Poetry Bookclub 2

[Dark Muse]

Hehe I am trying to make heads or tails out of this poem

Is he a bird or a tree? Not everyone can tell.

I really like this mine though it still somwhat baffles me, but from the other referecens within the first part of the poem, seems to be about the relationship or struggle between mother and sun.

Water recedes to the crying of spiders.
An old scow bumps over black rocks.
A cracked pod calls.

I really like this but have no idea what to make of it

Mother me out of here. What more will the bones allow?
Will the sea give the wind suck? A toad folds into a stone.
These flowers are all fangs. Comfort me, fury.
Wake me, witch, we'll do the dance of rotten sticks.

This makes me think of an old hag

The contradiction of the line between the flowers and the fangs seem interesting, as it seems to suggest that somthing which should be comforting has taken a negative turn here, it puts me in the mind of an overbearing mother figure who suffocates her children and will not let them go.

Shale loosens. Marl reaches into the field. Small birds pass over water.Spirit, come near. This is only the edge of whiteness.
I can't laugh at a procession of dogs.

There seems to be a lot of refrences to water

In the hour of ripeness the tree is barren.
The she-bear mopes under the hill.
Mother, mother, stir from your cave of sorrow.

I find this interesting, the use of the word barren, placed in connection with the idea of a mother. It could almost be an "empty nest" syndrom, with the moping, and retreating in the cave of sorrow. Not coping with her children growing.

[quasimodo1]

"Time for the flat-headed man. I recognize that listener,
Him with the platitudes and rubber doughnuts,
Melting a the knees a varicose horror.
Hello, hello. My nerves knew you, dear boy.
Have you come to unhinge my shadow?
Last night I slept in the pits of a tongue.
The silver fish ran in and out of my special bindings;
I grew tired of the ritual of names and the assistant keeper of the
Mollusks:
Up over a viaduct I came, to the snakes and sticks of another winter,
A two-legged dog hunting a new horizon of howls.
The wind sharpened itself on a rock;" As you mentioned Muse, there are many references to water and to many things you would be familiar with and fond of if your early life was lived amidst greenhouses. This "greenhouse" effect (no pun) comes through in almost all Roethke's poetry. In this one, I'm still trying to make connections between the text and the authors psychological beginnings. In the passage above, his father is a clear reference but just how the son would "unhinge" him, I'm still guessing.

[Virgil]

Are we discussing this poem: "Feud"?
Is this an early poem Quasi? It doesn't seem like Roethke's mature style, though a can pick up a echo. Here's the first stanza:

Corruption reaps the young; you dread
The menace of ancestral eyes;
Recoiling from the serpent head
Of fate, you blubber in surprise.

One thing I find interesting, and I do think Roethke employs this again, and that is the address to "you." "You dread," "you blubber," he puts the reader into the poem. It becomes a conversation.

Edit: Oops, I see we have changed the first poem to be discussed. Never mind.

[Dark Muse]

I notice a lot of his images seem to repeat

Up over a viaduct I came, to the snakes and sticks of another winter,
A two-legged dog hunting a new horizon of howls.
The wind sharpened itself on a rock;
A voice sang:

These lines seem to refelct back to some of the things which he said in the first part of the poem.

[stlukesguild]

Yes... "challenging" is certainly the word for it. Is it really "representative"? Most of what I have read by Rothke struck me as far more immediately accessible. Not that I question this. A great deal of Modern/Poet-Modern poetry is nearly abstract in nature... suggestive of a certain mood... atmosphere... idea... without ever being able to be reduced to a logical narrative meaning. As I first read through this poem I was certainly struck by the sound of his "music" as it were. Where a great deal of poetry has a sort of lilting musicality... often utilizing words that seem rooted in French and Italian and the Romance languages in general, Rothke repeatedly strikes me as producing a music that is rooted far more in the earthy Anglo-Saxon... harder... with hard guttural sounds... if that makes sense.

"Old scow bumps over black rocks..." "A cracked pod..." "A toad folds into a stone..." "That minnowy world of weeds and ditches..." "A slow snail lifting..." all of these words have a sound... and the images equally suggest something closer to the earth-bound dark and dank world of Beowolf and peat bogs and rough-tilled soil. In spite of the flow of images that suggests something Surrealistic or abstract... it is not the modernism of Rimbaud, Breton, Eliot, etc... that comes to mind but rather poetry such as that of Piers Plowman, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Ezra Pound's translation of the Seafarer, Seamus Heaney, and Geoffrey Hill. There is a seeming love of the more guttural, Germanic/Anglo-Saxon sounds. I suppose this is most obvious in the use of consonance (and assonance) as opposed to the end rhyme... a technique favored in Anglo-Saxon poetry... and later revived by Manley Hopkins:

A toad folds into a stone...

Wake me, witch, we'll do the dance of rotten sticks...

Morning-fair, follow me further back,
Into that minnowy world of weeds and ditches,
When the herons floated high over the white houses,
And the little crabs slipped into silvery craters...

Now to dig deep into the soil of this poem to attempt a further understanding of the poet's intention beyond the music of the form or the language...

[Virgil]

What’s this? A dish for fat lips.
Who says? A nameless stranger.
Is he a bird or a tree? Not everyone can tell.


Water recedes to the crying of spiders.
An old scow bumps over black rocks.
A cracked pod calls.


Mother me out of here. What more will the bones allow?
Will the sea give the wind suck? A toad folds into a stone.
These flowers are all fangs. Comfort me, fury.
Wake me, witch, we’ll do the dance of rotten sticks.

Now that is typical Roethke. The key phrase I think is "Mother me out of here."

[quasimodo1]

One expression that recurs in Roethke criticism is "confessional surrealism" where older methods are given up in favor of something more suggestive and emotive. I can see that working here. Since as Stlukesguild accurately reports...without ever being able to be reduced to a logical narrative meaning.

[quasimodo1]

Oh, Virgil, missed that post. At this point I would rather be discussing "Feud" but that will wait until we get a better handle on this piece.

[Virgil]

One expression that recurs in Roethke criticism is "confessional surrealism" where older methods are given up in favor of something more suggestive and emotive. I can see that working here. Since as Stlukesguild accurately reports...without ever being able to be reduced to a logical narrative meaning.

"Confessional Surrealism" yes I would concur with that characterization. Which is interesting because he was predated the confessional poetry movement that took off in the 1960s. I just looked up confessional poetry on wiki and they include Roethke. I had not considered Roethke as part of the confessional poets, but I guess it fits to some degree. I don't think he's as "confessional" as Robert Lowell.

[stlukesguild]

Upon a second reading I am struck by thoughts of some similarities in theme with Eliot's Wasteland and Hollow Men. The poem begins with a collection of images of earth and soil... and yet suggestions that such have become barren... wasted:

Water receded to the crying of spiders
An old scow bumps over black rocks
A cracked pod calls

Mother me out of here. What more will the bones allow?
Will the sea give the wind suck? A toad folds into a stone.
The flowers are all fangs. Comfort me, fury.
Wake me, witch, we'll do the dance of rotten sticks.

Shale loosens. Marl reaches into the field...

In the hour of ripeness, the tree is barren.

Like the closing stanza of Eliot's Hollow Men there are the sections that suggest a mocking nursery rhyme:

Where’s the eye?
The eye’s in the sty.
The ear’s not here
Beneath the hair.
When I took off my clothes
To find a nose,
There was only one shoe
For the waltz of To,
The pinch of Where.

The closing two sections of the poem contrast greatly with this as they look back in time... to a world far more succulent... fertile...lush...:

4

Morning-fair, follow me further back
Into that minnowy world of weeds and ditches,
When the herons floated high over the white houses,
And the little crabs slipped into silvery craters.
When the sun for me glinted the sides of a sand grain,
And my intent stretched over the buds at their first trembling.

That air and shine: and the flicker’s loud summer call:
The bearded boards in the stream and the all of apples;
The glad hen on the hill; and the trellis humming.
Death was not. I lived in a simple drowse:
Hands and hair moved through a dream of wakening blossoms.
Rain sweetened the cave and the dove still called;
The flowers leaned on themselves, the flowers in hollows;
And love, love sang toward.


5

To have the whole air!—
The light, the full sun
Coming down on the flowerheads,
The tendrils turning slowly,
A slow snail-lifting, liquescent;
To be by the rose
Rising slowly out of its bed,
Still as a child in its first loneliness;
To see cyclamen veins become clearer in early sunlight,
And mist lifting out of the brown cat-tails;
To stare into the after-light, the glitter left on the lake’s surface,
When the sun has fallen behind a wooded island;
To follow the drops sliding from a lifted oar,
Held up, while the rower breathes, and the small boat drifts quietly shoreward...

[Dark Muse]

I can see this poem having a certain confessional asepct to it.

The closing two sections of the poem contrast greatly with this as they look back in time... to a world far more succulent... fertile...lush...:

Yes, in the words that Quasi used, I cannot remember if he said it here, or just in his PM to me, but the last half of the poem does strike me as being more "innocent" than the first half.

[quasimodo1]

For sure, Stlukes, Eliot immediately comes to mind when reading some of Roethke's more complex, longer poems. In this particular poem, it seems accessability was never a consideration.

[quasimodo1]

Pleasure on ground
Has no sound,
Easily maddens
The uneasy man.

Who, careless, slips
In coiling ooze
Is trapped to the lips,
Leaves mare than shoes;

The Shape of the Fire has these mini-poem assemblies; does anyone have any idea what function they are serving?

[quasimodo1]

III
The wasp waits.
The edge cannot eat the center.
The grape glistens.
The path tells little to the serpent.
An eye comes out of the wave.
The journey from flesh is longest.
A rose sways least.
The redeemer comes a dark way.


{part three of THE SHAPE OF THE FIRE}

[Dark Muse]

I notice he seems to use all these currious little contradictions of words within the poem. Though I cannot make heads or tails of what they mean.

In the begining it starts with

Is he a bird or a tree? Not everyone can tell.

And than

The edge cannot eat the center.

The path tells little to the serpent.

They strike me as odd little lines, of things which relate to each other, but I cannot completely grasp what he is trying to say with his use of them.