pure fragrance to the soil;
The loose vine droops with hoar at dawn,
The riches of the air blow thin.

II

The ribs of leaves lie in the dust,
The beak of frost has picked the bough,
The briar bears its thorn, and drought
Has left its ravage on the field.
The season's wreckage lies about,
Late autumn fruit is rotted now.
All shade is lean, the antic branch
Jerks skyward at the touch of wind,
Dense trees no longer hold the light,
The hedge and orchard grove are thinned.
The dank bark dries beneath the sun,
The last of harvesting is done.
All things are brought to barn and fold.
The oak leaves strain to be unbound,
The sky turns dark, the year grows old,
The buds draw in before the cold. ... {2 of 3 parts}

Quasi has asked that I select the next Roethke poem and so I have done so... choosing Four For Sir John Davies:

1. The Dance

Is that dance slowing in the mind of man
That made him think the universe could hum?
The great wheel turns its axle when it can;
I need a place to sing, and dancing-room,
And I have made a promise to my ears
I'll sing and whistle romping with the bears.

For they are all my friends: I saw one slide
Down a steep hillside on a cake of ice-
Or was that in a book? I think with pride:
A caged bear rarely does the same thing twice
In the same way: O watch his body sway!
This animal remembering to be gay.

I tried to fling my shadow at the moon,
The while my blood leaped with a wordless song.
Though dancing needs a master, I had none
To teach my toes to listen to my tongue.
But what I learned there, dancing all alone,
Was not the joyless motion of a stone.

I take this cadence from a man named Yeats;
I take it, and I give it back again:
For other tunes and other wanton beats
Have tossed my heart and fiddle through my brain,
Yes, I was dancing-mad, and how
That came to be the bears and Yeats would know.

This first section can be heard read by Roethke himself:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wKaoXy2KaJU

Stanley Kunitz... poet and friend of Roethke writes the following of the genesis of this poem:

On another country visit, in the following decade, he asked me long after midnight to read something choice to him. I picked up Sir John Davies' neglected Elizabethan masterpiece, "Orchestra," a poem that he had somehow never chanced on despite his omnivorous appetite for verse, and I can still recall the excitement with which he responded to the clear-voiced music.

From that encounter, combined with his deep attachment to the poetry of Yeats—it was beat, above all, that enchanted him—he composed the eloquent sequence, "Four for Sir John Davies," which was to set the cadence for a whole new cycle of later poems.

The text of Sir John Davies' Orchestra can be found here:

http://www.uoregon.edu/~rbear/davies1.html

Hopefully Petrarch's Love will drop by and enlighten us with her knowledge of Davies' poem and perhaps offer up some insights into it's relationship with Roethke's work. I have been unable to find the entire poem on the net (anyone else have any luck? please post a link). It is included in my volume of Roethke's Words for the Wind as well as his Collected Poems. I'll PM the text to anyone needing it.

Oh, I love that recording of Roethke reading the poem you posted, St. Luke's! Great youtube find. I'll be glad to join in the discussion, but it'll have to be tomorrow night, since I have to spend this evening finishing my class prep. for the first day tomorrow rather than get lured into the dance (though perhaps my students would rather we dance than have me get up and lecture on portraits of Elizabeth I and Shakespeare's Richard II :p). The Renascence text of the Davies is the one in my bookmarks, so I'm assuming that's the most complete version I could find on the web.

"No poet, no artist of any art, has his

complete meaning alone. His signigicance, his appreciation, is the appreciation of his relation to the dead poets and artists.

You cannot value him alone; you must set him for contrast and comparison, among the dead. I mean this as a principle of

aesthetic, not merely historical criticism. The necessity that he shall conform, that he shall cohere, is not one-sided; what

happens simultaneously to all the works of art which preceded it. The existing monuments form an ideal order among themselves,

which is modified by the introduction of the new (the really new) work of art among them." T.S.Eliot

That bit (and a little more) from Eliot's great essay, Tradition and the Individual Talent from The Sacred Wood has long been etched upon my mind. Art is as much a dialog with art and other artists as it is a dialog with the present.

Looking at the first section here of Roethke's poem it is clear that he builds upon Davies exploration of the idea of all the cosmos involved in a grand dance... or the Musica Universalis or the Music of the Spheres a concept often credited to Pythagoras, who is quoted as having suggested that "there is geometry in the humming of the strings; there is music in the spacing of the spheres." This concept was further echoed in Dante's Divine Comedy and the theory remained popular into the Renaissane and was even put forth in Johannes Kepler's Harmonice Mundi (1619) in which Kepler suggested a connection between geometry, astronomy, harmonics, and music... a universal music (musica universalis).

It is immediately intriguing to consider Roethke's use of the word "humming" in this context.

Is that dance slowing in the mind of man
That made him think the universe could hum?

It also leads me to think that the dancing bears to which Roethke speaks are none other than Ursa Major and Minor.

According to some academic critics of Sir John Davies and other more recent critiques of Roethke's poems, in the past the mind and the universe (taking up stlukes. mention of constellations) were said to be somehow syncopated and/or humming in unison. "But what I learned there, dancing all alone,/ Was not the joyless motion of a stone" These lines indicate to me a harmony percieved of the planet (a stone) and the universe also in harmony with the dancing mind.

Hmm, my Roethke collection doesn't contain this poem nor was I able to find it on line. Does anyone have a link to "The Dance"?

Is that dance slowing in the mind of man
That made him think the universe could hum?
The great wheel turns its axle when it can

I ponder at the opening lines. Is Roethke asking merely whether we have lost faith in that old concept of the Musica Universalis... or have we lost something larger... a faith in an actual Universal Harmony... and order or meaning to the universe... God?

I need a place to sing, and dancing-room,
And I have made a promise to my ears
I'll sing and whistle romping with the bears.

For they are all my friends: I saw one slide
Down a steep hillside on a cake of ice-
Or was that in a book? I think with pride:
A caged bear rarely does the same thing twice
In the same way: O watch his body sway!
This animal remembering to be gay.

And then he turns to the dancing bears... and I wonder whether he is speaking of the celestial bears (Ursa Major/Minor)... and the image of the bear sliding on a cake of ice calls to mind the image of these constellations or a snowy horizon... or was it something read in a book?

...As the two bears, whom the First Mover flings
With a short turn around heaven's axeltree,
In a round dance forever wheeling be."

from Orchestra, Sir John Davies

And the caged animal is seen dancing with a joy that immediately calls to mind (especially in response to Roethke's choice of that word "gay") his beloved Yeats:

I have heard that hysterical women say
They are sick of the palette and fiddle-bow.
Of poets that are always gay...

On all the tragic scene they stare.
One asks for mournful melodies;
Accomplished fingers begin to play.
Their eyes mid many wrinkles, their eyes,
Their ancient, glittering eyes, are gay.

from Lapis Lazuli

The last two stanzas reinforce this connection with Yeats and make me suspect that Roethke speaks of the dance of poetry... and certainly not the "joyless motion of a stone"... the "dance" of the dead planets throughout the celestial spheres:

I tried to fling my shadow at the moon,
The while my blood leaped with a wordless song.
Though dancing needs a master, I had none
To teach my toes to listen to my tongue.
But what I learned there, dancing all alone,
Was not the joyless motion of a stone.

I take this cadence from a man named Yeats;
I take it, and I give it back again:
For other tunes and other wanton beats
Have tossed my heart and fiddle through my brain,
Yes, I was dancing-mad, and how
That came to be the bears and Yeats would know.

Again I find myself thinking on Kunitz' description of Roethke's response to Davies' Orchestra:

it was beat, above all, that enchanted him—

There is an intriguing section of Davies Orchestra in which he discusses the music of poetry... its rhythm... as a dance:

70 (67)

But for more diuers and more pleasing show,
A swift and wandring daunce she did inuent,
VVith passages vncertaine to and fro,
Yet with a certaine aunswere and consent
To the quick musick of the Instrument.
Fiue was the number of the Musicks feete,
Which still the daunce did with fiue paces meete...

69

What shall I name those currant trauases
That on a triple Dactyle foote doe run
Close by the ground with slyding passages,
VVherein that Dauncer greatest prayse hath won
Which with best order can all orders shun:
For euery where he wantonly must range,
And turne and wind, with vnexpected change.

70

Yet is ther one the most delightfull kind,
A lofty iumping, or a leaping round,
VVhere arme in arme, two Dauncers are entwind,
And whirle themselues with strict embracements bound,
And still their feet an Anapest do sound:
An Anapest is all theyr musicks song,
Whose first two feet are short, & third is long.

92

And those great Maisters of the liberall Arts
In all their seuerall Schooles doe Dauncing teach:
For humble Grammer first doth set the parts
Of congruent and well-according speach:
Which Rhetorick whose state ye clouds doth reach,
And heau'nly Poetry doe forward lead,
And diuers Measures, diuersly doe tread.

93

For Rhetorick clothing speech in rich aray
In looser numbers teacheth her to range,
VVith twentie tropes, and turning euery way,
And various figures, and licentious change:
But Poetry with rule and order strange
So curiously doth moue each single pace,
As all is mard if she one foote misplace.

I'll wait for Petrarch to comment here...

My Roethke collection contains this after all. I was looking under the wrong title. I was reading this last night and this is another outstanding poem. I don't have time to comment right now, but I will by tonight.

Will someone be kind enough to pm me the poem? I have not made it to the library yet because my Quickie and I are in a dark comedy of discovery as to which of us will kill the other first.

It is hard to digest Roethke from this angle, but what I have digested leaves me conflicted.

Thanks to those who helped. Hard day, bbl.

STEPHEN SPENDER ON ROETHKE'S DANCING: "In his poems, Roethke seems often to be dancing. This is not the dance transcended and purified in the poetry; the entry into a metaphysical pattern of theological joy of Auden or Eliot, nor is it the tragic dancing on the graves of the dead of Yeats-- it is simply Roethke incredibly and almost against his will dancing. He is the boy who is waltzed round by his father of the whiskeyed breath; the sensual man swaying toward the woman swaying toward him; the dying man dancing his way out of his body toward God. There was never, one might say, such ungainly yet compulsive dancing, as in Roethke." Stephen Spender

Two things strike me from this poem. First the number of questions throughout the poem. I count seventeen questions the narrator asks. He opens the poem with a question: "Is that dance slowing in the mind of man/That made him think the universe could hum?" That openning question is quite paradoxical, actually quite metaphysical. A dance in the mind is quite an image. It's not physically real and it leads to another metaphysical concept, the universe portrayed as a machine. How about some other questions: "What is desire?--/The impulse to make someone else complete?" "Who can embrace the body of his fate?" "Who's whistling up my sleeve?" "Things loll and loiter. Who condones the lost?/This joy outleaps the dog. Who cares? Who cares?" "What shape leaped forward at the sensual cry?--" "Did space shake off an angel with a sigh?" "Did Beatrice deny what Dante saw?" "Who leaps to heaven at a single bound?" "The visible obscures. But who knows when?" "The world is for the living. Who are they?"

All of these questions are paradoxical, disjointed, and realtively unanaswerable. Some are even outright absurd. From a poetic craft point of view, these questions creates a constant stress through out the poem. There is never a moment of relaxation.

The other thing that I observe is the constant contrast of opposites: light versus dark, ground versus universe or heavens, down versus up, mind versus body, spirit versus flesh, ice versus fire, animal versus human.

I should have more to say on the poem later.

Was I the servant of a sovereign wish,
Or ladle rattling in an empty dish?
One of Virgil's questions quoted here, may seem absurd but my view is that it's rhetorical. The given answer is that Roethke sees himself as voicing or re-voicing the dead poets theme. He indeed was or wanted to be the "servant of a sovereign wish" almost as historical fiction when done correctly recaptures the past.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by quasimodo1

Was I the servant of a sovereign wish,
Or ladle rattling in an empty dish?
One of Virgil's questions quoted here, may seem absurd but my view is that it's rhetorical. The given answer is that Roethke sees himself as voicing or re-voicing the dead poets theme. He indeed was or wanted to be the "servant of a sovereign wish" almost as historical fiction when done correctly recaptures the past.

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Actually Quasi I missed that question entirely. So eighteen questions, unless I missed others. I'm not familiar with this dead poet's theme. Can you elaborate? I'm curious and interested. :)

In the first stanza, Roethke is making a connection with Yeats referencing Davies work as subtext. Each stanza uses a different subtext: Homer and Virgil are two others. As Stlukes mentioned, "Orchestra" is a corresponding work serving both as inspiration and connection. Sir John Davies' theme or themes are ...comparing the natural order with that of the cosmos, the microcosm of man vis the macrocosm of God and/or the universe... the overall harmonies of man and the natural world. Davies uses Homer, I think, as a lens to meditate and elaborate on these comparisons.

On the composing of "Four for Sir John Davies" in Theodore Roethke's own words: "Let me say boldly, now, that the extent to which the great dead can be evoked, or can come to us, can be errie, and astonishing. Let me, at the risk of seeming odd, recite a personal incident. I was in that particular hell of a poet: a longish dry period. It was 1952, I was 44, and I thought I was done. I was living aone in a biggish house in Edmonds, Washington. I had been reading-- and re-reading--not Yeats, but Ralegh and Sir John Davies. I had been teaching the five-beat line for weeks--I knew quite a bit about it, but write it myself? --no: so I felt myself a fraud. Suddenly, in the early evening, the poem "The Dance" started, and finished itself in avery short time--say thirty minutes, maybe in the greater part of an hour, it was all done. I felt, I KNEW, I had hit it. I walked around, and wept: and I knelt down--I always do after I've written what I know is a good piece. But at the same time I had, as God as my witness, the actual sense of a Presence-- as if Yeats himself were in that room. The experience was in a way terrifying, for it lasted at least half an hour. That house, I repeat, was charged with a psychic presence: the very walls seemed to shimmer. I wept for joy. At last I was somebody again. He, they--the poets dead--were with me. Now I know there are any number of cynical explanations for this phenomenon: auto-suggestion, the unconscious playing an elaborate trick, and so on, but I accept none of them. It was one of the most profound experiences of my life."

A fabulous quote... Roethke channeling Yeats. It certainly suggests the author certainly believed in the notion that one of the roles of the poet was to engage in a sort of dialog with one's predecessors. Perhaps not unlike the already quoted comments by Eliot.

I'm looking now at the second poem in the suite, The Partner, where Roethke has moved on from the dance per se:

Between such animal and human heat
I find myself perplexed. What is desire?
The impulse to make someone else complete?
That woman could set sodden straw on fire.
Was I the servant of a sovereign wish,
Or ladle rattling in an empty dish?

Roethke seems to move on to questions... unanswerable... about love/desire/sex and whether it is all part of some plan of nature... or of God... part of the music of the spheres... the universal harmony... or nothing but a sound (and a fury?) signifying nothing?

We played a measure with commingled feet:
The lively dead had taught us to be fond.
Who can embrace the body of his fate?
Light altered light along the living ground.
She kissed me close and then did something else.
My marrow beat as wildly as my pulse.

I am continually struck by Roethke's ability to suggest multiple meanings... or ask multiple questions... with a single phrase: "Who can embrace the body of his fate?"

Who can embrace the body of his fate?
Light altered light along the living ground.
Roethke in describing the "body" of his fate intends to speak of the multiple fates which comprise a life, perhaps his life up to this point. Is the next line adjoined to this one? The light which alters the "light" is the metaphor for each small fate illuminating the next as he (we) moves through a life. So it might follow that Roethke doesn't view fate as a predestined end but one shaped and formed by all influences, definitely including a poetic ancestry.

I. The Dance

Is that dance slowing in the mind of man
That made him think the universe could hum?
The great wheel turns its axle when it can;
I need a place to sing, and dancing-room,
And I have made a promise to my ears
I'll sing and whistle romping with the bears.

For they are all my friends: I saw one slide
Down a steep hillside on a cake of ice,--
Or was that in a book? I think with pride:
A caged bear rarely does the same thing twice
In the same way: O watch his body sway!--
This animal remembering to be gay.


Although Roethke was dead before animation had advanced to make it possible, this opening has the false sentimentality of the Coke polar bear commercial, while the narrative voice lacks the courage to really link the caged bear to bear baiting itself, which Davies no doubt knew of if he was a true poet of the Renaissance.

I hate to be the odd woman out while digesting my kippers (a breakfast practice I adopted from The Turtle Diary once I could afford it), but Roethke really does have a limited use of tropes to authenticate himself. A great poem does more than scan perfectly, and Roethke doesn't quite break the mold while staying within the mold. He obsesses certain things well--clumsy manic feet, dishes, the body itself, but I'd like it if he would really try to put a fist through his retrospective fragmentation now and then.

I don't know how many more pieces we're going to discuss, but I'd like to nominate "Epideral Macabre" for the next. More daring in its chances.