I agree that this narrator is an adult, clearly male (from the nasty boy imagery)recalling the family rootcellar of his rural American childhood -- probably Roethke himself.

On the literal level, it is a beautiful meditation on the homely traditional underground rootcellar in, say, January or so when things have really had time to sprout, molder, etc..

Working, of course, on other levels -- metaphorical, psychological etc., as noted.

Many of Roethke's poems do have that autobiographical childhood memory aspect, don't they -- e.g. "My Pappa's Waltz".

Nice one, Jerry. Thanks -- I hadn't seen it before.

I've always thought this poem was one a sequence tracing his psychic development, for better or worse. It comes after "Cuttings" and "Cuttings (later)" in Lost Son.

I think "congress" is "sexual congress."

John

I think "congress" is "sexual congress."

But John, why should it be reduced to THE meaning? The one meaning?

Intended ambiguity is an essential part of poetry, in my view. Why pick a word with a singular reference when you can have a creative ambiguity?

Of course! I never meant it was cut and dried. How could it be in this poem?

Roethke's great subject was shit and roses and how they mix. That's why there's always plenty of "reproductive" words--straining, sobbing, sucking, seeping, parting and on and on.

Congress works beautifully because of its ambiguity--sexual congress and a congress of elements, the beginning of a "discussion" about how the pulpy stems, manure, etc. are going to come together.

It's interesting this poem is posted for discussion. As a newbie here I've been thinking about Roethke. He started out writing metrical poems, many quite nice. But when he turned to his "great" subject--using his father's greenhouse as a metaphor he used to make his psychic development, his being, happen in the poem, instead of describing it happening--he dropped iambs and wrote almost totally in FV.

Was it necessary for him to do so? Was it simply a failure of talent? I certainly don't see how he could have written these poems in regular meter, but I'm interested in what the more experienced poets here think.

Best,
John

I agree with you, Mary, surprising as that may be *grin*. This concentrates on life. Even mildew is life. I don't see a single mention 'decay'.

The enivornment is dank, but the conditions are excellent for life - not life that we would normally call 'beautiful', and some of - the flowers - stunted by the lack of sunlight - but still 'life'.

Therein lies the emphasis...

There was a time--perhaps before Marx, Darwin and Freud--when most poets and critics shared a similar world view. Critics had less to work with than they have today because, to use the phrase coined by Arthur Lovejoy, "the Great Chain of Being"{Aristotle, Acquinas, et al.} embraced poet and critic alike. There was no Stanley Fish in the eighteenth century. If everyone agrees about creation, evil, sin, salvation, interpretations may follow a somewhat similar pattern.

In the seventeenth century I suspect Roethke's piece would have been received as a precise, nearly Voyage of the Beagle-like description of a green house world and, if I may presume, little more. Today, because the hermeneutic threads that bound western man have been broken, Roethke's values-neutral piece becomes an tropically volatile solicitation to spin out your or my own personal world view. Roethke avoids any sentence or phrase that suggests his own higher values or world view--part of the unspoken message behind show, don't tell--so critics of the piece are invited to throw all their polysemic levers. A smorgasborg of hypothetical figures emerges: government, sex, various schools of psycholgy.

Some of you may find this offensive, but Formalist poets, IMHO, have an opportunity to recover some of the sense of the common values once shared by those who wrote and thought in the Western world. Admittedly, that is a large, some might even say, arrogant, order; but the self-imposed discipline of meter and all that goes with meter--conventions, precedents, knowledge of the literature--does put us touch with the order, symmetry and pattern of the past in a way that many free verse poets may not recognize. Metrics is not semantics, nor is it metaphysics, but it does signify order. Is it, thereby, a small step toward hermeneutic harmony?

As for Roethke's piece, to me it's great piece of creative non-fiction that smells and swells into The Halls of Congress, Brad and Angelina, Yankee Stadium, my kids' sandbox.

Best
Lance Levens



[This message has been edited by Lance Levens (edited December 26, 2007).]

You've made some fine points, Lance.

I suppose - in that era - readers' interpretations would be more similar due to common attitudes and education. I wonder if poets would have had a more difficult time getting recognition than their peers had they varied from the norm - but is that a good thing?

If what you're suggesting is true, do we have more latitude today in our writing? Can we address more topics, or can our writing work on more layers? It seems you're suggesting the poets of the day and their audience were more narrow minded.

Perhaps, since the poets and readers of the time were of a similar class - by and large - they understood what each other had to say. While poetry is no longer the force it once was, I think it is less class-oriented than once it was. I perceive that as a 'good thing.'

It also implies - I think - that we now have to write more carefully, more specifally, because we are dealing with a more diverse readership. We can't assume one will infer or interpret as we do. It makes our task more difficult, yet more satisfying when we succeed.

Jerry

Adam Kirsch, who writes for the NYT Book Review occasionally , has a fine set of critical essays entitled The Modern Edge. He sees Roethke and his pupil, James Wright, even moreso, as poets seduced by sincerity. Believing that The Modernists were too consciously difficult, Roethke and Wright both set forth in the opposite direction toward a rhetoric of innocnce. Ultimately, in Kirsch's view, this quest for the almost child-like sentence, diminishes the power and depth of their work.


Lance

[This message has been edited by Lance Levens (edited January 01, 2008).]

I read this article, or a similar one, as a review of Wright's collected poems when it came out. I thought it was superficial. It's the most obvious thing to say but misses the point, particularly with Roethke. The only foundation for the opinion was that Wright had studied with him.

Roethke wanted to do what Yeats had done and create a framework for the myth of himself. Yeats had his visions, gyres, Byzantium, etc. Roethke finally hit on using his father's greenhouse as his organizing metaphor. His poems from this sequence are supposed to recreate the development of his consciousness and to move progressively from baby-talk to adulthood.

There's plenty of things to criticize about this--massive self-centeredness for one--but to call it a faux attempt to be primitive or innocent is, I'll say it again, superficial and lazy.

Best,
John

Root Cellar

Theodore Roethke

Nothing would sleep in that 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.
And what a congress of stinks!
Roots ripe as old bait,
Pulpy stems, rank, silo-rich,
Leaf-mold, manure, lime, piled against slippery planks.
Nothing would give up life:
Even the dirt kept breathing a small breath.


Stern Frederick Crewes style anti-Freudians might want to take a pass on the following, but here goes, for the rest:

I agree that the POV here is a recreation of a child's world. It seems to start with a kind of phobic, even hysterical and confused apprehension of adult sexuality (as a child's apprehension is confused, nececessarily)--those mysterious events which take place in the dark when everyone should be sleeping ("Nothing would sleep in that cellar" sounds a note of displacement; who thinks of sleeping in a cellar?). Here images of sexuality are confounded throughout with the imagery of death, beginning with "dank as a ditch" echoing "dead in a ditch". The sense of dread and uncanniness borrows from religious prohibitions; besides the grossly phallic imagery, obscenely lolling evil tropical snakes sure sound like the wages of (original) sin being death. The narrative features an abrupt transition that mirrors a childlike confusion of genital and anal events and sensations, with its (I agree, primariliy sexual) congress of stinks, again associated with dead or near dead things (old bait, leaf-mold, manure). The final abrupt turn in the last two lines is unprepared for by the rest of the poem, unintegrated, as it would be for a child--the incredulous intimation that all of this gross, dreadful, stinky stuff has something to do with the perpetuation of life.

Andy