Free Theodore Roethke by Jay Parini Page A

Roethke’s life impulse, calling the cellar “a chaos of aimless and bewildering multiplicity.” 11 Yet there is something positive about the fact that “Nothing would give up life.” It is strangely comforting to know that life insists on itself, albeit at this elemental level.
    We come upon the actual greenhouse in “Forcing House,” which describes the artificial environment working against the natural seasons of the planet. Here are “Fifty summers in motion at once, / As the live heat billows from the pipes and pots” ( CP , p. 38). And in “Weed Puller,” which follows, we are introduced to the protagonist, the “lost son,” at his labors:
    Under the concrete benches,
    Hacking at black hairy roots,—
    Those lewd monkey-tails hanging from drainholes,—
    Digging into the soft rubble underneath….
    ( CP , p. 39)
    The boy ferrets among a variety of loathsome weeds, grubs, sticks, and fern-shapes, “Tugging all day at perverse life.” This labor resembles what Roethke called in the notebooks “The long testing of the unconscious before one gets even a few symbols true to himself.” 12 In any case, the poem takes the form of descent into an underworld, whether or not we liken it to the unconscious; the last lines are explicit: “Me down in that fetor of weeds, / Crawling on all fours, / Alive, in a slippery grave.”
    The boy is not present in the next poem, “Orchids,” one of the most accomplished in the sequence:
    They lean over the path,
    Adder-mouthed,
    Swaying close to the face,
    Coming out, soft and deceptive,
    Limp and damp, delicate as a young bird’s tongue;
    Their fluttery fledgling lips
    Move slowly,
    Drawing in the warm air.
    And at night,
    The faint moon falling through whitewashed glass,
    The heat going down
    So their musky smell comes even stronger,
    Drifting down from their mossy cradles:
    So many devouring infants!
    Soft luminescent fingers,
    Lips neither dead nor alive,
    Loose ghostly mouths
    Breathing.
    ( CP , p. 39)
    The conflict of opposites occurs more subtly here than before. Daylight governs the first stanza, while evening presides over the second. Similarly, the air is alternately warm and cold. The plants, like strange reptiles in a zoo, are awake, then asleep. The adder-mouthed creatures sway upward under the influence of sunlight, then recede to their mossy cradles when moonlight filters through the glassy roof. The gradual transformation of metaphor in the poem deserves attention; the snake imagery, signifying a very low point on the phylogenetic scale, gives way to birdimagery in the first stanza. By the second, the orchids have become “So many devouring infants!” The climbing is to a human level, albeit infancy. Yet a stronger transformation takes place in the last lines as the “Loose ghostly mouths” hover in suspended animation, “neither dead nor alive,” waiting and breathing. The plants achieve a kind of spirituality, having become ghosts. (One recalls the Latin meaning of spiritus : breath.) By reversing direction along the scale of being, the poet sets “Orchids” in opposition to “Cuttings ( later),” perhaps to suggest that a dialectical progression exists between the individual poems as a sequence. Malkoff, who reads the poems as a thinly veiled sexual autobiography, sees the dialectic of innocence and experience as a primary pattern in the sequence, and says of “Orchids” that “infancy here is not the age of innocence, but rather of demanding, grasping, undisciplined sexual urges.” 13 While this is true, I think one loses the highly specific, concrete texture of this great lyric by treating its allegorical dimension as anything more than subliminal. It is first a poem about orchids.
    â€œMoss-Gathering” brings the boy back to our attention. It narrates an experience familiar to Roethke as a child, that of going out