Free Theodore Roethke by Jay Parini Page B

into the countryside to gather patches of moss for lining cemetery baskets. The poem looks at the activity metaphorically. After cutting up squares from the earth’s surface, the sensitive young man claims a certain feeling of remorse:
    As if I had broken the natural order of things in that swampland;
    Disturbed some rhythm, old and of vast importance,
    By pulling off flesh from the living planet;
    As if I had committed, against the whole scheme of life, a desecration.
    ( CP , p. 40)
    Only a poet plagued by guilt feelings could have reacted in this way to an apparently innocent task. Malkoff writes: “The ‘gathering’ itself takes place in a landscape with clearly sexual overtones; it is followed by a feeling of guilt at the onanistic action.” 14 The phrase “pulling off flesh” certainly may have this level of association, yet the poem needs a wider reading. We meet the boy for the second time here, again in isolation, and again his response to the environment is individual. In both “Weed Puller” and “Moss-Gathering,” nature is animate, threatening, ready to accuse or overwhelm the protagonist. Nature is never simply acted upon; it reacts, participating in the interplay of subject and object so crucial to Romantic poetry. La Belle points to Wordsworth’s “Nutting,” another Romantic poet’s guilt-laden account of a childhood “desecration,” as a precursor. 15 A passage toward the end of “Nutting” does parallel Roethke’s last line:
    Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Then up I rose
    And dragged to earth both branch and bough, with crash
    And merciless ravage: and the shady nook
    Of hazels, and the green and mossy bower,
    Deformed and sullied, patiently gave up
    Their quiet being: and unless I now
    Confound my present feelings with the past,
    Ere from the mutilated bower I turned
    Exulting, rich beyond the wealth of kings,
    I felt a sense of pain when I beheld
    The silent trees, and saw the intruding sky. 16
    Burke uses the next poem, “Big Wind,” to illustrate his thesis that when reading the greenhouse poems “you have strongly the sense of entering at one place, winding through a series of internal developments, and coming out somewhere else.” In this essentially narrative poem the ! poet begins by defining the situation with a rhetorical question:
    Where were the greenhouses going,
    Lunging into the lashing
    Wind driving water
    So far down the river
    All the faucets stopped?—
    ( CP , p. 41)
    There follows an account of efforts to keep the greenhouse together and functioning in the storm. The florists drain the manure machine and pump the stale mixture into rusty boilers, trying to keep the temperature high enough to save the plants. The greenhouse appears to be collapsing in high winds. The narrator explains:
    Where the worst wind was,
    Creaking the cypress window-frames,
    Cracking so much thin glass
    We stayed up all night,
    Stuffing the holes with burlap.
    This exact description of the physical work dominates the middle section of “Big Wind”; careful manipulation of line length and stresses pulls the reader forward through the poem like a piece of paper caught in a wind tunnel. The heavy use of present participles in a poem set in the past tense gives this memory poem its immediacy. And the poet ends with a vivid and perfect image-with-symbol: the greenhouse as a ship:
    But she rode it out,
    That old rose-house,
    She hove into the teeth of it,
    The core and pith of that ugly storm,
    Ploughing with her stiff prow,
    Bucking into the wind-waves
    That broke over the whole of her,
    Flailing her sides with spray,
    Flinging long strings of wet across the roof-top,
    Finally veering, wearing themselves out, merely
    Whistling thinly under the wind-vents;
    She sailed until the calm morning,
    Carrying her full cargo of roses.
    The poem moves, as a whole, from