Free Theodore Roethke by Jay Parini

“Propagation,” which Roethke would divide into the first two lyrics of the greenhouse sequence, “Cuttings” and “Cuttings ( later )”:
    Slivers of stem, minutely furred,
    Tucked into sand still marked with thumb prints,
    Cuttings of coleas, geranium, blood-red fuchsia,
    Stand stiff in their beds.
    Topsoil crusts over like bakery sugar.
    But three inches beneath, in the damp sandy cradles,
    Where the stem-end is cut diagonally like a string-bean,
    The thin, flexible cells keep coaxing up water.
    Even before fuzzy root-hairs reach for gritty sustenance,
    One pale horn of growth, a nubly root-cap,
    Nudges a sand-crumb loose,
    Humps like a sprout,
    Then stretches out straight. 7
    â€˜Cuttings” is sleeker, more evocative:
    Sticks-in-a-drowse droop over sugary loam,
    Their intricate stem-fur dries;
    But still the delicate slips keep coaxing up water;
    The small cells bulge;
    One nub of growth
    Nudges a sand-crumb loose,
    Pokes through a musty sheath
    Its pale tendrilous horn.
    ( CP , p. 37)
    The odd noun combination “sticks-in-a-drowse” reflects the continuing influence of Hopkins, as does the sensuous and concrete imagery. Monosyllables dominate the poem and internal alliteration forces the reader onward as the delicate shoot breaks upward through the topsoil. The poet himself stays out of the picture, but the poem imitates a psychic state; it can be read as a conceit with one half of the metaphor missing, the tenor presented without its vehicle (as in Blake’s “Sick Rose”). The poem describes a state of consciousness which precedes the rational; it is a direct representation of the infantile nervous system, “polymorphously perverse” in Freud’s sense of that provocative phrase. It is a poem about beginnings without fanfare, a poem of expectancy.
    â€œCuttings ( later)” brings the poet-protagonist into focus. Roethke dramatizes the conflict of life against death in the plant world: “This urge, wrestle, resurrection of dry sticks, / Cut stems struggling to put down feet” ( CP , p. 37). One critic calls attention to the “sliding of the metaphorical images by which the plants are rendered backward alongthe phylogenetic scale.” 8 Indeed, the poem’s metaphors descend the Great Chain of Being systematically: saint becomes suckling, and sobbing infant becomes fish. One senses at a very early stage in the sequence that the poet intends more than mere descriptions of a natural process. Blessing, somewhat vaguely, suggests that “the real meaning of these poems is the energy they convey.” 9 Yet Blessing has singled out an important aspect of the greenhouse poems as a whole: they move . Whereas the lyrics of Open House can be thought of as photographs, the lyrics of The Lost Son are cinematic. Stanley Kunitz put it this way: “What absorbs his attention is not the intricate tracery of a leaf or the blazonry of the complete flower, but the stretching and reaching of a plant, its green force, its invincible Becoming.” 10
    â€œRoot Cellar” follows, taking us back further into the dank, steamy atmosphere of a greenhouse cellar, where the life force survives at the level of instinct:
    Nothing would sleep in the cellar, dank as a ditch,
    Bulbs broke out of boxes hunting for chinks in the dark,
    Shoots dangled and drooped,
    Lolling obscenely from mildewed crates,
    Hung down long yellow evil necks, like tropical snakes.
    ( CP , p. 38)
    The cellar, with its explicitly sexual imagery (“Shoots dangled and drooped, / Lolling obscenely”), may be read as a metaphorical equivalent of the unconscious mind. Here life persists at its most primitive level, gasping among roots and stems in a lively slime. “Nothing would give up life: / Even the dirt kept breathing a small breath.” The life force thrives on opposition, importunately breathing. Sullivan points out the “terrifying and perverse” nature of