Theodore Roethke by Jay Parini Read Free Book Online Page B

promissory element. Yet the next stanza goes even further as Roethke claims a greater capacity for honesty than can be taken seriously:
    My truths are all foreknown,
    This anguish self-revealed.
    I’m naked to the bone,
    With nakedness my shield.
    Myself is what I wear:
    I keep the spirit spare.
    The final stanza grasps a theme Roethke would cultivate in later years, that of the relation between language and experience:
    The anger will endure,
    The deed will speak the truth
    In language strict and pure.
    I stop the lying mouth:
    Rage warps my clearest cry
    To witless agony.
    Although the poem is technically accomplished, showing off Roethke’s perfect musical sense and mastery of form, the speaker sounds like a poseur. Too many abstractions in the second and third stanzas wear away at the original effect of the conceit established in the first. Taken as the title poem, one might argue with Richard Blessing that “an open house suggests informality, a kind of unstructured, free-floating gathering in which guests come and go pretty much as they please.” 1 If so, the title is misleading.
    Karl Malkoff divines a remarkably complicated ground plan for Open House ; he isolates the theme of selfhood and suggests that the five parts of the book explore the definition of self and view it from various angles. 2 But I must again agree with Blessing, who warns that this is overly complicated. Applying Occam’s razor, let us assume that these were the best poems on hand when Roethke submitted the manuscript to Knopf. They group naturally into categories, but this matters very little. In Open House there is none of the overall singleness of voice and vision that pervades his later books. Still, Roethke looked back on his first volume with a certain affection: “It took me ten years to complete one little book, and now some of the things in it seem to creak. Still, I like about ten pieces in it” ( SL , p.16).
    Among the best of these lyrics is “Feud,” which begins:
    Corruption reaps the young; you dread
    The menace of ancestral eyes;
    Recoiling from the serpent head
    Of fate, you blubber in surprise.
    Exhausted fathers thinned the blood,
    You curse the legacy of pain;
    Darling of an infected brood,
    You feel disaster climb the vein.
    There’s canker at the root, your seed
    Denies the blessing of the sun,
    The light essential to your need.
    Your hopes are murdered and undone.
    ( CP , 4)
    The poem opens a Freudian vein, and the method mimics the psychoanalytic. The subject is the separation of the self from ghosts of the family which persist in the unconscious long after they should have been subdued; Roethke argues, the “spirit starves / Until the dead have been subdued.” If this were true, we would have none of Roethke’s later poems. “Feud,” with its wish to escape or suppress the past, points to Roethke’s fundamental early mistake. Nobody can run away from home; the mature man makes his peace with old ghosts. The oblique nature of this poem, which remains impersonal on the surface because of its second person subject, is symptomatic. The poet controls his powerful emotions by driving a wedge between language and experience.
    â€œPrognosis” continues the psychoanalytical theme, this time dealing with the image of Mother:
    Though the devouring mother cry, “‘Escape me? Never—’”
    And the honeymoon be spoiled by a father’s ghost,
    Chill depths of the spirit are flushed to a fever,
    The nightmare silence is broken. We are not lost.
    ( CP , p. 5)
    The confrontation with Mother, for Roethke, was less important than that with Father, “Papa”; yet some of the finest passages in the Praise to the End ! sequence exploit the obvious Oedipal connections. Of the poems in Open House dealing with family or childhood memories, “The Premonition” comes closest to Roethke’s later, more direct poetry:
    Walking this field I